The 8GB Surface Pro devices we bought a few years ago have become noticeably sluggish and are nearing the point of being unusable. I recently found an even older Surface that had been unused since 2023. It was still running an older, unupdated version of Windows 10, and it felt about as responsive as it did when we first bought it. Why does this happen? Is the slowdown mainly caused by newer Windows updates and background features, or are there other technical reasons that make aging computers feel slower over time?
4 Answers
Eight gigabytes is increasingly a tight amount of memory for current Windows workloads. A browser with several tabs plus Office, Teams, antivirus, and synchronization tools can fill it quickly. Once RAM is exhausted, Windows uses the page file on disk. Even with an SSD, that is far slower than accessing RAM. Moving to 16GB can help, but it cannot fix every issue if the processor is old, storage is failing, or a background process is misbehaving.
Updates can add services, security components, telemetry, web-based interfaces, and other features that run in the background. Some releases also introduce bugs or memory leaks, so a particular update can cause a noticeable performance problem. There have also been reports of Microsoft’s WebView2 components contributing to high memory usage on systems with 8GB, although the exact impact depends on the installed applications and update level.
It is not inevitable that old hardware must become slow. A clean installation, fewer startup programs, enough free storage, and checking for failing drives or overheating can restore some performance. Lightweight operating systems can also run well on older devices, which is a useful comparison: if the same hardware feels fast with a lighter system, software overhead is likely a major part of the problem. However, newer applications may still demand more than the machine can comfortably provide.
Modern software generally uses more resources than older versions. Windows itself, browser tabs, security tools, Teams, Outlook, and other background services can consume a significant amount of memory. With only 8GB of RAM, the system may start paging data to storage, which makes everything feel much slower. A newer installation that has fewer updates and background tasks can therefore seem dramatically faster on the same hardware.
That makes sense, but those same applications used to run acceptably on these machines. It sounds like their resource requirements have gradually increased.
So an update might be responsible for a specific slowdown, but the broader problem is probably years of software becoming heavier rather than Windows simply slowing down the hardware.