Just read a short and fascinating blog post from Michael Niehaus. It’s entitled The overhead of Widgets and Teams in Windows 11. In it he looks at the memory overhead from Widgets and Teams Chat. In costing Windows 11 Widgets and Teams using Sysinternals Process Explorer, he produces interesting numbers.

If Costing Windows 11 Widgets and Teams, What’s the Charge?

Numbers vary from installation to installation but his numbers are close to mine on Dev Channel, RP Channel and Production PCs. Thus, I’ll reproduce his. (Note: I show mine from a production PC in the lead-in graphic above).

Niehaus reports that the version of Teams that loads by default with Windows 11 consumes around 390MB RAM. Widgets, on the other hand, consume about 210MB RAM. Add the two together and you get around 600MB.

On my system, private bytes (memory that cannot be shared with other processes, which is what Niehaus is reporting) show up in the left-hand column. Working set (which includes page file entries touched by the process but not in active use) show in the right. The total for private on my X1 Carbon is ~485MB, for working set is ~988 MB.

Long story short: leaving those defaults alone on a Windows 11 PC will add between 0.5 and 1.0 GB to the memory overhead.

What to Do About This, If Anything

As Taras Buria observes in his WinAero reporting on this phenomenon, this doesn’t matter on PCs with plenty of RAM and sufficient CPU power. But on lower-end PCs, laptops and tablets, one need only remove the Teams and Widgets icons from the taskbar, and restart the PC to get rid of that resource drain. On a low-end i3 or equivalent, with less than 8 GB of RAM, it actually could make a difference.

All in all it’s an interesting bit of analysis, and a nice demonstration of the kinds of things that Sysinternals Process Explorer can tell you. Cheers!