IT House News On February 3, WindowsLatest reported that if your PC has little memory, disabling some features and settings that are enabled by default on Windows 11 can speed up your operating system.
First, users can unpin the Microsoft Teams icon on the Windows 11 taskbar. The Teams app has been integrated into the taskbar of the new system, allowing users with personal accounts to chat or video conferencing and invite their friends to join.
In addition to Teams, another new feature called "Widgets board" has been added to the taskbar of Windows 11. These two new buttons are pinned to the taskbar, as shown below, "Widgets board" allows users to view and manage news, gadgets, and more.
According to former Microsoft employee Michael Niehaus, if you prefer performance over fancy features, it might be a good idea to turn off these icons.
This is because widgets and Microsoft Teams chats start the Microsoft Edge WebView2 process in the background. WebView2 is part of Microsoft Edge, which is necessary for web-based applications such as Teams or Widgets in Windows 11, but these processes are resource-intensive in some cases.
The Windows 11 gadget feature only starts the WebView2 process when the user clicks on their button and browses the content, while the Teams chat icon in the Windows 11 taskbar is the entry point for Microsoft Teams 2.0 to use the system's resources without doing anything.
▲ Windows 11 Teams chat
When an icon is pinned to the taskbar, network-related activities are triggered in the background during check-in. In applications such as Process Explorer, you'll notice that up to nine processes are tied to the Teams client.
Niehaus, the IT administrator, notes that removing the Teams icon disables these WebView2 processes at startup.
IT House understands that disabling this may not have a direct impact on your day-to-day experience, but it's beneficial to limit how many concurrent WebView 2 processes run in the background when you launch more applications or web applications.
So, to improve the performance of your operating system, simply right-click the Widgets board and Teams icons and unpin them.