Why is my Win 11 slower than Win 10?

Brother,I bought last year and hp windows 11 laptop,i noticed it is booting 4 times slower then it is on windows 10,I checked it a million times,checked for viruses,re installed the 11,still the same,on windows 10 it is way snapper,so I'm gonna use windows 10

as my hard drive froze in my old pc,  i was forced to buy a new pc its been 4 days now and i find windows 11 a lot more responsive than 10, it is defiantly taking me some time to get used to the new features but so far pretty good, time will tell i guess. 

FYI, we just bought a brand-new laptop computer. It isn't some residual something-or-other left over. Windows 11 IS slower on our shiny, spotless computer.

After being constantly reminded that support for windows 10 was running out i decided to upgrade my 8th generation intel i7 NUC pc to a new ryzen 9 pc with windows 11 pro with 64GB of RAM. The old pc was fine and worked seamlessly but the new one is so laggy i am so disappointed. I have read all the articles to try and speed things up but hardly any improvement has been made. The spec on my new pc should have made massive improvement but has left me wondering. Is this just widows 11? Are we being ripped off?

As someone who works with Windows performance tuning, here’s the reality: Windows 11 isn’t inherently slower than Windows 10, but there are several common reasons why an upgrade can feel sluggish:

1. Upgrade leftovers

When you upgrade in-place from Windows 10, a lot of old drivers, background services, and cached system files remain. These can cause conflicts and slowdowns. A clean install of Windows 11 usually performs much better than an upgrade.

2. Background features in Windows 11

Windows 11 enables additional visual effects, background services, and tighter security features (like VBS, TPM checks, and virtualization-based security) that can add overhead on older hardware. These don’t break performance on new PCs, but on mid-range laptops, they’re noticeable.

3. Drivers not optimized

Even if your laptop meets requirements, outdated drivers (especially graphics, chipset, or storage drivers) can drag down performance after the upgrade. Installing the latest drivers from the manufacturer (not just Windows Update) often fixes lag.

4. Hardware bottlenecks show more under Win11

• HDDs (instead of SSDs) = very slow boot and app loading times.
• 4–8 GB RAM = paging and stuttering more noticeable on Win11 than Win10.
• Older CPUs may struggle with Windows 11’s added background tasks.

I have tried Windows 11, but I honestly prefer Windows 10. Windows 10 runs smoother, faster, and fits my workflow much better. Windows 11 feels heavier, slower, and less reliable for the way I use my laptop. I really hope Microsoft keeps supporting Windows 10 longer, because for me it’s the better operating system.

As a Microsoft user since MSDOS days (I started programming in Basic and Fortran in the 1960s!) I can heartily endorse Peter Ruckdeschel's comments.  Things that used to be fairly instant in Windows 10, now can randomly take an extra 10 seconds to a minute! 

One of the most irritating manifestations of this is that, while keying into Word, the screen can sometimes lock, so that one is not sure if the computer has registered your keystrokes.  I used to rekey the items, only to find the phrase doubled up ten or more seconds later.  Now I have learned to wait for Windows 11 to catch up with me!

Tee hee🤣, Microsoft, you are shortening our lives!  (The only really useful feature of Windows 11 that I have been able to discover is the ability to more readily split the screen.) 

Dear Microsoft can we hope that some of these unhelpful features are dealt with in Windows 12?  Meantime I suspect I am not alone in being prepared to pay handsomely if I could readily downgrade to Windows 10.

I can only support SlantCut's report about a desastrous performance of Windows 11 when compared to Windows 10.

After a long consideration and for the dawning end-of-use term of Windows 10 in October 25, I decided to switch from Windows 10 Professional 64bit to Windows 11 professional 64bit early enough in Oct 2024. After a thorough testing since, I must say this was the worst decision I could take.

Contrary to what the other replies state, I would not consider my hardware out-dated: I have a Lenovo X390 Laptop at an Intel i7 8565U CPU @ 1.80GHz   1.99 GHz with 16GB RAM on board, a 2TB SSD drive, so strong enough according to Windows 11 specifications to support this OS. I have an AVAST PREMIUM SECURITY suite running for my security. I have all drivers updated to the newest versions, and use AVAST DRIVER UPDATER to identify outdated drivers.

Fact is, though, that since having switched to Windows 11, I am constantly running on short memory, the number of programs / "apps" running in the background has dramatically increased without any extra benefits for me as a user. 

I am a user who is used to keep a lot of programs running in parallel so that I can quickly jump between them by "alt-tab". This usage mode also helps me not to forget tasks I had to interrupt in between. In addition, to be able to seamlessly continue my work I only restart my OS once a week or so, and in between only let the OS fall asleep. This worked perfectly with Windows 10, but has gone dramatically wrong with Windows 11. This may not be the recommended usage, but it was my workflow which was working without any problems for me with Windows 10. And instead of improving on this with a new OS, Windows 11 has dramatically deteriorated my workfow.

Windows explorer is failing, once I have more than 6 instances with different file paths open in parallel; Windows 11 kills applications without prior notice, which is particularly bad in case of my KeePassXC password safe demon running in the background. Acrobat reader is only working in slow-motion, I can no longer smoothly and gradually change the displayed size. It takes ~5 seconds to switch from one application to the next one via alt-tab (and < 0.1 second in Windows 10). Switching between WLANs is a nightmare (in comparison with Windows 10) it takes ~ 2 minutes (and ~ 30 seconds with Windows 10) and it takes ~ 5 minutes after arriving at a new place with a new WLAN to start up a new teams session compared to ~ 1 minute with Windows 10. With Windows 11 Firefox eats up ~1.5 GB, and Thunderbird the same while with Windows 10 it only needed 700MB respectively.

So Microsoft should be honest and only recommend Windows 11 as is for machines with >= 64 GB RAM and 3GHz processors...  Before Microsoft is really doing something about this, I can only recommend to stay with Windows 10 as long as possible. 

I would not consider myself an IT expert but still close enough to to be a voice that should be heard. I am a professor for applied statistics at Oldenburg university, so do have professional skills to be believable when judging such a system.

Prof. Dr. Peter Ruckdeschel