When it comes to the user experience, compatibility and performance are probably two of the biggest driving factors, and Windows is no different. Microsoft says it does its best to improve them, and in this era of AI, the company recently highlighted how it is coming up with new tools to do so,both for compatibility, as well asfor performance.
Speaking of the latter, there are ways to make Windows less sluggish byproperly configuring startup appsand using official free features like Smart App Control, whichno longer requires a clean install.
Besides the software, the hardware can also play a key role. I/O or throughput is a very important metric of any performance discussions, and Windows is no different. In recent testing conducted by Tom's Hardware, SATA SSDs were compared against NVMe drives to see how much of an improvement the latter can provide. While the testing was only in the case of gaming, it should still give a decent idea considering games are, in fact, one of the most intense workloads including on the I/O.
Perhaps surprisingly, it was found that SATA III and PCIe-based NVMe drives were often trading blows with each other, which shows that users may not really need a very fast SSD at all, at least in the case of gaming.Maybe more RGB could help with the performance, but that too isbroken at the moment.
As you can see, in titles likeAlan Wake 2andStarfield, despite both games being pretty intense in different ways: the former has lots of ray tracing effects while the latter is a pretty vast open world, there is hardly much difference between them, indicating that you don't need the most powerful, latest-generation drive to enjoy titles that aren't reliant on the SSD. And this was typically the case in most games. That said, though, things do flip around in certain specific scenarios.