Windows 11 Insider builds offer FAQs based on your PC's specs

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Still not as competitive as WinSAT back in the old days.

Windows 11 logo on blue bloom background.
(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has released a new feature in its latest 26120.3576 and 22635.5090 Insider builds that helps users understand their PC's capabilities (via phantomofearth on X).

From its looks, this feature isn't cutting-edge by any means, as a simple search on the internet will likely land you with many more detailed and fine-tuned answers. In addition, it also tells you if you have the latest Windows release installed on your system, but oddly asks you to verify the information in the Windows Update section.

Back in the Vista days, Microsoft released WinSAT, a tool designed to assess the capabilities of your hardware through a set of tests. It would report back the score on a scale between 1.0 and either 5.9 or 9.9, depending on the Windows version. While this number wasn't definitive, it let people know where their PC stood. WinSAT also benchmarked individual components such as the CPU, memory, graphics, and disk enabling users to identify potential bottlenecks.

The new FAQ feature spans two different Windows Insider versions: build 26120.3576 for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel for Windows 11 23H2 and build 22635.5090 for Windows Insiders in the Beta and Dev Channels for Windows 11 24H2. Release notes for both releases mention the inclusion of a new "Frequently Asked Questions" list within "Device specifications" under System > About. The FAQs are disabled by default, though can be activated by enabling the "55305888" Feature ID.

Known FAQs (non-exhaustive) detailing your Windows version, followed by how much RAM you have and your system's graphical capabilities have been compiled in a GitHub Gist. The first question allows users to check if their Windows is up-to-date but confusingly asks them to verify again within the Windows Update section. That’s most certainly a bug. The second question outlines what applications can be run on your system based on its RAM capacity, using a few common ranges such as <4GB, 4GB-8GB, 8GB-16GB, and >16GB. Lastly, the graphics section goes over the graphical capabilities of your system, or lack thereof if you don’t have a dedicated GPU.

This approach is not as quantifiable as WinSAT and omits assessment of key components such as the CPU and storage. Given Microsoft’s strong push for AI, an AI-driven hardware analysis utility would have been a significant overhaul to WinSAT. (Maybe I'm just reading too much into what’s supposed to be a supplementary feature.) Hopefully, the official release will include more detailed insights that provide users with more than just the basics.

Hassam Nasir
Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • evdjj3j
    From the generated FAQ

    Is my GPU sufficient for (a) high end gaming and video experience?

    A GPU with less than 4GB of memory MAY struggle with high-end gaming....

    That's worthless info there.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    Maybe instead of trying to victim-blame each user's poor/slow Windows 11's experience on the hardware they could just, you know, speed up the frustratingly slow animations in their ugly, horribly designed GUI.

    I promise Windows 11 feels exactly as slow and miserable on my overclocked 9900X machine with 96GB memory and an RTX 4080 as it does on my Intel N100 mini-PC with single channel DDR4. After speeding up the animations 5x-10x and both felt equally more responsive. But good luck convincing an IT admin to let you hack into the registry to get that done on a work machine.
    Windows 11 feels slow because Windows 11 is constantly getting in your way, slowing you down, and making you wait for animations, just to look pretty. No amount of hardware can fix that design problem.
    The slow animations make some sense in Chrome OS, where they are constantly hiding small load times as they swap data in/out of a tiny 4GB of memory, or are fetching it from a server.
    But forcing those wait times to be baked into the interface into a full-powered PC just because they don't understand why elementary schools suddenly bought 15 Million $79 Chromebooks in 2020 instead of their $2500 surface studio laptops? They don't get it. They aren't even doing it to try and make extremely low-powered machines feel smoother, they're just doing it to rip off Chrome OS, because a graph told them people were buying Chrome OS. The copied the GUI, but not any of the reasons Google gained market share.

    As a related aside - I actually did buy a school-specced 4GB/Celeron N4020 Windows netbook from Microcenter on Black Friday a year ago... because I thought it was a chromebook and I was too lazy to drive 80 minutes to return it.
    It's totally unusable. The hardware is a real problem there - In that special kind of way I remember from the underpowered machines of 20 years ago. The kind of unusable where you would have to let the machine idle for 10ish minutes after boot and disable antivirus just to be able to smoothly move the mouse around an empty desktop and still it struggles to open a web browser. But a chromebook with those same specs boots pretty fast, and at least is mostly ok at web browsing - even with both CPU and memory constantly riding 100% utilization.

    I wish windows would just give people a slider or something to speed up the animations. Maybe let non-admins turn off the space-wasting Chrome-ripoff round corners while they're at it. How in so many years have they not found a way to let users shrink or even move the taskbar? Is it really that hard to let non-admins customize the GUI?
    Is it worth so much effort to preserve the sanctity of a product that people don't want to adopt? Is it really worth trying to force it as the only option?
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    And this score will be as meaningless now as then.
    Reply
  • rluker5
    Giroro said:
    As a related aside - I actually did buy a school-specced 4GB/Celeron N4020 Windows netbook from Microcenter on Black Friday a year ago... because I thought it was a chromebook and I was too lazy to drive 80 minutes to return it.
    It's totally unusable. The hardware is a real problem there - In that special kind of way I remember from the underpowered machines of 20 years ago. The kind of unusable where you would have to let the machine idle for 10ish minutes after boot and disable antivirus just to be able to smoothly move the mouse around an empty desktop and still it struggles to open a web browser. But a chromebook with those same specs boots pretty fast, and at least is mostly ok at web browsing - even with both CPU and memory constantly riding 100% utilization.
    sanctity of a product that people don't want to adopt? Is it really worth trying to force it as the only option?
    A couple years back I picked up a 2c2t Alder Lake G6900 and it was also unuseable and performed considerably more janky with 32GB DDR5 and an Optane drive than my 2c4t 6w Broadwell tablet from 2015 with 4GB ram. With W11 you really need more than 2T. Just how it is made. Too much crap for just 2.
    Reply
  • BryanFRitt
    The second question outlines what applications can be run on your system based on its RAM capacity, using a few common ranges such as <4GB, 4GB-8GB, 8GB-16GB, and >16GB.
    Which of these 4 categories would 8GB be in? It's a duplicated point in the above list. Number lines for fully categorizing items should be continuous without duplicates or gaps. Like x<4GB, 4GB<=x<8GB, 8GB<=x<16GB, and x>=16GB, where x is the amount of RAM, and groups are comma separated.
    Reply
  • adamboy64
    This is an interesting idea. I enjoyed seeing the WinSAT / Windows Experience Index score in Vista. I thought it was a neat form of benchmarking.

    Actually, the further away we get from Windows Vista, the more I miss it.
    Reply
  • ICollectTransformers
    Giroro said:
    Maybe instead of trying to victim-blame each user's poor/slow Windows 11's experience on the hardware they could just, you know, speed up the frustratingly slow animations in their ugly, horribly designed GUI.

    I promise Windows 11 feels exactly as slow and miserable on my overclocked 9900X machine with 96GB memory and an RTX 4080 as it does on my Intel N100 mini-PC with single channel DDR4. After speeding up the animations 5x-10x and both felt equally more responsive. But good luck convincing an IT admin to let you hack into the registry to get that done on a work machine.
    Windows 11 feels slow because Windows 11 is constantly getting in your way, slowing you down, and making you wait for animations, just to look pretty. No amount of hardware can fix that design problem.
    The slow animations make some sense in Chrome OS, where they are constantly hiding small load times as they swap data in/out of a tiny 4GB of memory, or are fetching it from a server.
    But forcing those wait times to be baked into the interface into a full-powered PC just because they don't understand why elementary schools suddenly bought 15 Million $79 Chromebooks in 2020 instead of their $2500 surface studio laptops? They don't get it. They aren't even doing it to try and make extremely low-powered machines feel smoother, they're just doing it to rip off Chrome OS, because a graph told them people were buying Chrome OS. The copied the GUI, but not any of the reasons Google gained market share.

    As a related aside - I actually did buy a school-specced 4GB/Celeron N4020 Windows netbook from Microcenter on Black Friday a year ago... because I thought it was a chromebook and I was too lazy to drive 80 minutes to return it.
    It's totally unusable. The hardware is a real problem there - In that special kind of way I remember from the underpowered machines of 20 years ago. The kind of unusable where you would have to let the machine idle for 10ish minutes after boot and disable antivirus just to be able to smoothly move the mouse around an empty desktop and still it struggles to open a web browser. But a chromebook with those same specs boots pretty fast, and at least is mostly ok at web browsing - even with both CPU and memory constantly riding 100% utilization.

    I wish windows would just give people a slider or something to speed up the animations. Maybe let non-admins turn off the space-wasting Chrome-ripoff round corners while they're at it. How in so many years have they not found a way to let users shrink or even move the taskbar? Is it really that hard to let non-admins customize the GUI?
    Is it worth so much effort to preserve the sanctity of a product that people don't want to adopt? Is it really worth trying to force it as the only option?
    I use a program called Start 11 that disables all of the animations and garbage, my windows 11 is zippy
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    ICollectTransformers said:
    I use a program called Start 11 that disables all of the animations and garbage, my windows 11 is zippy
    You can disable all the animations in system properties under performance and then visual effects. Has been like that for as long as I can remember.
    Reply
  • salgado18
    rluker5 said:
    A couple years back I picked up a 2c2t Alder Lake G6900 and it was also unuseable and performed considerably more janky with 32GB DDR5 and an Optane drive than my 2c4t 6w Broadwell tablet from 2015 with 4GB ram. With W11 you really need more than 2T. Just how it is made. Too much crap for just 2.
    I use Windows 11 on a Loki Zero, with configurable TDP on the fly. It has a 2c/4t Athlon 3050e with 8GB and an NVMe SSD.

    At 11W, it is very responsive, boot times are great, Steam boots up rather quickly and browsing is good.

    At 7W, it's terrible, in every aspect.
    Reply
  • cknobman
    Windows 11 is trash.
    I was forced to upgrade on my work machines last year.
    The good thing is my work laptops showed me just how bad Windows 11 is so I knew for sure not to upgrade my gaming rig.

    Once Steam releases an official SteamOS distro thats what I will move to.
    Microsoft has gone to pot all around.
    No more of their Office 365, OneDrive, and currently looking to get off their email clients riddled with ads disguised as emails.
    Reply