It has become increasingly difficult in recent years to source affordable, cost-effective and high-quality hardware, which makes working with a local IT support partner in your local area more important than ever before.
Part of the problem is the concept of software bloat or bloatware: computer applications, tools, or features that require too many system resources relative to your intended use of the system.
The intended solution is to upgrade your computer, but given that certain computer parts have quintupled in price and sent laptop prices skyrocketing, this is not likely to be an option for many companies in the same way it used to be.
A particularly alarming study by Gartner suggests that the entry-level PC market (computers costing under £370) may not even exist by 2028, which means that the focus of businesses is to maximise the usability and longevity of existing computers.
The answer, according to market leader Microsoft and reported by Digital Trends, is to optimise running Windows 11 on less RAM, the computer part most affected by the recent wave of component shortages.
What is optimisation? Why does it matter? And why has it become a particular priority in the modern computer world?
What Is Computer Optimisation?
Also known as software optimisation, code optimisation or just optimisation, computer optimisation is when programmers improve particular applications to make them work better on the same hardware without changing how they work in practice.
There are varying ways to do this, from using more optimised code that produces the same results with less processing power, removing vestigial code that was left in for compatibility reasons, or removing features that are not used in order to significantly reduce memory usage.
Optimisation is often an iterative process, undertaken through a series of updates and upgrades once it has become clear how people actually use a particular piece of software and how different computers function when they interact with it.
The concept of optimisation can apply to particular applications such as word processors, image manipulation tools or spreadsheets, or it can apply to the operating system itself, the brain behind your computer.
Why Does IT Optimisation Matter?
In some respects, the need for optimisation is self-evident; with RAM prices increasing fivefold and every consumer-grade electronics product (including laptops, tablets and smartphones used in offices) suffering from price increases, simply buying a better computer is not always an option.
Similarly, given that Windows 10 has ended active support and will only receive security updates until 12th October 2027, many businesses have been left in the unenviable position of either sticking with an unsafe system or upgrading to one that could lead to lower productivity.
If people are being effectively forced to use Windows 11 or switch to an alternative OS which will still work with their existing hardware, Microsoft needs to ensure that their core user experience is positive rather than focus on features not everyone can use.
This is particularly true after years of criticism of poor performance, something that Microsoft admitted to according to Windows Latest, and a change in priorities from trying to force an agentic future to fixing the present.
Why Has IT Optimisation Become A Priority?
The problem with modern IT, one that Microsoft has actively contributed to, is AI, or specifically the large language models (LLMs), which are often described as AI agents.
Software bloat has been an issue since the dawn of modern IT in the mid-1990s; Windows 95 was criticised for its then-high hardware requirements, but in the late 1990s, 2000s and 2010s a simple solution was to regularly upgrade your computer.
Most companies had an IT policy of refreshing their computers on a progressive basis every five years, with some opting for three years or fewer depending on hardware needs.
This was possible thanks to increasingly efficient hardware manufacturing, which allowed for computers to be made twice as powerful for half as much, a principle often described as Moore’s Law, although the actual law specifically relates to transistor number.
This has suddenly stopped, as industries such as cryptocurrency mining and AI data centres have gobbled up all available GPU and RAM capacity respectively, leading to exponentially higher costs for everyone else.
This was not helped by component shortages in 2020, the blocking of the Suez Canal and more recently the trade and shipping issues beginning in February 2026.
We are in a rare situation where buying a computer of the same power as the one you currently have may cost more than you paid for it, a situation which is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Because simply buying a better computer is no longer an option, software companies and IT specialists are working to maximise the available computing power you have to ensure you can continue to work quickly and effectively.