Windows 11 Updates Now Install Faster and Use Less CPU with 24H2 Update

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 24H2 update brings significant improvements, making Windows updates install faster and use less CPU power. This major update, which started rolling out earlier this month, enhances performance and cuts down installation and restart times.

Windows 11 regularly receives monthly cumulative security and non-security updates to introduce new features or address security vulnerabilities. With version 24H2, Microsoft has overhauled the update process, introducing parallel component processing, optimized system RAM usage, and improved cache management. These changes have made updating Windows 11 more efficient and much faster.

According to Microsoft, the 24H2 update can install monthly updates up to 45% faster while using 25% less CPU. Additionally, restart times have improved by up to 40% on some systems. These performance improvements were tested on a virtual machine running the older 22H2 version of Windows 11, with comparable gains also seen against the 23H2 version, which uses the same servicing stack.

The update also reduces the size of feature downloads, saving around 200MB by not forcing built-in app updates when users already have the latest versions. This includes excluding Microsoft Edge from downloads in certain cases, further reducing the size and speeding up the process.