Copilot's new PC Insights feature diagnoses your slow PC while eating nearly 1 GB of your RAM

Microsoft Copilot is rolling out a new feature called PC Insights that lets it tap into Windows APIs and analyse your system hardware in real time. It's currently going live for Copilot users in the US.

PC Insights lets you ask Copilot things like "what is my current CPU usage," "do I have enough space for a 100 GB game," "what graphics card do I have," and "is my antivirus running." It can't directly fix performance problems, but it gives less tech-savvy users a conversational way to diagnose what's dragging their machine down. The catch is the Copilot app itself — built on an Edge-based web app that runs locally while the AI model lives in the cloud — is a serious RAM hog. Windows Latest recorded 791.7 MB of RAM usage at idle, suggesting total usage can hit around 1 GB. The author of the source article clocked it at roughly 560 MB while writing, making it the third most RAM-hungry app running on their system at the time.

Copilot isn't alone in this. The WhatsApp desktop app, also web-based, regularly chews through 1 GB or more of system RAM — a stark contrast to its older native implementation that barely registered. Microsoft has pledged to make Windows 11 leaner following sustained user criticism, but the OS still feels bloated compared to most alternatives. For anyone on a RAM-limited machine, running a diagnostic tool that itself consumes a significant slice of available memory is a frustrating irony.

The feature is genuinely useful in concept, especially for users who wouldn't otherwise know where to start when their PC slows down. But until Copilot gets its own memory usage under control, it risks being part of the problem it's supposed to help solve.