The Widgets button on the Windows 11 taskbar (and its predecessor, News and Interests on Windows 10) is designed to give you a quick glance at news, weather, and stocks. Convenient as it is, it runs its own background process that stays loaded in memory even when you never click it, which is wasted overhead on a PC that's short on RAM.
Key takeaway: Turning off Widgets or News and Interests removes its background process from memory entirely, and it can always be switched back on later in a few clicks.
Disabling Widgets on Windows 11
- Right-click an empty area of the taskbar.
- Choose Taskbar settings.
- Find "Widgets" in the list of taskbar items and toggle it off.
- The Widgets icon disappears from the taskbar, and its background process stops running.
Disabling News and Interests on Windows 10
- Right-click an empty area of the taskbar.
- Hover over "News and interests."
- Click "Turn off" to remove it from the taskbar entirely.
Trimming other taskbar extras
While you're in Taskbar settings, it's worth reviewing the other toggles on the same screen — each additional live icon, such as Task View, Search box (as opposed to just a search icon), and Chat, carries a small amount of its own background overhead.
- In the same Taskbar settings screen, review Search, Task View, and Chat toggles.
- Turn off any you don't personally use, keeping the taskbar both leaner and less distracting.
Tip: If you like glancing at the weather but want to avoid the wider News and Interests feed, some versions allow you to switch the taskbar display to just a temperature icon instead of the full feed via the same right-click menu.
Before you start: This change is entirely cosmetic and reversible — there's no risk to your files or system stability either way.
The bigger picture: taskbar bloat over time
Widgets is a good example of a wider pattern in Windows: features that arrive turned on by default and quietly stay that way for the life of the PC, simply because most users never think to look. Over several years and multiple feature updates, a Windows installation can accumulate a surprising number of these small "on by default" extras, each contributing a small amount of background activity on its own but adding up meaningfully together. Taking ten minutes every so often to work through Taskbar settings, Settings > Apps > Startup, and Settings > Privacy & security is a reasonable habit, treating it a bit like a seasonal tidy-up rather than a one-off task you do once and never revisit.
This is particularly worth doing after a major Windows feature update, since Microsoft occasionally re-enables a newly introduced feature by default even on PCs that previously had similar features turned off, simply because the new feature is technically a different toggle to the old one.
A quick checklist to run through together
Since Widgets is just one of several small taskbar extras, it's efficient to review a short checklist in one sitting rather than returning to Taskbar settings repeatedly over time. Alongside Widgets, check Search (consider switching from the full search box to just a small icon), Task View, Copilot if shown, and Chat, if present on your version of Windows. Each has its own toggle in the same Taskbar settings screen, and reviewing all of them together takes only a couple of extra minutes once you're already there.
Frequently asked questions
- How much RAM does Widgets actually use?
- It varies, but its background process typically holds somewhere in the range of 100 to 300MB of memory persistently, which matters more on a PC with 4GB or 8GB of RAM than one with 16GB or more.
- Can I turn Widgets back on later?
- Yes, just return to Taskbar settings and toggle it back on at any time — nothing is uninstalled or removed permanently.
- Does disabling Widgets affect Windows Update or security?
- No, it's a purely cosmetic feature unrelated to system updates, security patches, or driver support.