How to Disable AI in Bing on Windows 11 — and Why Your Laptop Is Still Slow

What Microsoft actually announced today

Yes — as of today, you can officially turn AI answers off in Bing. According to TechPowerUp's coverage of a new post on Microsoft's Bing Search Blog, there are two routes:

1. The Microsoft Bing AI Search Choice extension for Chrome and Edge — install it, flip one toggle, and AI-generated answers are switched off across every Bing search you do.
2. A settings option within Bing itself — no extension needed, per the announcement.

That's the news. But the more interesting part is what it signals: Microsoft publicly admitting that not everyone wants AI answers. After years of AI being pushed as the default — Copilot in the taskbar, AI summaries on every results page — this is a genuine walk-back.

One thing to be clear about, because the search results blur it: this is about Bing search results only. It does not touch Copilot, and it does not touch the AI features baked into Windows 11 itself. If your complaint is "my computer feels slower since the updates," the Bing toggle is the visible tip of a much bigger iceberg.

Why your Windows machine still feels slower after the updates

Disabling AI in Bing cleans up your search results. It does nothing about the AI and background processes Windows 11 runs locally.

Over the past couple of years, Windows feature updates have layered on Copilot integration, extra search indexing to feed AI features, telemetry and a growing pile of background tasks. On a new machine with a fast NVMe drive and 16GB of RAM, you don't notice. On an older machine with a mechanical hard drive and 8GB of memory, that extra load lands on hardware that was already at its limit.

The pattern we see at the bench goes like this: a machine was fine on its original Windows 11 build. Then a feature update lands, and suddenly it's wading through treacle — boot times double, the Start menu lags half a second behind your clicks, browsers crawl with three tabs open.

Trimming the AI cruft is a legitimate performance fix. But it's a partial one. It removes load — it doesn't remove the bottleneck underneath.

If you're weighing an SSD or RAM upgrade against a new machine entirely, it's worth reading our take on why now is a better time to upgrade your PC than January will be — component supply is already tightening.

And if your machine has an AMD Radeon graphics card, it may have been quietly hammering your SSD in the background for months — we've written about how much drive life that bug may have cost you.

If RAM is the bottleneck, the good news is it's often the cheapest fix going — we've broken down what a laptop RAM upgrade actually costs, and how to tell whether yours can even be upgraded.

The winter "my laptop got slow" spike is real

Every winter, from November onwards, we get a spike in "my laptop got slow" complaints. It's the same seasonal pattern we see with Wi-Fi faults — people move indoors, machines get used more hours per day, and the updates that queued up over autumn all land at once. We covered the Wi-Fi side of that pattern in our piece on pinning down whose fault a disconnect is; the slow-machine side follows the same curve.

The timing is rarely kind. For students, November is when deadlines stack up. For small businesses, it's the run into Christmas. A slow machine stops being an annoyance and starts being urgent.

So the Bing toggle news landing on 12 November is well timed — it's exactly the point in the year when people start noticing.

What trimming the AI cruft can and can't fix

Honest expectations, from the workshop bench:

Can fix:

• Sluggish, cluttered search results
• Browser tabs eaten by AI answer panels
• Some of the background indexing load

Can help with:

• Overall responsiveness on a machine that's otherwise healthy

Can't fix:

• A mechanical hard drive grinding through a modern Windows build
• 8GB of RAM that's full the moment you open Chrome and Teams

Our rule of thumb: if the machine was fast once and updates made it slow, software trimming buys you back some of it. If it was never fast — or it's five-plus years old — the hardware is the story.

We're deliberately not walking you through every registry tweak and service disable here. In our experience, plenty of them break Windows Update or search outright, and we've had machines on the bench that were put there by "optimisation guides" someone followed online. The safe toggles are safe; the deep cuts are how machines end up in a worse state than they arrived.

The real culprits we find when we open the machine up

When a "slow after updates" machine comes in and the software side is already trimmed, here's what we actually find:

Culprit one: a mechanical hard drive. Still the single biggest cause of "slow laptop" in our workshop. Windows 11 on a spinning drive is misery — the OS is built around SSD-speed storage. An SSD swap is the most transformative upgrade we do. Most laptops we see from the last five or six years take an NVMe drive; older ones usually take a 2.5-inch SATA SSD instead — either way, the difference is a two-minute boot becoming a twenty-second one.

Culprit two: 8GB of RAM. Fine in 2020. Permanently swapping in late 2026, the moment Windows, a browser and Teams are open. Many laptops take a 16GB upgrade for less than people expect — often less than the cost of a new keyboard.

Culprit three, less often: a clogged or dying cooling system. Dust-packed fans and dried thermal paste make the CPU throttle, and everything feels sluggish. Winter is actually a good time to spot this — machines work harder indoors, with heating drying the air and dust building up.

The honest sequence: try the Bing toggle, trim what you safely can, and if it's still slow — it's not the AI's fault. It's the drive or the memory.

Windows 11 support dates matter here too

Before you spend money on a machine, check where it sits on the support ladder. Windows 11 feature updates get 24 months of support on Home and Pro, which means 24H2 has already fallen off and 25H2's window closes in October 2027. A machine that's struggling with recent updates may also be one that's about to stop receiving them — and an unpatched machine is a security risk, not just a slow one.

Machines below the Intel 8th-gen / Ryzen 2000 line are end-of-life for Windows 11. No amount of AI-trimming makes a supported, secure Windows viable on them.

Sometimes the right answer isn't an upgrade at all. It's a new machine, or a custom build if you want something that lasts. We'll tell you honestly which side of that line you're on.

When to bring it to us

If your machine is still slow after you've turned the AI features off, bring it in. We'll diagnose the actual bottleneck — drive, memory, cooling or software — rather than guessing at it. If the answer turns out to be a fresh Windows install rather than new parts, our Windows OS installation service covers that too.

SSD and RAM upgrades are our bread and butter. We quote parts and fitting before any work starts, and every repair carries a 6-month labour warranty and 12 months on new parts. If the diagnosis says the machine is done, we'll say so — and a straight answer about replacement costs you nothing to hear.

We collect and deliver across Portsmouth for £10 each way, or you can drop the machine off at the workshop on Durham Street — and students and NHS staff get a discount. Either way, book it in and you'll leave knowing what's actually wrong, not just what Microsoft toggled today.

Questions people ask