Microsoft’s Copilot Can Read Your PC’s Health, RAM Cost and All

Microsoft is testing a Copilot feature that answers questions about your Windows PC’s hardware and health, and the assistant doing the answering turns out to be a drain on that same hardware. The feature, called PC Insights, is rolling out as an opt-in experiment inside the Copilot app, first spotted by Windows Latest in Microsoft’s own support documentation and app code.

Ask it whether a laptop has room left for a 100GB game, or whether the antivirus is current, and Copilot checks the live system and answers in plain language. Testers have also clocked the app itself eating close to 1GB of RAM while sitting idle, putting it among the heavier processes running on the very machine it is supposed to be diagnosing.

What PC Insights Actually Does

Microsoft’s own description is straightforward. The tool lets customers “conversationally ask Copilot questions about their Windows PC and receive clear responses based on their device’s state without having to dig through system settings.” The company says the feature is gradually rolled out to Copilot app users and may not show up on every device yet.

At launch, PC Insights can field questions about graphics cards, storage, CPU usage, antivirus protection, battery health and connected peripherals. Later reporting on Microsoft’s support page and app code found a wider list: BIOS version, hardware specs, connected USB devices and external drives, printers, webcams, and the current state of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Sample questions people are actually testing include:

• “Do I have enough space for a 100GB game?”
• “What’s my current CPU usage?”
• “Is my antivirus running?”
• “Is my webcam working?”
• “What graphics card do I have?”

Every time Copilot needs to check a file or system detail, it asks first. The default is “Ask every time,” though you can flip that to “Always allow” if you would rather not see the prompt again. A one-time approval lasts only until the app closes or the PC restarts.

Copilot Eats Nearly 1GB of RAM While It Watches Yours

Here is the part that gives the feature its edge. Copilot for Windows now ships as a full web app built on its own private copy of Microsoft Edge, and multiple testers have found it sitting near the top of Task Manager, right alongside heavyweight apps like Excel, even when nobody is asking it anything.

Windows Latest, which first surfaced PC Insights in Microsoft’s code and support pages, measured the app using nearly 1GB of RAM on a 32GB machine shortly after opening it, with Copilot identifying itself as a “Browser” in Task Manager. Separate testing told a similar story with different numbers.

The exact figure moves depending on the machine and the moment, but every test lands in the same neighborhood: a tool built to flag what is slowing a PC down is, itself, one of the things slowing it down.

Not every company building on-device AI assistants is solving this the same way. Perplexity’s upcoming Computer product plans to split AI tasks between local and cloud processing, an approach aimed at keeping the heaviest inference work off the machine sitting on your desk entirely.

Why Microsoft Is Pushing This Now

Microsoft has been trying to make Copilot earn its keep on both the consumer and developer side of Windows for months. PC Insights is the latest attempt to put a dollar value on having an AI assistant baked into the operating system, translating numbers that used to live only in Task Manager into sentences an ordinary user can act on.

The push continues even though paid uptake of Microsoft 365 Copilot in workplaces reportedly remains below 5%. On the developer side, GitHub’s Copilot app now lets programmers manage fleets of AI coding agents at once, while large outsourcers including Infosys, TCS and Wipro have scaled Copilot past 300,000 seats combined.

There is friction underneath that expansion. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri has laid out plans to lower Windows’ baseline memory footprint, and Microsoft has already pulled Copilot entry points out of Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad after users pushed back on the clutter. PC Insights opens a new entry point into Copilot at the same moment the company is trying to close others.

The Data Copilot Is Allowed to Touch

Access is permission gated, in theory and mostly in practice. Copilot cannot read the contents of a file unless you grant that specific request. It can calculate the size of a folder, like Downloads or Documents, without opening anything inside it. It also cannot see work email, Teams chats, calendars or documents stored in an organization’s Microsoft 365 environment.

Microsoft’s language is direct on the point that matters most to skeptics: “your personal files and system info aren’t stored or used to train models.” The company adds a carve-out worth noticing, though: conversation activity, meaning the prompts you type and the answers Copilot gives back, may still be used to improve the product, including training future models, depending on your settings.

That kind of promise sits inside a track record that has drawn its own scrutiny elsewhere in the Copilot family. A data-risk report from Concentric AI, a data security firm, found that Copilot’s overly permissive access model has left 16% of business-critical data overshared across organizations it studied, with hundreds of thousands of files at risk on average. That finding is about enterprise Microsoft 365 deployments, not PC Insights specifically, but it is the backdrop against which Microsoft is now asking consumers to trust a new access prompt on their personal laptops.

Copilot Still Can’t Fix Anything It Finds

For now, PC Insights only reports. It cannot end a runaway process, clear disk space, update a driver or change a Windows setting on its own. If it flags a problem, the user still has to go fix it manually, the same as before Copilot could describe the problem in plain English.

Microsoft says it plans to keep improving the experience and may add new capabilities later. The company has not committed to a timeline, and it has already warned that answers from an experimental feature “may not always provide complete or accurate information.”

• What we know: PC Insights is read-only and cannot change Windows settings, delete files or run fixes automatically.
• What we know: The feature is opt-in, gated behind permission prompts, and rolling out gradually in the United States only.

• What’s unconfirmed: Whether Microsoft will eventually let Copilot execute simple fixes rather than just describe them.
• What’s unconfirmed: The feature’s final resource cost and rollout timeline ahead of a wider release.

Reddit Calls It ‘Bloated and Might Be Lying to Me’

Reaction so far splits along a predictable line. People who already understand Task Manager see a slower, heavier version of a tool they didn’t need. People who don’t see something genuinely useful for the first time.

Oh hey it’s like Task Manager except instead of lightweight and authoritative, it’s bloated and might be lying to me.

That line, quoted by TechRadar, came from a Reddit user reacting to the rollout. Other coverage of the same test run described the feature as situationally useful even while acknowledging the irony of an AI assistant asking permission to check your battery health while quietly consuming a chunk of that battery itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Copilot PC Insights Safe to Use?

It is gated behind permission prompts and cannot read file contents without explicit access, which limits the practical risk. Microsoft also says PC Insights cannot reach work email, Teams chats or organizational documents, and any access you grant can be reviewed or revoked later in Copilot’s privacy settings.

How Do I Get Copilot PC Insights on My PC?

Open the Copilot app on Windows and ask it a system question, such as how much storage you have free. If the feature is live on your device, Copilot will prompt you for permission before answering; if you don’t see a prompt, the rollout simply hasn’t reached your machine yet.

Can I Remove Copilot Entirely Instead of Just Turning Off PC Insights?

Yes. Beyond declining individual permission prompts, Copilot can be uninstalled through the app’s own settings or blocked outright using Group Policy on managed devices, separate from whatever choice you make about PC Insights specifically.

Does Copilot Train AI Models on My PC Data?

No, not on your personal files or system information, according to Microsoft’s privacy FAQ for Copilot, which notes that trained reviewers may still examine conversation transcripts to evaluate and improve the AI models themselves.

Will PC Insights Come to Windows 10 or Outside the US?

Microsoft has not published a timeline for either. Every account of the rollout so far describes it as gradual and US-only inside the Windows 11 Copilot app, with no confirmed date for broader geographic or platform expansion.