Andy Young, an ex-Microsoft senior software engineer, posted a message on X/Twitter bemoaning that even with his $1,600 Core i9 CPU and 128 GB of RAM, Windows...
None of you read the article. His complaint pertains to the Start Menu, which I agree is atrocious. Mine never indexes Steam. If you wanted to compare this to alternatives you’d have to look at Mac’s Spotlight, or the Linux tools dmenu or rofi. Dmenu and rofi kick the shit out of Window’s Start Menu for my use cases. I want you to find my applications, that’s it. The Start Menu consistently jumbles settings, web searches, and shit I don’t want (why does searching User Accounts not bring up User Accounts to the fucken top?) It is comically bad, but its not talking about fucken gaming performance.
Pretty much everything related to the explorer.exe process is needlessly slow on Windows 11. On my work machine, the file explorer will take 2-3 seconds to load after I open it, and that’s with only a C:/ drive (i.e. no network shares to slow it down or anything else).
Start menu was separated from explorer.exe since 8 or 10, it’s called StartMenuExperienceHost.exe nowadays. Taskbar is also a separate process since 11. It also means that they can freeze separately
The worst part is that it worked fine on Windows 7. You could hit start > type the first 3-4 letters > enter and be able to open any program or OS setting in under a second. They somehow fucked it up with 8 and still haven’t fixed it over a decade later.
An FYI for Windows users, check out Everything for searching your harddrive. It is insanely fast. Like, search your entire harddrive in real time as you press the letters fast. Compared to the crap Windows has built in, it feels like magic, until you realize that searching a database at fast speeds has been a solved problem for decades and yet Microsoft still continues to struggle because they want to throw in every possible piece of metadata and contents every time you search when most people just want to type a name in.
WizFile does a good job at it too. It works differently though; WizFile just looks at your partition table of the selected drive/directory. It’s super fast in all aspects but it’s only a single drive/directory at a time. I think Everything is slow to index everything but is super fast when searching and works across multiple drives/directories
WizFile is made by the same people who make WizTree and is essentially the same program, but instead of visually showing you the disk, it allows you to search.
I went back to windows for a few months after running linux as my daily driver for years. It was a jarring experience just how bad the basic user experience was. Everything seemed like an attempt at shoving some kind of advert-ainment down my throw when I was just looking for a basic program or file.
I don’t understand how an advertising system like this is acceptable for buisnesses? Like if I’m a business and providing work machines to my employees, you sure af aren’t going to be making money off my employees, with the machines and electricity I paid for.
It still seems like the “killer app” keeping everyone one Microsoft is Office, and maybe a handful of other proprietary pieces of software.
The whole ecosystem sucks power and time close to abusive levels though, so adding this…
Fairly often when I right click on an item I get the spinning blue wheel for 20-40 seconds. Open the shell (installed with git) always 40 seconds spinning wheel. I’m using another soft to get around it.
Yeah I fucking timed it and it is most often 40 (!) seconds. Work PC so I havent installed cryptohacker.exe on it or something. Launch any soft and it crawls from the SSD to main memory.
Just saying many problems stem from the inbuilt unsecurity and hence the crazy checks to “protect you”.
Can’t confirm the waiting time.
My Ryzen 7800X3D and nvidia 3070 based PC is snappy and quick to respond (if I am not running anything intensive in the background.
My (i believe) i5 8600 in my work laptop (HP Elitebook 850 G5) is not as fast but once everything is up is usually quite responsive (1-2 chrome windows with multiple tabs, Teams, Outlook, OneNote, 2 different Remote Tools and some other programs I happen to run).
I believe you have a slow af or broken SSD that’s slowing you down. Better check with something like CrystalDisk.
I have same CPU and GPU, with C: on an M.2 (Read 7200 MB/s - Write 5700 MB/s) and 32GB DDR5. When I right-click my desktop/wallpaper, I have the blue spinning wheel for 3 or 4 seconds before the menu opens 😬
980 Pro 500GB about 25-30% filled.
All programs are outsourced to my secondary drive.
All games are outsourced to my tertiary drive
I run Wallpaper Engine in the back. Even with my backup software running it doesnt load longer than maybe 1sec at best.
Now compressing a 7zip archive will make the CPU sweat and let my system think for maybe a bit more.
It isn’t start. It’s Window’s search. It’s been shit forever. I can search for the exact file name and still not get it as a result. In the meantime iOS (or Android) can find it before I’ve typed the entire file name in. It’s embarrassing.
I found out that if you download PowerToys one of the toys is a better start menu that runs 4x faster and without the web crap. I use it more than the actual start menu now.
My favorite part is how virtual desktops and switching between them works perfectly on Windows 10, and even on KDE it works well and smooth, but on Windows 11 somehow they made it slower and glitchy. It was probably better when it didn’t even have an animation when switching.
None of you read the article. His complaint pertains to the Start Menu, which I agree is atrocious. Mine never indexes Steam. If you wanted to compare this to alternatives you’d have to look at Mac’s Spotlight, or the Linux tools dmenu or rofi. Dmenu and rofi kick the shit out of Window’s Start Menu for my use cases. I want you to find my applications, that’s it. The Start Menu consistently jumbles settings, web searches, and shit I don’t want (why does searching User Accounts not bring up User Accounts to the fucken top?) It is comically bad, but its not talking about fucken gaming performance.
Pretty much everything related to the
explorer.exeprocess is needlessly slow on Windows 11. On my work machine, the file explorer will take 2-3 seconds to load after I open it, and that’s with only a C:/ drive (i.e. no network shares to slow it down or anything else).Start menu was separated from explorer.exe since 8 or 10, it’s called StartMenuExperienceHost.exe nowadays. Taskbar is also a separate process since 11. It also means that they can freeze separately
Pretty good summary of Microsoft’s “innovations” the last decade or so
The worst part is that it worked fine on Windows 7. You could hit start > type the first 3-4 letters > enter and be able to open any program or OS setting in under a second. They somehow fucked it up with 8 and still haven’t fixed it over a decade later.
Base windows 8 still had a very performant search, though a bit worse than 7. 8.1 is where it got truly fucked up.
Seriously, searching for anything on your PC is completely useless.
An FYI for Windows users, check out Everything for searching your harddrive. It is insanely fast. Like, search your entire harddrive in real time as you press the letters fast. Compared to the crap Windows has built in, it feels like magic, until you realize that searching a database at fast speeds has been a solved problem for decades and yet Microsoft still continues to struggle because they want to throw in every possible piece of metadata and contents every time you search when most people just want to type a name in.
+1 for everything: literally saves my sanity
WizFile does a good job at it too. It works differently though; WizFile just looks at your partition table of the selected drive/directory. It’s super fast in all aspects but it’s only a single drive/directory at a time. I think Everything is slow to index everything but is super fast when searching and works across multiple drives/directories
WizFile is made by the same people who make WizTree and is essentially the same program, but instead of visually showing you the disk, it allows you to search.
Thought it was abandoned. It’s not but closed source. Just discovered EverythingToolbar. Btw, i use Launchy / TagsSpaces on Windows.
I went back to windows for a few months after running linux as my daily driver for years. It was a jarring experience just how bad the basic user experience was. Everything seemed like an attempt at shoving some kind of advert-ainment down my throw when I was just looking for a basic program or file.
I don’t understand how an advertising system like this is acceptable for buisnesses? Like if I’m a business and providing work machines to my employees, you sure af aren’t going to be making money off my employees, with the machines and electricity I paid for.
It still seems like the “killer app” keeping everyone one Microsoft is Office, and maybe a handful of other proprietary pieces of software.
Enterprise versions can be customised without any of this bullshit.
Yeah…First thing I do in setting up a new Windows PC is install Everything to get instant indexed search.
KFind works great for me. /shrug
The whole ecosystem sucks power and time close to abusive levels though, so adding this…
Fairly often when I right click on an item I get the spinning blue wheel for 20-40 seconds. Open the shell (installed with git) always 40 seconds spinning wheel. I’m using another soft to get around it.
Yeah I fucking timed it and it is most often 40 (!) seconds. Work PC so I havent installed cryptohacker.exe on it or something. Launch any soft and it crawls from the SSD to main memory.
Just saying many problems stem from the inbuilt unsecurity and hence the crazy checks to “protect you”.
Pfff.
Can’t confirm the waiting time.
My Ryzen 7800X3D and nvidia 3070 based PC is snappy and quick to respond (if I am not running anything intensive in the background.
My (i believe) i5 8600 in my work laptop (HP Elitebook 850 G5) is not as fast but once everything is up is usually quite responsive (1-2 chrome windows with multiple tabs, Teams, Outlook, OneNote, 2 different Remote Tools and some other programs I happen to run).
I believe you have a slow af or broken SSD that’s slowing you down. Better check with something like CrystalDisk.
I have same CPU and GPU, with C: on an M.2 (Read 7200 MB/s - Write 5700 MB/s) and 32GB DDR5. When I right-click my desktop/wallpaper, I have the blue spinning wheel for 3 or 4 seconds before the menu opens 😬
980 Pro 500GB about 25-30% filled.
All programs are outsourced to my secondary drive.
All games are outsourced to my tertiary drive
I run Wallpaper Engine in the back. Even with my backup software running it doesnt load longer than maybe 1sec at best.
Now compressing a 7zip archive will make the CPU sweat and let my system think for maybe a bit more.
I’d reformat if I were you. And perhaps you’d enjoy running ReviOS playbook too 😈
Same here, went through multiple upgrades but even when I had a 3700X and a Vega 64 with 32 GB of RAM and a SN550, it was really snappy.
It isn’t start. It’s Window’s search. It’s been shit forever. I can search for the exact file name and still not get it as a result. In the meantime iOS (or Android) can find it before I’ve typed the entire file name in. It’s embarrassing.
Its start, the article is 100% about the design of the new start menu and how it is now designed to distract you.
Indexer was a pain point of Windows since forever. Although there are so much open source tools around doing it better…
I found out that if you download PowerToys one of the toys is a better start menu that runs 4x faster and without the web crap. I use it more than the actual start menu now.
My favorite part is how virtual desktops and switching between them works perfectly on Windows 10, and even on KDE it works well and smooth, but on Windows 11 somehow they made it slower and glitchy. It was probably better when it didn’t even have an animation when switching.
The spotlight-like search from Windows Power toys is far better, they should just make it the default
Ah. Short for “fuckeng”, but I think they renamed it Balljang a few decades ago.
I thought that was short for “fucking”, but “en” isn’t how we do that.
It is how some of us do that