6 ms·

> It makes no sense why windows explorer should even have delays. Why the start menu should have a delay. Not sure how regular windows power users tolerate this

> It makes no sense why windows explorer should even have delays. Why the start menu should have a delay. Not sure how regular windows power users tolerate this OS. It's as clunky as I remember XP being despite the hardware I'm trying these days being way more powerful; 20 years and no ux experience because microsoft knows people and companies will buy it anyway. I use Windows for work everyday. I don't like it as much as Linux or osx but I can't say that I have issues you are describing with start menu lag or windows explorer. And that's with several phpstorm/pycharm instances open along with like a dozen services running in docker. There are many problems with windows, but I don't think performance is one of them. Also it was a very long time ago, but XP was one of my favorite OS's. I think that was the last time where I could look at my process list and tell you exactly what each process is for.

sokoloff 6y ago
Those lags are exactly what we experienced. Click on start menu, get a blue spinner. Folder in explorer? Same. Click on the settings panel, get a spinner. And not for 100ms, but for a second or more. Now, this was on a fresh install, so maybe some cache needed to be built, but it was maddening. We did it in part to benchmark some games which I do suspect will work better in Windows.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  Something is seriously wrong there. Even on an ancient computer once I turn off menu and window animation the start menu and small folders open with 0 spinning and probably less than 20ms. Maybe your “fresh install” has a bunch of bloatware and virus scanners?
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    It's a fresh Win10 install downloaded directly from Microsoft, put on a USB stick to install on a brand new drive, freshly formatted for the purpose. I agree with you on it being entirely puzzling and unexpected and will continue to poke at it for a while.
    - computerex 6y ago
      Not sure what your requirements are, but maybe try Parallels? Worked super well for me, enough for me to be able to do .NET development in it.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        Son is trying to do gaming in Minecraft with consistent 60+ fps and screen recording in OBS. (The combination of those two was hard to achieve on the Mac and so we're trying Windows as the base OS. The Mac would do 120+ fps until launching OBS, then would struggle to do better than 30 fps.)
- Const-me 6y ago
  > Click on the settings panel, get a spinner. And not for 100ms, but for a second or more. I have experienced that only once. The computer was a $150 tablet from ~10 years ago, with 1GB RAM, 32 bit Windows 10 (sold with Windows 8, I think), and Intel Atom SoC for a CPU. Computers with adequate amount of resources worked well for me, even very old ones.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    This is a Haswell i7-4771 iMac14,2 with 32GB of RAM. It's probably got enough compute resources to open settings.
    - Const-me 6y ago
      Indeed. Might be the drivers. Most importantly GPU drivers. Run dxdiag.exe, Display tab, it should say DirectDraw and Direct3D acceleration are both Enabled. For that particular iMac you need two of these drivers, because two GPUs. Another possible thing is SATA driver. Normally installed automatically as a part of Windows, but I never tried running windows on Apple desktops. If Apple gives you Windows drivers install them, otherwise install CPU-Z, “Mainboard” tab, see the chipset, then install from intel.com.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        Thanks for the specific tips; I'll try those out this evening!
        sokoloff 6y ago
        I couldn't wait for this evening so poked around during lunch. dxdiag was fine, but the SATA driver was a generic AHCI SATA driver. Replacing that with a chipset-specific SATA driver dramatically improved the responsiveness of Explorer and general application launching. I can't be 100% sure that solved everything, but it is perceptibly faster now. I'm not sure why Windows didn't auto-install those drivers. Perhaps it would have eventually done so during one of the Windows Update cycles, but your advice was very helpful, so thank you!

sokoloff 6y ago

Those lags are exactly what we experienced. Click on start menu, get a blue spinner. Folder in explorer? Same. Click on the settings panel, get a spinner. And not for 100ms, but for a second or more. Now, this was on a fresh install, so maybe some cache needed to be built, but it was maddening. We did it in part to benchmark some games which I do suspect will work better in Windows.

joshspankit 6y ago
Something is seriously wrong there. Even on an ancient computer once I turn off menu and window animation the start menu and small folders open with 0 spinning and probably less than 20ms. Maybe your “fresh install” has a bunch of bloatware and virus scanners?
- sokoloff 6y ago
  It's a fresh Win10 install downloaded directly from Microsoft, put on a USB stick to install on a brand new drive, freshly formatted for the purpose. I agree with you on it being entirely puzzling and unexpected and will continue to poke at it for a while.
  - computerex 6y ago
    Not sure what your requirements are, but maybe try Parallels? Worked super well for me, enough for me to be able to do .NET development in it.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Son is trying to do gaming in Minecraft with consistent 60+ fps and screen recording in OBS. (The combination of those two was hard to achieve on the Mac and so we're trying Windows as the base OS. The Mac would do 120+ fps until launching OBS, then would struggle to do better than 30 fps.)
Const-me 6y ago
> Click on the settings panel, get a spinner. And not for 100ms, but for a second or more. I have experienced that only once. The computer was a $150 tablet from ~10 years ago, with 1GB RAM, 32 bit Windows 10 (sold with Windows 8, I think), and Intel Atom SoC for a CPU. Computers with adequate amount of resources worked well for me, even very old ones.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  This is a Haswell i7-4771 iMac14,2 with 32GB of RAM. It's probably got enough compute resources to open settings.
  - Const-me 6y ago
    Indeed. Might be the drivers. Most importantly GPU drivers. Run dxdiag.exe, Display tab, it should say DirectDraw and Direct3D acceleration are both Enabled. For that particular iMac you need two of these drivers, because two GPUs. Another possible thing is SATA driver. Normally installed automatically as a part of Windows, but I never tried running windows on Apple desktops. If Apple gives you Windows drivers install them, otherwise install CPU-Z, “Mainboard” tab, see the chipset, then install from intel.com.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Thanks for the specific tips; I'll try those out this evening!
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        I couldn't wait for this evening so poked around during lunch. dxdiag was fine, but the SATA driver was a generic AHCI SATA driver. Replacing that with a chipset-specific SATA driver dramatically improved the responsiveness of Explorer and general application launching. I can't be 100% sure that solved everything, but it is perceptibly faster now. I'm not sure why Windows didn't auto-install those drivers. Perhaps it would have eventually done so during one of the Windows Update cycles, but your advice was very helpful, so thank you!