4 ms·

Given how awful performance on my Windows desktop is, I am shocked that Microsoft is still investing in performance.

chongli 1y ago
It's really funny to me as well. All this effort put into low level performance seems like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. The operating system (and core business software such as Office) is overflowing with bloat that absolutely tanks the performance and responsiveness of the system. On a fresh boot I might as well go for a 15 minute coffee break lest I end up with multiple hung applications blocked on the UI thread.
- xenophonf 1y ago
  It's bad everywhere. Every time I've upgraded Ubuntu on my old laptop, performance gets worse and worse because more and more junk keeps getting added. Absolutely maddening.
  - exe34 1y ago
    my nixos with just xmonad works really well, I haven't noticed any degradation in the last 10 years of updates.
    - xenophonf 1y ago
      NixOS looks super cool, but it also looks too much like actual work. As a FreeBSD main for two decades, I've played that game already and have the (sadly, now long dead) tinderbox and poudriere installations to prove it.
  - Scramblejams 1y ago
    Is it the desktop environment or background stuff that’s getting worse for you? If the former: FWIW I was pleasantly surprised when I switched back to Kubuntu. KDE’s surprisingly resource efficient these days, actually seems pretty close to XFCE.
    - xenophonf 1y ago
      I'm not sure and don't have the patience to check. I might go back to Debian. I'm only really using Ubuntu since that and RHEL are what we use at work.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  It's so bad that Microsoft is actually going to start preloading Office on boot to speed up the application start times. It was quite the shock to me recently when I had to use a Surface Laptop (the ARM one). Snapdragon X Elite & 32GB of RAM and took almost double the time to get to the desktop from a cold start compared to my M2 Air. Then even once everything was loaded, interacting with the system just did not feel responsive at all, the most egregious being file explorer and the right click menu. And I have my own gripes with macOS feeling like it's slow due to the animations and me wanting to move faster than it can. Windows used to happily oblige, but now it's laggy. Microsoft is too caught up in shoving Copilot everywhere to care though.
  - tredre3 1y ago
    > It's so bad that Microsoft is actually going to start preloading Office on boot to speed up the application start times. Office has been preloading on startup since Windows 95.
thevillagechief 1y ago
It's just ridiculous. Windows 11 currently has this bug where the file explorer just freezes all the time. Everyone is experiencing it at work. I cannot believe how a core product gets away with this.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  A tale as old as time. It always seemed wild to me File Explorer is allowed to have so much synchronously driven activity. Like sure, display a loading symbol in the content area if I open a network share that's not already mounted (or whatever else it may wait on)... but don't lock the whole darn window so closing it becomes unresponsive!
- pixl97 1y ago
  Since I'm not seeing issues like this I'm assuming these are computers on an active directory... I remember XP having a few fun issues like this when a GPO refreshed links to a file that didn't exist and froze for a moment trying to resolve them.
  - Rohansi 1y ago
    I get this all the time without being on an active directory. It's nothing network related from what I can tell. The explorer tab just stops being interactable seemingly randomly. Closing and reopening the tab works around it.
- r721 1y ago
  Process Monitor is invaluable for investigating cases like that - at least one can look at what Windows is actually doing at that moment of freezing: >Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon ... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  Every time I've investigated an issue like this, it was something outside of explorer. Most of the time some kind of plugin that I didn't want (PDF readers, Tortoise SVN/Git, document preview handlers, you name it), mapped network drives not responding, or file system corruption that went by seemingly unnoticed. At some point I started Autoruns and just disabled every DLL that didn't come from Microsoft and that I didn't strictly need. It sped up Windows immensely, and I went back enabling maybe one or two of those DLLs at a later point because it broke functionality. I could've saved weeks of my life if Microsoft had just added a little popup that says "7zip.dll is adding 24% extra time to opening right click menus, disable it Y/N" every time a badly programmed plugin slowed down my shell.
cogman10 1y ago
It's really stark when you compare it to something like a linux desktop running KDE or Gnome. Both pretty full featured desktops that were built for the computers I used as a kid. While there's been a bit of polish, the two simply sip hardware requirements. So much so that you can put them on things like a raspberry pi 3 and still get a decent experience.
DobarDabar 1y ago
The new M$ slop Explorer is horribly optimized and full of unnecessary IPC so no wonder it's so slow.

It's really funny to me as well. All this effort put into low level performance seems like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. The operating system (and core business software such as Office) is overflowing with bloat that absolutely tanks the performance and responsiveness of the system. On a fresh boot I might as well go for a 15 minute coffee break lest I end up with multiple hung applications blocked on the UI thread.

xenophonf 1y ago
It's bad everywhere. Every time I've upgraded Ubuntu on my old laptop, performance gets worse and worse because more and more junk keeps getting added. Absolutely maddening.
- exe34 1y ago
  my nixos with just xmonad works really well, I haven't noticed any degradation in the last 10 years of updates.
  - xenophonf 1y ago
    NixOS looks super cool, but it also looks too much like actual work. As a FreeBSD main for two decades, I've played that game already and have the (sadly, now long dead) tinderbox and poudriere installations to prove it.
- Scramblejams 1y ago
  Is it the desktop environment or background stuff that’s getting worse for you? If the former: FWIW I was pleasantly surprised when I switched back to Kubuntu. KDE’s surprisingly resource efficient these days, actually seems pretty close to XFCE.
  - xenophonf 1y ago
    I'm not sure and don't have the patience to check. I might go back to Debian. I'm only really using Ubuntu since that and RHEL are what we use at work.
thewebguyd 1y ago
It's so bad that Microsoft is actually going to start preloading Office on boot to speed up the application start times. It was quite the shock to me recently when I had to use a Surface Laptop (the ARM one). Snapdragon X Elite & 32GB of RAM and took almost double the time to get to the desktop from a cold start compared to my M2 Air. Then even once everything was loaded, interacting with the system just did not feel responsive at all, the most egregious being file explorer and the right click menu. And I have my own gripes with macOS feeling like it's slow due to the animations and me wanting to move faster than it can. Windows used to happily oblige, but now it's laggy. Microsoft is too caught up in shoving Copilot everywhere to care though.
- tredre3 1y ago
  > It's so bad that Microsoft is actually going to start preloading Office on boot to speed up the application start times. Office has been preloading on startup since Windows 95.

thevillagechief 1y ago

It's just ridiculous. Windows 11 currently has this bug where the file explorer just freezes all the time. Everyone is experiencing it at work. I cannot believe how a core product gets away with this.

zamadatix 1y ago
A tale as old as time. It always seemed wild to me File Explorer is allowed to have so much synchronously driven activity. Like sure, display a loading symbol in the content area if I open a network share that's not already mounted (or whatever else it may wait on)... but don't lock the whole darn window so closing it becomes unresponsive!
pixl97 1y ago
Since I'm not seeing issues like this I'm assuming these are computers on an active directory... I remember XP having a few fun issues like this when a GPO refreshed links to a file that didn't exist and froze for a moment trying to resolve them.
- Rohansi 1y ago
  I get this all the time without being on an active directory. It's nothing network related from what I can tell. The explorer tab just stops being interactable seemingly randomly. Closing and reopening the tab works around it.
r721 1y ago
Process Monitor is invaluable for investigating cases like that - at least one can look at what Windows is actually doing at that moment of freezing: >Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon ... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...
jeroenhd 1y ago
Every time I've investigated an issue like this, it was something outside of explorer. Most of the time some kind of plugin that I didn't want (PDF readers, Tortoise SVN/Git, document preview handlers, you name it), mapped network drives not responding, or file system corruption that went by seemingly unnoticed. At some point I started Autoruns and just disabled every DLL that didn't come from Microsoft and that I didn't strictly need. It sped up Windows immensely, and I went back enabling maybe one or two of those DLLs at a later point because it broke functionality. I could've saved weeks of my life if Microsoft had just added a little popup that says "7zip.dll is adding 24% extra time to opening right click menus, disable it Y/N" every time a badly programmed plugin slowed down my shell.

cogman10 1y ago

It's really stark when you compare it to something like a linux desktop running KDE or Gnome. Both pretty full featured desktops that were built for the computers I used as a kid. While there's been a bit of polish, the two simply sip hardware requirements. So much so that you can put them on things like a raspberry pi 3 and still get a decent experience.

DobarDabar 1y ago

The new M$ slop Explorer is horribly optimized and full of unnecessary IPC so no wonder it's so slow.