People running Windows 11, are you all running Sluggish Incarnate?

18 points by davidgrenier 2 years ago | 26 comments

I ask because every family member's system I sat next to has been, by my standards, unusably slow. At least 3 minutes boot time, then 1 minute spinning and another for icons to show up. Then opening up the settings menu and everything freezes for 30 seconds.

I understand they have no clue about tidying things up, but this Debian machine hasn't been reinstalled in at least 4 years and I'm pretty sure I still don't have a clue about Linux, yet it still runs smoother than butter.

I'd like to help them but haven't touched a windows machine since Windows 8 showed its ugly face. I could handle myself with Windows 7/2003 but I'm pretty sure I lost it. Is there a commonly agreed best-guide?

romanhn 2 years ago |

It definitely feels slower than previous versions. The fact that the Start menu almost always takes multiple seconds to open is absolutely inexcusable. To be fair, it's likely attributable to running a bunch of heavy apps (Visual Studio, Docker Desktop, multiple Chrome windows) on 8GB of RAM, but the task manager doesn't typically show memory as full, or any other obvious diagnostic. The primary hard drive is an SSD.

I've been on Microsoft operating systems since Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS. Next year I am buying a Macbook M3 when that comes out. Time to move on.

mouzogu 2 years ago | |

i use an m1 max with 32gb ram at work and it's often slow as hell.

apps refuse to open without reboot. often resets or disables system settings randomly.

with shit like docker or microsoft "cloud services as a js app" running, no chip is going to help.

running win10 at home for 8 years best experience in over 20 years of all OSes in stability.

hardware2win 2 years ago | |

Start menu is really slow

runjake 2 years ago |

8700K with NVMe SSD and 32 GB RAM. My Windows 11 machine boots in seconds and is quite speedy. The only exception being the absolutely sluggish Start Menu.

I do uninstall anything that doesn't need to be installed and I also police startup items with the SysInternals tools[1].

If those systems are using a spinning HDD, you're doomed. W11 is designed for SSD systems. I doubt MSFT cares about HDD installs.

And with PCs and Windows, you're always running into oddball hardware and driver issues unless you take great care in picking components with good track records (as I did).

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

JohnFen 2 years ago | |

> If those systems are using a spinning HDD, you're doomed. W11 is designed for SSD systems.

Does this mean anything except "Microsoft has decided not to bother being efficient with disc accesses"?

runjake 2 years ago | | |

I'm not sure what it means other than "MSFT isn't really paying attention to making sure W11 works well on HDD boot drives".

Does it mean extreme inefficiency with disk access, or does it mean heavy read-aheads plus aggressive caching? Who knows, but if you Google for "Windows 11 SSD optimized" you'll get pages and pages of results about SSD bugs and issues that have plagued large swath of users. Eg. KB5007262

THENATHE 2 years ago | | |

Yes

In games, for example, games that are designed around HDDs might pack 3 copies of the same tree so that I can be loaded at the same time as other assets in the scene with limited seek time and decompression time. SSDs, having no seek time, don’t need elements to be in adjacent locations.

Granted that is for video games, but to develop for hardware is always at the expense of every other hardware

manfre 2 years ago | | |

With ssd and nvme drives being available for cheap, it's probably not worth devoting engineering resources to improve it. They still cater heavily to OEMs and many of those have stopped specing spinning disks for the boot drive.

hypercube33 2 years ago | |

Home machine is a Ryzen 7 5000 series on 11 pro and it's decently fast. work machine is a Ryzen 7 4000 series and it's dog slow, especially network shares or network applications and I haven't a clue why. 64gb ram in my home box and 32gb in my work one. both on nvme disks. the beta 1 of 11 was crazy fast compared to windows 10 but somewhere they made it dog slow before releasing it

Spooky23 2 years ago | | |

Work computer probably has various agents etc running on it.

One of my favorites was a script pushed by GPO that was flagged by Crowdstrike, which caused some other stupid process to fail and freeze things.

navjack27 2 years ago |

My computer is super super fast and responsive and I just have a 2 1tb lowly ol pcie 3 nvme drives and 128gb of RAM and a overclocked 5900x paired with a 2080 Ti.

pawelduda 2 years ago |

Reading this I get flashbacks from HDD era, perhaps this is already a case but:

Put a SSD in it. Then clone the system from old to new drive. Even the cheapest ones make huge difference but if it's old machine, don't go too crazy because bandwidth could be limited by SATA2

tentacleuno 2 years ago | |

Definitely a good suggestion. Some appropriate information to supplement your above point would be that the price of SSDs has gone way down over the past few years. A 1TB SSD can be attained for around £45 in the UK.

davidgrenier 2 years ago | |

Will double check both systems I have access to, thanks.

misswaterfairy 2 years ago |

NTLite is a pretty good tool, still in beta for Windows 11, to strip out all of the cruft Microsoft adds to 'improve' Windows before you install it. If you install NTLite onto a machine with an NTLite built image, it's host update tool will keep checking for, and removing, things Microsoft tries to sneak back in, like Edge.

Although I built my machine for performance - i9-13900K, 64 GB RAM, 2TB boot SSD - Windows is quite performant and barely touches the CPU at idle as it's not trying to process any 'value adds'.

justsomehnguy 2 years ago |

> At least 3 minutes boot time, then 1 minute spinning and another for icons to show up

This is not a sw issue, but a hardware one. As other commenter note - you didn't even check if the system on SSD.

> but this Debian machine hasn't been reinstalled in at least 4 years and I'm pretty sure I still don't have a clue about Linux, yet it still runs smoother than butter.

And I can show you X301 what run fine enough with Win10 yet it is slow as molasses on CentOS8. What gives? And yes, it has both on SSD, not HDD.

Kelteseth 2 years ago |

Sounds like a hardware issue. My Windows 11 boots up in a few seconds, no freezes whatsoever.

vintagedave 2 years ago |

I found Windows 10 rapidly gets slow, the slowest being opening the Start menu and right-clicking taskbar buttons. Possibly the menus are a new implementation: all the new menus etc in Win10 and 11 seem to open slowly or repaint slowly under Parallels.

Windows 11 so far feels slightly faster in terms of responsiveness and UI. However my typical performance benchmark is to run a build of the software stack I work on, which takes 1.5 hours (good machine) to 3 hours (slow or low-end VM.) On the same VM, upgraded from Win10 to Win11, this build slowed from about 2:45 to closer to 3 hours. Minor over such a long timeframe, but it does show the OS is definitely not faster.

accrual 2 years ago | |

For the Windows 10 start menu you may benefit from disabling it's "online" component. On my system it makes opening the start menu and searching for items nearly instant:

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer]
    "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions"=dword:00000001

While you're there, you can also reduce menu delay:

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
    "MenuShowDelay"="20"

Windows 10 really benefits from tuning. I periodically run WDP and O&O ShutUp10++ to turn off various telemetry things and my system is super snappy (870 EVO, 4th Gen i7, 32GB, 1080Ti).

_xerces_ 2 years ago |

After some update (Dell XPS) either from Microsoft or perhaps Dell, I noticed that my CPU was thermal throttling despite being only around 50C. I was using the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility to diagnose processor state. Digging in some more with the Throttle Stop app, for some reason my system was activating BD PROCHOT and throttling the CPU down to 0.8 GHz.

A quick search shows that this can be a bad sensor on the motherboard or something to do with the power supply being identified as non Dell (incorrectly in my case).

AussieCoder 2 years ago |

4 year old Lenovo laptop here, 16GB RAM and SSD. Bootup from cold is around 5-seconds, everything is pretty snappy even with lots of browser tabs open and VSCode running. Never had the start menu lag other people have reported. Definitely faster than it was when Windows 10 was installed.

Have you checked for viruses? Last time I saw a machine that slow booting up, even with a spinning disk, it was riddled with viruses.

readyplayernull 2 years ago |

When I try to copy 400k files from an external HDD to the internal SSD, Windows 11 gives up after a few minutes and the paste button stops working at all. But it perfectly loads all the news on killer moms and rapists in widgets, that's OS development progress!

linhns 2 years ago |

I’m on a HDD here and still working fine. A tad slow bootup but can run Chrome and my WSL heavy dev setup simultaneously. You may want to turn off unnecessary startup programs and other little things, help more than you think.

HackOfAllTrades 2 years ago |

The HDD may be having to retry reads on weak/bad sectors. Run Steve Gibson's SpinRight on it. It spots sectors that are having problems but not yet totally failed, and tells the controller to swap them out for spares (which is what the controller would do when they completely failed.)

It also works on SSDs, and yes, SSDs have the same problem because the drive controllers were not written from scratch.

(No affiliation here. It's just a tool I use because it works.)

simonblack 2 years ago |

I do my best to stay on "Peak Windows" - Win 7

(on the rare occasion that I have to run Windows.)