Former Microsoft dev says Windows Start menu's performance is "comically bad," even with monster PC

[toooooot]

It is about the same for an average user.

 

[backfrombreak]

Windows 10 will probably be my last MicroSoft OS. Zorin OS for the laptop and a MB-A for on the go. For gaming I will try and hold it out with Windows 10 as long as possible and then call it a day.

 

[McRuff]

prediction for Windows 12: is going to be good, it just works, back to basics.

I doubt that. Windows 12 is going all out on the newest hotness. AI.
It will be like Clippy on steroids.

 

[Mark Fuller]

That Start menu in w11 is 100% depending on Internet speed and latecy. With a good Internet line it never happened to me. Only exception is AD Domain joined machines, but that depends on the ammount of GPO/scripts received from AD. Workgroup with multiple users has about the same issue.

I think that he just a a bad experience with one machine. I have never had any start menu problems with the 4 machines I have owned and others that I have used. W11 has about the same performance that previous other versions have had by my experience.

 

[someusernam]

Bloat isn't even necessary for what that guy was experiencing. Just this week I had an issue with windows update getting stuck while installing something. It caused similar, though not as bad, system lag that persisted through multiple reboots. I had to boot in to safe mode and manually clear the update queue to fix it.

 

[ZedRM]

Search performance? Maybe. App/Game/Program performances? No way. I recently benchmarked 7 vs 10 vs 11 and 7 was the best(no surprise), 10 and 11 were nearly dead even depending on the App/Game. Whoever this guy is seems to be blowing things out of proportion. Kinda sad..

 

[ddferrari]

Welp, I will use Win 10 until the last day of support, then "upgrade" to 11.

Is what it is, or go with Linux.

 

[scavengerspc]

Search performance? Maybe. App/Game/Program performances? No way. I recently benchmarked 7 vs 10 vs 11 and 7 was the best(no surprise), 10 and 11 were nearly dead even depending on the App/Game. Whoever this guy is seems to be blowing things out of proportion. Kinda sad..

Happens all the time.
A dozen computers have a problem, and it takes very little time before it is passed off as common.

 

[Fuzzy Dunalap]

"This machine has a $1600 Core i9 CPU and 128 GB of RAM"

This got me thinking. It's not even a good brag. Just a "Gedankenexperiment":

1. $1600 for a CPU would be too expensive. There is no $1600 i9 so I guess he means total cost of cpu + ram

2. Hopefully the 1600 USD figure does not include board, ssd and other parts as that would be a tiny amount for a whole rig - this would be a budget system (still possible with 128GB DDR 4 RAM on an older motherboard like e.g. Z690 - but this would render his argument invalid ("monster system", "using a beast of a PC")

3. So let's assume he meant $1600 for the CPU + RAM

4. Let's further assume i9 14900KS (the fastest i9), that's $750 out of budget

5. That leaves $850 for the ram. That means he grossly overpaid to get 4 sticks of high performance DDR5.

6. Why overpaid, you may ask? Because he will then find out that there are some issues with (any) 4 sticks of DDR5. I'm speaking from my experience with XMP. You will most likely not be able to run four sticks of DDR5 beyond 5600 at best. And this is miles better than what you get with AMD CPUs (4 sticks there will most likely run stable at 3600). This is the current state of 4 stick memory management. So anybody that builds a couple of rigs a year or just researches 10 minutes before buying knows that one should never run 4 sticks of DDR5 unless the capacity is that badly needed - which he maybe does. Still he could buy 2x2x32 vanilla 5600 DDR5 sticks for the same experience.

7. ERGO: This may be a "beast of a PC" but for most tasks (where the amount of RAM is not fully needed) it's presumably slower (at least concerning RAM) then most other modern CPUs with two sticks of DDR5.

That's the 1st spot where the brag fails to deliver.

8. All that said: When opening the start menu and perceiving the kind of lag shown in the video it's surely not connected to hardware, not to the cpu and surely not to the ram unless you run a grossly old system with 4gb of DDR3. The speed of internet connection will most likely determine the performance in the menu. So bragging with your high end PC (that is still not well put together in terms of amout of money spent AND will be slower in memory speed then most generic XMP dual stick rigs) will get you nowhere - at best.

So that's the 2nd place where the brag fails.

And don't get me started on the nooblike mouse movement and the staged code window in the background. So a monster pc by a monster die hard user and where does windows 11 fail to deliver? In the start menu! Didn't see that coming, that ruins the whole OS for any productivity work. Pathetic.

9. Still, it's a good clickbait article. I read it and had my fun.
Also, another thing, Techspot. The short sentence "Facepalm." is such a good start for any text. Let's do that more often, will ya? It helps with the attention. And I bet there are thousands of other professional Tweets on X out there. Such great content for any tech enthusiasts! Personally, I can't wait for more articles like that to be published. So keep on with the quality articles, Techspot

10. I'm all out. What do you think?

This. This is what makes us different and I love this for it.

Dont change anything.

 

[takaozo]

I think that he just a a bad experience with one machine. I have never had any start menu problems with the 4 machines I have owned and others that I have used. W11 has about the same performance that previous other versions have had by my experience.

Maybe you never used a GPO poluted corporate device. Also Cloud Proxy like Forcepoint or ZIA can help with the bad experience.

 

[yukka]

Nothing wrong with mine. 32GB and 5800x3D. But was fine with my 3600. So. User/skill issue then

 

[Nobina]

I hate when people are like "I spent $XXXX for my PC, it should be faster!!!!" Maybe just spend twice as much, see if it improves.

I do agree that Windows search is still horrible after all these years. I don't get what I'm searching for most of the time. It just shows me obscure files and stuff. I find things manually or use Everything.

Windows still suffers from slowing down over time. No amount of disk clean-up helps, you need to reinstall Windows like once a year for it to work the best.

 

[WhiteLeaff]

I still see no reason to leave the stability of W10. I'll stay as long as I can.

 

[yukka]

I still see no reason to leave the stability of W10. I'll stay as long as I can.

This is a perfectly valid reason to stay on windows 10. I looked forward to the direct storage stuff for gaming which was windows 11 only - the promise of shared memory akin to the consoles cutting out the cpu as the middleman slowing down the shunting of memory from ram to vram but nope. Nothing has used it so far of note if at all.

The OS itself does work fine on my system but the entire premise of search from the start menu has always been a bit ****. When I rdp to a desktop I’m managing and type the name of an application in, if I am presented with a load of web links etc, I’m never 100% sure if search just hasn’t completed indexing or if the application is excluded for some odd reason. So it’s off to “add/remove programs” to see if it’s installed. It’s not ideal.

Nothing wrong with windows 10. Aside from the impending end of life for support etc. Whenever that is. It used to be that the windows releases were tick tock. Good. Bad.

Win 95. Good
Win 98. Bad
Win 98 SE. Good
Win ME. Spectacularly bad
Win 2000/XP. Good
Vista. Bad
Windows 7. Good.
Windows 8. Oof bad
Windows 8.1. Erm a bit better
Windows 10. Good.
Windows 11. Hmmm Ups and downs but it’s alright.
Windows 12. Impending AI integration. Good or bad? Should be good right? Right?

 

[mrSister]

Yes, Windows menu became terrible after Win7. That's why we have OpenShell: so we can make Windows menu usable again.

 

[milkom2021]

It's literally flying on 4th generation Celeron after adding an SSD + 8 Gigs of DDR3 and some heavy duty tweaking and cutting down on unwanted junk running constantly in the background without my consent hampering my already meager resources

 

[milkom2021]

Delete

 

[milkom2021]

It's literally flying on 4th generation Celeron after adding an SSD + 8 Gigs of DDR3 and some heavy duty tweaking and cutting down on unwanted junk running constantly in the background without my consent hampering my already meager resources

I would even argue that it's faster and more pleasant to use than Win 10 with a same amount of customization

 

[bexwhitt]

I've used Startisback (StartAllBack in windows 11) since windows 8 and that uses the still availably search from Windows 7. I could not for the life of me do without it.

 

[ZedRM]

Nothing wrong with windows 10.

That's your opinion.

Win 95. Good
Win 98. Bad
Win 98 SE. Good
Win ME. Spectacularly bad
Win 2000/XP. Good
Vista. Bad
Windows 7. Good.
Windows 8. Oof bad
Windows 8.1. Erm a bit better
Windows 10. Good.
Windows 11. Hmmm Ups and downs but it’s alright.
Windows 12. Impending AI integration. Good or bad? Should be good right? Right?

Allow me to fix this list for you.

Win 3x. Good for it's time
Win 95. Game changing and decent
Win 98. Better
Win 98SE. Better still
Win ME. Great
Win 2k. Good
Win XP. Excellent
VistaRTM. Bad
Vista SP1. Reasonable
Vista SP2. Good
Windows 7. GOAT version of Windows
Windows 8. Garbage
Windows 8.1. Recycled garbage
Windows 10. Refined recycled garbage
Windows 11. Much better than Windows 10
Windows 12. Non-existant as of yet

There you go.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

stealing or paying an insane amount for enterprise isn't worth being able to set the "configure telemetry" group policy setting to "security" instead of "minimal". Just delete the service(s) related to telemetry. Things can't be collected if the service they rely on are completely dead.

Stealing?

 

[yukka]

That's your opinion.


Allow me to fix this list for you.

Win 3x. Good for it's time
Win 95. Game changing and decent
Win 98. Better
Win 98SE. Better still
Win ME. Great
Win 2k. Good
Win XP. Excellent
VistaRTM. Bad
Vista SP1. Reasonable
Vista SP2. Good
Windows 7. GOAT version of Windows
Windows 8. Garbage
Windows 8.1. Recycled garbage
Windows 10. Refined recycled garbage
Windows 11. Much better than Windows 10
Windows 12. Non-existant as of yet

There you go.

Hahaha you said ME was good. Seriously it wasn’t called “many errors” edition for nothing.

 

[scavengerspc]

Hahaha you said ME was good. Seriously it wasn’t called “many errors” edition for nothing.

It worked well for a lot of people. Including me on my 32 office PC's. Well except for system restore.
And file protection drove me crazy.
And it broke a lot of DOS games (yes brother, DOS, and I still play many today on a DOS PC) but
my productivity software really did run better.
But I did get a deal when introduced. Every copy was $40.
Although, updates could be a nightmare.
Now that I think about it, it broke printers. Like almost every new update or driver for about a year.

Oh screw it, I did use it for 2 years because later updates really helped.

 

[Athlonite]

my fiber internet connection is rock-solid and I also have similar Start issues, especially with search. I had to use a registry hack to disable web results

the Start menu is one of the most fundamental UI elements in the Windows OS. there's really no justification for degrading its performance due to an internet connection

And what is it that you need to search for on the start menu

 

[yukka]

It worked well for a lot of people. Including me on my 32 office PC's. Well except for system restore.
And file protection drove me crazy.
And it broke a lot of DOS games (yes brother, DOS, and I still play many today on a DOS PC) but
my productivity software really did run better.
But I did get a deal when introduced. Every copy was $40.
Although, updates could be a nightmare.
Now that I think about it, it broke printers. Like almost every new update or driver for about a year.

Oh screw it, I did use it for 2 years because later updates really helped.

The only good thing about windows ME was that it introduced me to windows 2000. Which was unfortunate because you don’t wish a version of windows to be rubbish. I lost count of the number of times I had to completely reinstall it.