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Comment by infinityplus1 | Hacker News Reader

I hope they improve the start menu search and prevent cases when right clicking a file can freeze the PC frequently.

Right-click freeze has literally never happened to me. Check that you don't have misbehaving shell extensions: the most common culprit is a program that adds its own item to the right-click menu but doesn't play well with others and winds up hanging when the shell asks it what it wants to do.

This seems like issues that just shouldn't be allowed to happen. An unresponsive extension, a network drive not answering etc should never need to block the UI - yet it always did in Windows. They really really need to make all such things async and simply show the context menus without the extensions, or show a spinner when explorer wants to show a slow network location.

That the message pump of the explorer windows stop because a server in another country is down must be a design that is extremely hard to change in windows explorer - because they have surely seen this problem.

>They really really need to make all such things async and simply show the context menus without the extensions

but then you have another problem: if the system load is high (eg. hard drive is busy), then context menu items would randomly disappear. That's arguably worse than before, because it happens randomly.

>or show a spinner

you mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_wait_cursor

I think they meant show a spinner in place of the blocking entry.

I second the shell extension thing. This is the tool to use: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

I just windows-q and type the name of the application I want and it always works. Don’t even know what the start menu looks like.

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