Hacker News Reader

Comment by ncpa-cpl | Hacker News Reader

And Calc! It takes about 5 seconds to load. And search is so unreliable mixing web and local results.

I've been pretty much exclusively Linux-based for over a decade now, but I used every version of Windows from 3.11 to Windows 7, so I still have some muscle memory from the good ol' days.

Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.

I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.

What does happen? I'm using Windows 10 Enterprise (is that GitHub repo to activate any license still around?) , with policy to disable Internet search from the start menu... so your story makes me wonder what the astonishment is.

I'm betting a very large loading time.

I had a similar experience to the OP. After a new version of Windows I tried to run something, or maybe it was just pressing the Start button, and I waited, mouth open, wondering what in $DIETY's name was happening before it responded. The pause was completely alien to a Linux user, who is used to the Window manager unconditionally responding instantly. It would be alien to users of older versions of Windows too.

I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that.

I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.

Bit of a clickbaity way of phrasing it, but I'm also curious what the result was? From googling it I don't see any stories about recent changes to the calculator app, other than a few features like graphing.

I just tried it on regular Windows 11 Pro and it just opened the calculator.

I bet the friend just pressed the Windows key, and typing "Calc" and quickly pressing enter caused Bing to search for calc instead. Common failure because window's start-menu search/load/discovery is a total mess.

Even in this case it opens the calculator. Web search results are further down.

if you are searching for something for the first time (or after caching invalidates), it seems like it prioritizes search sources that have already completed.

on my computer, that means web-search almost always completes first. So most of the time if I type in something "new" and don't wait, it'll bring up Bing.

Sometimes it looks like "downloads folder" file search completes before Installed app search completes, because on one occasion I typed in an app's name and it launched the INSTALLER for the app.

once all the searchs resolve it behaves "as expected". I am very surprised if you don't have the same symptoms I'm describing. Why is your computer behaving different from every Win11 install I ever interact with?

I just tried a search for "downloads" and the first result was "Downloads folder privacy settings". I never search for that so it wasn't cached. I even pasted in the query to give it less time to search before pressing enter.

I don't think I've changed any settings for search. Everything is still enabled. There's over 250,000 items in the search index so I haven't removed indexed locations. My computer is pretty much a high-end gaming PC using last generation CPU and GPU. But really I've never seen this behavior anywhere - including my very basic laptop. Maybe I could see this happening on computers that are still using a HDD but I haven't tested that.

pretty weird, i have a few moderately high-end pc's and cheap laptops and they all have the same issues. Maybe me disabling a bunch of telemetry stuff screws up the caching.

I don't think caching makes the difference for me. I never search for "downloads" so it shouldn't be cached. Calculator probably was cached.

I'm sorry, I wasn't intentionally trying to write clickbait, I was just agreeing with the parent and did not consider how it would come off to other parties.

What happens is the calculator window pops up ~immediately, but the entire contents of the window are a stupid logo--for at least 5 full seconds--until the UI elements actually load and you can actually use the calculator to calculate things.

The most basic thing our PCs do is they calculate. The Intel 4004 was designed... for a calculator. calc.exe, that erstwhile snappy, lightweight native Win32 application is now apparently some Electron abomination with a footprint the size of Windows 98 and a launch time to match.

No worries! Sorry, I phrased that rudely / like an accusation.

That makes sense though. Yeah, it is really depressing. I guess they just don't prioritize start time at all. The hilarious part is, like... Blender on my computer starts up almost instantly! Versus a calculator...

If it loads at all. The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it.

The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.

I love when it takes 3 minutes to open "Add or Remove Programs" because the Start menu search decides that typing a, ad, add, r, re, remove, unin, install, etc. definitely means "let me Bing that for you" instead of opening the one thing I clearly want.

It obviously knows what I'm trying to do (Bing search recommendation is for "Add or Remove Programs"), yet refuses to surface the actual shortcut to that settings page (or "app", or whatever Microsoft calls it this week). Even better: some days it pops up immediately after typing "Add" and other days I'm wrestling with it like I'm training a stubborn animal, clicking the result in the hope that the OS will "learn" that yes, this is what I want when I type "Add".

Most of the time I just give up and dig through the Settings menu like it's 1999.

I still use a copy of Calc.EXE from Windows 2000 that I just move from machine to machine. It stopped being useful after that. That old one is nice. Hex mode. Starts quickly.

If I could get regular security updates for Windows 2000 I might still be using it- peak Windows

I wonder if it's ancient enough that the exploits floating online are too modern for it...

Hah, I guess the Internet really is like a sewer, you have to have good protective equipment to wade in it...

This reasoning is actually why I ran Windows XP 64 bit edition for very very long. Most exploits found that it was XP and tried to do stuff and failed on the 64 bit kernel they did not expect.

I'm not going to say that's a good idea, but I've long had an idea along similar lines that a source-only distribution that generates a bespoke calling convention, stack frame layout, syscall number mapping, etc. for each individual machine at install time would do a lot to mitigate RCE threats.

Gentoo-by-obscurity?

That's exactly how I think of it. Gentoo plus ABI obfuscation.

I'm sure there are issues (particularly around binary blob drivers) but they seem surmountable given enough effort...

I have a derive.exe from 1996 that I still use. TI's calculator, as an incredibly fast windows app that's like 20% of wolframalpha.

And to think on all "modern" OSes you can't even do that. Neither Android nor IOS let you do this in any way shape or form. Even with portable webapps it doesn't work, as webapps go offline. And microsoft clearly wants to create this situation too (last brute force attempt was windows home)

https://dmitry.gr/89

you can also "add to homescreen" on iOS/android and it acts like a native app & works offline. symbolic math - computer algebra system, integration/differentiation, finance app in rom, 3d graphs.

(emu is not my work, i only packaged it for PWA and host it for myself to use, but you are welcome to as well)

Derive is more sophisticated. TI-89/92/Nspire is close though.

Derive doesn’t run on my iPhone sadly

Sure (and thanks for the link, do you have a TI-82 as well?) but it won't "last". You'll take the site offline, sooner or later and I can't just store an exe locally and use it in 20 years. I'll lose the ability to install it on phones.

That is my personal site, I do not expect to take it down, since that is where I post my projects. But also, you can just save it from there entirely, and serve from your own site -- there is no server-side part to it.

no 82. I only liked the ti-89

Best part is that on a fresh install without internet you are not able to use it...well all of the modern replacement apps.

Yeah first time Windows Clock wouldn’t restore because the net wasn’t ready I was shocked

It was rewritten into WinUI, hence why.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com