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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.

I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is fast. There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files.

If I have to browse network CIFS shares with a lot of files, Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile. I've switched over just to Windows a time or two just to deal with high file count shares.

> If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else.

I put Windows 11 on an old low powered laptop for a family member. FYI you can easily circumvent some of the Windows 11 requirements and put it on old hardware.

It's fast. It doesn't have any of the problems you're describing.

I do wonder how many of the "Windows 11 is painfully slow" comments are coming from people with corporate laptops with extremely laggy endpoint management overhead.

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>> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all

> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco. It’s not a good look when expensive laptops render their darn File Explorer slowly.

Also re endpoint management, corporate Macs also have endpoint management and still provide better experience vs corporate Windows PCs.

Microsoft isn’t a mute participant in the corporate device market. Their recommendations and best practices carry enormous weight. Windows division can work with security vendors and customers to improve UX. But they maybe haven’t done enough. Maybe because Windows is an increasingly small fraction of Microsoft’s bottom line? Who knows.

But today you’ll see increasing numbers of Macs in even super-Windows-heavy workplaces, especially in digital/cyber/AI/leadership roles. That’s not a one-company quirk.

A few years ago my laptop died while I was travelling. I was going to back to back tech conferences - and not having a computer would be a disaster. So, I went to best buy and picked up a brand new $500 HP laptop. It was running windows 11 or 10 or something - whatever was current at the time. And a recent enough intel CPU and 4gb of ram. It was way faster than my desktop machine from 10 years earlier. I figured it'd be plenty fast enough.

Nope. The experience was just rubbish. Out of the box, the machine was incredibly slow. It would get warm to the touch while sitting idle, and the battery would die in about 45 minutes. I quickly figured out there was some HP audio process running all the time to do noise cancellation on input from the microphone. For some reason it was active all the time, and it needed about 30% of a core to do its thing. So I got rid of that. But windows explorer was still slow... of course, it was some HP antivirus rootkit program preinstalled doing who knows what. I spent hours clearing crap off that machine. Anything with HP in the name, to start. It probably would have been faster to reinstall windows completely, but I didn't want to do that from a hotel room over wifi.

By the time I was done, it was ... ok. The machine still lagged when you opened programs for some reason. But the battery life went up to 3-4 hours, and it was fast enough I could get work done.

I think about that laptop a lot. Imagine all the people who buy those laptops. What % will spend the hours it took to clear the crapware off them? I can easily imagine my mother buying a laptop like that and just assuming that's how fast computers are.

I think this might be the #1 benefit for regular people to buying a mac. When you buy a computer from apple, there's no 3rd party who installed a bunch of crap on the computer before you got your hands on it. The only people who install crap software are Apple. And as much as I hate apple's greedy background processes, they tend to pause while you're running on battery.

> You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco.

Never underestimate how much bloatware is running on that costco laptop. Open up task manager. You'll see.

I recently reset a Dell laptop for a friend. Dual core, 8gb RAM, HDD (not SSD), can run Windows 11, so I ran the built-in recovery feature and it took almost 2 days to just get Windows 10 updated.

When I saw it was still absolutely crap and unusable, I considered putting Linux on it, but didn't want to end up as support, so...

Long story short, a clean install of Windws 11 was functional. Updates took forever and a day. The computer itself takes about 6-8 minutes to become usable on boot, but once everything is cached into RAM, it's usable.

More usable initially than my work issued Dell (when I actually worked at Dell) that within a week I cloned and installed an SSD on, probably breaking all kinds of terminable policies. So,story time:

I did some silly things in those 4 years there to bypass bureaucracy: Cloned my entire laptop into a VM to have a secondary method of accessing work stuff. Created an entire test lab using unauthorized disk cloning into VMs for remote access. Disabled auto updates by management software so PCs wouldn't be kicked off the network. Probably set off all kinds of alarms. Would occasionally reenable to keep VM authorized.

The kicker is that I was recognized company-wide for creating something useful out of basically nothing but my time and curiosity. Got a bonus for it, on top of it.

To your point, my 96GB DDR5 24-core desktop-replacement "gaming" laptop, when used regularly, with a decent amount of startup apps, still struggles to be responsive on boot. There is a lot of bloat I don't want to get rid of because they provide updates and performance features. At startup, I'm usually at 14 GB RAM used, which is nuts. Not sure how to fix this trend.

> I'm usually at 14 GB RAM used, which is nuts. Not sure how to fix this trend.

I know this isn't an option for many, but I think swapping to linux might be the right first step. Linux would be fast as lightning on a computer like that.

All other issues aside, RAM is meant to be used, it makes things snappier. What you don't want is programs holding on to your RAM forever.

After decades I’m back where I started putting BSD on everything. I can’t deal with MS Apple anymore.

> Microsoft isn’t a mute participant in the corporate device market.

This is 100% on point! For the past three years all of my in-office work was done on a ChromeBox running ChromeOS, I work in a contact center, but my specific project does not focus on customers but other stuff.

At first I thought they did this because Chrome-anything is usually cheap, but the devices they give us are all around or above $1000, so now I think we use them only because the client wants us to use them, since on some other projects they do use Windows, but with this client we have A LOT of project and A LOT of work, so it's not like we're the exception.

I think with the advent of SteamOS, ChromeOS and Android merging, we could legit see a serious move away from Windows, even in corporate worlds, but who knows, my vision could just be clouded, I'm not a genius or some smart person like a bunch of people here on HN, I work for basically a minimum salary (Portugal), live in a room, that the company that hires me, rents to me, and read HN mostly for entertainment.

I don't share his experience entirely, by even on my desktop built for gaming I can notice the right click menu is delayed in comparison to Windows 10. Even more heinous, before you remove it, the AI button would lazy load causing you to sometimes hit it by accident when you mean to hit something else. God forbid I'm not 80 years old and click my menus with any sort of speed.

Also, if I'm going to have to adjust anything to use an operating system, I might as well use Linux. The only value prop for me to use Windows was gaming, but at this point I'm just completely ripping the band-aid off because it doesn't seem like Microsoft is going in a better direction.

> Even more heinous, before you remove it, the AI button would lazy load causing you to sometimes hit it by accident when you mean to hit something else.

Yup, definitely intended

I had a comment a few days ago about my freshly installing, configuring, and A/B testing W10 and W11 on a not-too-old HP laptop, using both HDD and NVMe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358

That was then.

Now last night my partner comes back from the dumpster with a Toshiba laptop that's in great shape, its 20 full years old, came with Windows Vista, had been upgraded to Windows 7, has 1GB of memory, 120GB SATA2 HDD (slower than modern SATA), dual-core 1.73GHz CPU.

Seems to work perfectly and With W7 it's snappier than the 2019 HP booted to old or new Windows 10 or Windows 11 even more. All comparisons at baseline without the internet.

When you try W11 on a HDD it really emphasizes the difference from W10 on the same hardware.

But when this kind of W7 thing just falls in your lap, it really hits you how much better performance could have been available by now from Windows if they really tried.

Or didn't drop the ball every time they were at bat, depending on the general manager ;)

> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I disagree. I've got windows defender as the only endpoint software on both my daily driver machines, and I see the same issues.

In 2019, I was working for a place that installed Carbon Black on my desktop and it went from fast to unusable overnight. I've since changed jobs, and I've seen a decay in the baseline of the OS over the last 6 years.

> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I know you're getting hammered on this, but this is also an indicting statement. If your brand-new OS requires you to have endpoint management that locks it down so much that it affects how long it takes to open files, that's on the OS, not the endpoint management.

Okay, it's on both... endpoint management as a rule is horribly written software, which is shocking knowing how intrusive it is into the system. But, if the OS has so many vulnerabilities that you're required to have endpoint management, that's not a good look on the OS.

My current and former $JOB both required endpoint management on Macs (and a limited amount for folks who used Linux), so it's not a blanket statement. But the impact of the endpoint software on Mac and Linux were still much lower. That is, once I figured out that a certain (redundant) enterprise firewall was crashing my work Mac anytime I plugged in a USB network adapter.

>>> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

>>> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.

> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

This can also be due to OneDrive / Sharepoint / Teams etc. Which I suspect supports your point.

A hard lesson I learned was that cloning a git repository into a directory managed by OneDrive is a recipe for interesting behavior.

Windows seemingly hate many tiny files, even in sharded directories, many ecosystems suffered because of this; node_modules, .git, the examples are many.

Yeah, I remember trying to delete a fully loaded Python installation that had found its way onto a OneDrive-managed folder. After a chat with IT, I learned that OneDrive can only delete X number of files at once. We agreed that the most practical solution was for me to spend an hour deleting files by hand, and choose another drive next time. Fortunately I don't really depend on OneDrive as a backup, since GitHub does that job well enough.

The other thing is that both Git and OneDrive are in some sense fiddling with your file system at once.

Even without OneDrive, ever tried to delete a directory with millions of small files? Even sharded, takes like 30 minutes, on fast SSDs...

> The other thing is that both Git and OneDrive are in some sense fiddling with your file system at once.

Why would .git be fiddling with your file system? It writes into .git, and changes files, but shouldn't do more than that.

To be fair on this default windows drive formatting is not well suited to many small files in general.

Unrealengine taking 40 extra gigs because of underutilization on small files is one rampant case.

Large python project disk ballooning is another.

That it's file copy move is also dramatically bad at handling such scenarios compounds this further as can be seen by shuffling the same lot with teracopy vs explorer and windows default behavior irrespective of drive formatting. Can easily be hours of difference.

> To be fair on this default windows drive formatting is not well suited to many small files in general

How is that fairer? :P They set the defaults, they could change it, yet they don't. Seems entirely fair to point out shitty defaults as faults of their OS, regardless of how that came to be.

If I were an assuming feller I'd "almost guarantee" that you haven't been blessed/cursed with anything besides Windows 11.

A lot of my beef, personally, can be chalked up to Windows' aggressively long animation times. It's serviceable with them turned off. But even with animations turned off on an aggressively debloated consumer PC there is either a notable delay or a perception thereof in context menus and file explorer that did not exist with Windows 10, or on my Linux machines.

Speaking of animations, it’s shocking to me how bad they are.

I turned on hiding the taskbar the other day. I don’t think they’ve changed it since Windows 95. I have a modern gaming laptop, and the animation is purely linear, no acceleration. It feels so weirdly unnatural. Even worse, it’s not smoothly animated! I have a 120Hz monitor but it seems to be animated at 5fps.

Nobody on the Windows team seems to give a single shit at all.

win11 look and feel felt a rushed metoo kneejerk reflex

From the comment you're replying to: "Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile"

So I wouldn't assume they've only used Windows. FWIW I also primarily use Windows 11 currently, but have also used other OS'es. I've experienced frustrations with all of them. Just because it's fast for you doesn't mean it's fast for everyone, and vice-versa. I could certainly buy that more people are having problems with 11 than they did with 10, though it hasn't been my personal experience. Just saying we shouldn't assume our own experiences are universal.

The irony of that first line might be lost along the wire because I explicitly called it an assumption where the gp did not.

"I have a Windows 11 workstation ... There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files."

You have the same Windows updates as everyone else and it will be painful. Also you should be keeping those CAD and games up to date and that will be very painful. Updates often happen at unfortunate times.

The Win 11 start menu has managed to be worse than the Win 10 effort and jumped to the middle of the task bar because ... reasons. Search on it is ever so slow. For some reason Win server 2025 has decided that I want to use a welsh keyboard (I'm english and tend to en_GB) when I RDP to one. Cymraeg (soz if I got "welsh" wrong) is alphabetically first in the en_GB list of keyboard mappings and I didn't even know there is a welsh keyboard! I suppose they must have some accents and diacritics not found in english. Its all just a bit weird that a bug like that surfaces after well over two decades of me using RDP from a Linux box to a Windows server.

You wag your finger at endpoint management in the same way that most software vendors used to do at AV back in the 90s and 00s (and 10s and 20s!) Its nothing new and basically bollocks! Modern AV is very good at being mostly asynchronous these days and besides, we have unimaginably faster machines these days and very fast CPU, gobs of RAM and SSDs. Copy a multi GB file and yes AV will take a while but at least you might be saved from nasties.

There is a good reason that corp devices have to run things like inventory agents, log shippers and the rest too - its about security. You doing your own IT security is fine and I'm sure you'll be fine.

You can get Win 11 to work on an old machine for now but as you say, you have to circumvent things. When you do that, I think you are storing up issues for later. Perhaps you will be lucky but perhaps not. My dad will soon be rocking Linux instead of blowing a grand+ on a new PC. He will get a secure booting Ubuntu based effort that looks quite similar to Win 11 that is fully supported by the vendor ... and me. I managed to "port" my wife some years ago and she is a much tougher proposition than my dad!

> Also you should be keeping those CAD and games up to date

Not OP, but why? I have a perpetual license and a 12-year-old copy of a corpo CAD package and it works fine. I see no reason to compulsively update something that's feature-complete and functional.

Updates break shit or make shit worse for me all the time. See: Windows 11, macOS Tahoe, and KDE next year when they drop my working X11 session and expect me to use busted-ass Wayland that's missing functionality I use daily.

Why do I need updates? "Security?" I'm not exactly a nation-state hacking target. I don't run random pirated software. I'm firewalled to hell, and behind CGNAT on Starlink. I'll keep my browser up to date, fine, but I'm still running -esr.

"that's feature-complete and functional."

I get where you are coming from. That was my stance roughly 20 years ago too. I also note that you are quite clearly not daft!

You and I have different "jobs". I worry about thousands of systems on many sites, one of which is my home. I'm an IT consultant and am the managing director of my company. I think you are an engineer, perhaps retired ("12-year-old copy of a corpo CAD package and it works fine")

If Solidworks, Catia, AutoCAD or whatever (?) works then fine. You might like to firewall off whichever vendor's website/security systems might want to stop a 12 year old copy of a corpo CAD from working if it isn't licensed. It probably is because all of the above generally need a license service.

I worry about many 1000s of PCs and I think updates, patches etc are a good idea. If you are an engineer, then you will have to do your own "deploy, fix issues" cycle. IT is just the same.

How about a right click on the desktop? I have a very fast computer with no bloatware on, yet it takes half a second for the desktop context menu to appear. When I do this repeatedly. The first time takes 1 second or more.

Compare with a right click menu in a browser which is instant.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop > MenuShowDelay set to 100 (ms) close regedit, reboot.

Lol . You made my day. I was doing that kind of Registry mangling 25 years ago. Brought me good memories, its been a while.

I'm so happy I haven't had to use a Windows machine in more than 10 years.

For me, MacBookPro for coding, Linux Mint for home desktop and Steam + Xbox Live online for gaming. We live in excellent times

But why?

Good god.

Why is this set to 400ms?

Any reason it's not 0?

> Why is this set to 400ms?

I can't test it on my current computer, but does the setting affect menus that are triggered by hovering over something?

If so, then 400ms makes more sense, and the real bug is that menus summoned by an explicit click should be exempt from the delay.

The reason for a hover-delay is that it allows someone to flick their mouse to their real destination without triggering a "trap" of content which pops up on the way to obscure their goals.

"Due to my elite programming skills, I figured out how to shave THIRTY SECONDS from my app's startup time. Here's some optimization tips:

1. Remove the sleep(30) statement you added a month ago and forgot about"""

-Lars Doucet

I have an old Win7 workstation, I did so many mods to it at the build time that now I don’t even know how it works.

> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

Not necessarily. Every little or not so little utility deems it necessary to install a context menu item on Windows. Corporate or not. Just like every little or not so little utility deems it necessary to send you notifications on mobile.

On Windows the solution is Total Commander, on mobile the solution is to turn all notifications off :)

The Windows 11-way is to just plaster another, worse, context menu over the working existing one. Now every right click was actually two clicks. You can disable it, but what the hell...

Random fact: I'm involved in a Windows project and there's a CreateWindowEx that can be either instant or take like 7 seconds on the win 11 machines.

When it's slow it takes 3 seconds on win 10.

The endpoint stuff kills laptop performance. I left my previous job and they let me keep my X1 Nano (1st gen; 16GB memory) which was performing abysmally towards the end.

Deleted all the partitions and did a 100% clean install (multi boot Win11/Fedora), and it's suddenly what feels like 2-4x as fast. Made sure to disable some of the Copilot and Internet content in search menu rubbish etc with a few registry tweaks (yay for having admin access to get rid of the bloat/junk).

Fedora/Wayland/Plasma still feels faster though - I just had some issues getting my video to work properly across all of Teams and Zoom.

Back in the times of Windows 95 and Windows XP, reinstalling the OS at least once per year made Windows noticeably faster. Then it degraded month by month. And yet I still remember how incredibly faster the same laptop was with Ubuntu 8.04. Faster than a newly installed Windows.

>> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.

>I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

It seems to be a common complaint online, dating back to the launch of 11. I see some of the blame being put on extensions but what changed in the extensions between 10 and 11 to cause this?

I know on my work computer I was experiencing this plus I almost always have to click show more and wait for that lag to finish.

I was able to edit the registry to show all at the cost of 1 lag...so I guess a step forward?

Corporate, “security software” is almost always to blame for Windows being slow on new machines. There is no reason for Windows 11 to be that slow. On my personal machine Windows runs great. My last Windows work laptop was, despite being brand new, unusable. 100 % CPU and memory usage with not a single application open was the norm.

I have similar suspicions. I have a decent but not spectacular company Thinkpad. When I first got it, it was super-fast; it didn’t matter that sleep very quickly turned into an automatic shutdown, as it booted in mere seconds.

Gradually, over the past 9 or so months, it’s just become progressively worse and worse in a range of ways. It might be Windows updates, but the magnitude makes me suspect it’s layer upon layer of corporate management and security nonsense.

Could also be a temperature throttling problem caused by dust or a stuck fan. My old work Laptop suffered from that, and recovered after I cleaned it.

Are you sure it's the corporate tracker? Maybe it's the copilot tracker, or maybe the Recall video recording? Maybe it's the Windows anti-virus, or even the corporate anti-virus. What about the Advertisement stuff and the web search?

It's hard to tell what makes a non-stock Windows install slow.

> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I had the same issue with a loan machine from a client, super responsive onsite, but once I connected through a VPN from an external network, all the basic functionality in the file manager was brought to a halt. Even something as simple as right click on a folder to show a context menu would take several seconds.

The files were all local (also with Onedrive sync disabled) so I am almost positive it was whatever they were using for endpoint protection (Can't recall 100% but probably something from CrowdStrike).

Endpoint software is a blight. My company's M2 pro should have flown through the things i subject it to. But simple things like linting on many files is slower than my 8y old pc on a sata-SSD.

Often the software itself is fine but it makes it possible for the IT department to configure performance killing behaviours. SHA hash every file you open, execute specific actions if the a opened file or process matches specific heuristics, log everything.

Well the reason they install it is often not to enable the features you bought the license for, which is, on-the-fly scanning. It pushes all IO through a hose in case of windows defender.

I guessed the same thing. Probably the fault of employer-mandated software gumming things up. But since the only reason to run Windows is because my employer mandates it, almost all of my Windows experiences involve enterprise-managed lag in the extreme.

It may not exactly be Microsoft's fault, but it piles nicely onto a pre-disposition against them and all pro-MS IT departments who can't seem to tie their own shoelaces. It takes a maturity that is sometimes lacking in moments of frustration not to blame all the world's problems on MS.

Either you haven't been when context menus / explorer was blazingly fast or something odd happens there, since I can confirm that on brand new PC (128GB RAM, 9950X3D, 5090) with vanilla Windows 11 it still lags and annoys a lot after some linux distro.

on my corporate laptop as well as my own private surface laptop as well as my gaming rig does file explorer lag doing pretty much anything and the context menu can sometimes take like 10 seconds to open. this is a pretty wide spread issue you can see people mention this everywhere

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