Funnily it probably runs Windows better than the typical corporate spyware burdened x86 laptop.
That was until I realized how many reports are coming from people talking about their work laptops loaded with endpoint management and security software. Some of those endpoint control solutions are so heavy that the laptop feels like you've traveled back in time 15 years and you're using a mechanical hard drive.
Microsoft also puts a lot of crap into a default install that you may want to disable. Windows 11 with some judicious policy editor settings isn't so awful.
Not nine different/only somewhat overlapping pieces of software from companies that were competitors. Nine equivalent products. I guess defender made ten.
It was a US government owned/issued computer. It had 9 fully overlapping/redundant endpoint security products running. Opening websites took ages. Using specialized apps like IDEs was unlikely to fully or consistently work. As I understand it, this situation is not unusual in government/heavily regulated workstation environments elsewhere.
Except they were unusably slow. Literally.
Log in when class starts, you may get control after 10+ minutes. Opening a web browser was a mistake you may not live to regret.
The network there was not fast. The various security stuff slowed every computer down a lot.
I suspect they were already older and maybe underspec. Probably had 4200 RPM disks or something.
But the combination meant they were 100% worthless.
Some of this is not _just_ a corporate problem. Why would Winzip have an auto run application and tray application in the first place? Every single app seems to think they need one, and it's a classical tragedy of the commons. Perhaps on a virgin Windows install, your app with autorun and a tray icon will be more responsive. But when 20 other apps pull that same trick, no one wins.
This is actually one of the reasons I'm not excited at the idea of Linux defeating Windows. If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.
They do already, my work laptop runs the corporate spin of Ubuntu, complete with Crowdstrike, which goes absolutely crazy and chews all the CPU whenever I do a Yocto build.
If your Explorer context menu is taking more than a split second to load, there's something wrong with your hardware.
It's not the recommended way to hook into the context menu. They have had declarative options for a long time which do not cause issues like this.
The new menu is faster, it takes about .5 to 1 second to appear. Pretty great compared to 10 seconds for the old style menu. Still a very noticeable lag for a simple task on a top-shelf Windows laptop.
To be fair the delays get better when you repeatedly open the context menu. It seems to get everything cached and then it loads in ~0.5 second. But it loses this speed when you don't open the menu for a while.
During the wait the entire desktop background went black along with the icons then it came back. I was actually trying to get to a setting to set the background to a fixed colour instead of an image in the hope of speeding the machine up.
From a UX experience there was zero indication that it was trying to do anything during this time.
At the same time, as someone with a well maintained Windows gaming rig, I don't like spending time in the OS these days. Something about transparently doing stuff that puts money in their pocket while inconveniencing me gives me the ick.
They are more incentivized by that than the few lost sales from people who know better to look for low crud machines.
And on more expensive machines they’d just be leaving money on the table. So they still often ship bundled crud.
Similar to spyware on TVs. Margins are razor thin. They’re going to make them up somewhere.
I use a corporate Windows VDI at work, so the experience is understandably subpar there, but it is still horrible on high.end hardware. Took me half a day just to herd it through update after update, while avoiding linking it to a Microsoft account despite its protests.
It's literally used to run only Steam and Firefox, and it still sucks compared to the ease of install/management of Linux. Ubuntu LTS took me about an hour to set up dual boot, apply updates, install Steam, and every other software and tool I use daily.
Why is Windows 11 still so clunky in 2026? It doesn't feel like the flagship product that many bright minds have improved for three decades. Why are hobbyists and small companies outperforming Microsoft's OS management?
The LTSC IoT releases are easy to find (wink-wink) and don't have 80% of the annoyances, including constant "feature upgrades" - still not Linux, but better than consumer Windows.
First experience of Windows 11, trying to download a file through firefox caused my 18 core 10980xe to have the entire UI freeze for the full time the download was going.
Reverted back to windows 10 immediately and the problem went away.
Windows 11 is full of spyware from the Mothership
Like, the UI shows my hovers and interactions live but clicking things just takes time to do the corresponding result.
I think that Apple has gotten so used to having fast storage in their machines that the newer OSes basically don’t work on spinning rust.
If a Mac is running that slowly, there's probably a hardware issue.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17011372
This was the latest UTM in the App Store, so native Hypervisor.Framework access for arm64 Windows acceleration.
My home laptop is even faster.
Also it isn't 2-3x faster, stop with the made up nonsense please. Just checked and my 3 year old AMD laptop is on par with the NEO geekbench score I found online (slower in single core but faster in multi core), not 2-3x slower.
A Neo will win a race with a similar speed Windows computer full of bundled crap and security slop.
But it would work the other way around too.
The nice thing about Macs is even if you see a lot of what Apple puts on the computers as useless trash (“Why the hell do I need iBooks?”) it’s not stuff running in the background interfering with everything you do the way bad PC security software bundled on cheap Windows PCs or forced by corporate often does.
I can tell you my last work Mac slowed down noticeably (though not too bad, luckily) the day they decided to put the corporate security crud on it.
The newer security crud we use now seems much better behaved though.