> Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close.
I have a hard time believing this. I'm pretty sensitive to performance losses and I haven't noticed any difference between those. It wouldn't make sense either, given they should both host the same shell icon views. Are you sure the difference you're seeing is in explorer.exe? As opposed to something else, like a new shell extension or a new filesystem filter driver on Windows 11?
It is certainly perceptibly slow. Carried out a test on my 12 year old PC running Win-10 vs a new HP Win11 laptop of my friend which he bought in a hurry before price increases. Opened a directory of several thousand files with nested folders - much slower at navigation. Much slower at opening right-click menus. Much slower at pretty much everything.
M$ has now introduced web-latency into the desktop along with their adoption of web-tech into the OS. You gotta get used to staring at that spinning blue circle, counting the many precious moments of your life draining away.
You could at least disable Active Desktop to dethrottle your PC. Meanwhile, my work W11 PC has a second+ delay for explorer right click and there's nothing I can do about it.
You can actually restore the old right-click menu on W11 with some regedit.
Not ideal in any way, and a setting would have been a much better way to toggle this, but it is an option.
I've found that ( at least for me ) that was caused by some entries doing some checks before showing up. Getting a context menu editor and removing some of them can help.
Doesn't matter, it's a shit user experience and Microsoft's fault for putting the onus on the user to fiddle around at that level, rather than putting a hard, very low limit on how long shell extensions can hold up the context menu before they're banned from it.
Oh, I'm not trying to defend Microsoft in any way. Everything they make has been going downhill faster and faster.
Just suggesting a possible way to work around it.
> As opposed to something else, like a new shell extension or a new filesystem filter driver on Windows 11?
Ultimately, what difference does it make? The file explorer in Windows 10 is much faster than the one in Windows 11, and it's very noticeable. Turn on the old context menus, and try right clicking a file. Instant in Windows 10, visible delay in Windows 11.
I measured once. It uses about 50% more resources and offers less feautures (or at least hides existing feautures). You may not have noticed if you had resources to spare.
It does offer some new features for businesses. Nothing useful for the consumer, and nothing to justify the massive performance loss
The Windows computer I have to use at work takes over ten seconds to open the calculator. It literally is faster to type the calculation I want into a search engine and get the results back over the network.
The new calculator even manages to screw up basic input. The old calculator accepted both commas and periods as decimal separator inputs. It just worked no matter what I typed in. The new calculator has some sort of "clever" localization where my inputs change depending on the language of the operating system. My language uses commas so of course it only accepts those. Infuriating. Hope whoever coded this is enjoying their promotion.
Off-topic, but do you know Mozilla Firefox has a builtin calculator and unit conversion in the URL bar? For my personal use I rather use python and GNU units, but I guess for most users that live in the browser instead of the terminal, this could become their default calculator.
browser.urlbar.suggest.calculator = true
I don't know if you need to restore the urlbar first, before that works.
One of the first projects I made while learning to code was a calculator.
It wasn't very sophisticated. But it was fast and it handled commas and periods. It wasn't localized, but it could be.
Sad to think that me having a month of coding experience made a better product than MSFT, yet whoever coded the calculator is probably making ten times what I am right now.
Yeah, I think that is a common first task when learning to program. Learning about strings: write a first-grade-math expression calculator. Learning Java: make a GUI calculator. Now convert between prefix, infix and postfix notation. This is all even before you learn about classes or files.
The new calculator isn't just slow to open, it seems to have actual input lag too. God I miss the old calculator.
To me it's not sad, it's infuriating. This corporation is worth a trillion dollars. Why can't they do their jobs? I'm sure the old calculator could be maintained and improved without screwing it up beyond belief. Send us some fat stacks and we'll do it.
Its AI and not humans that make up that trillion dollars and its AI enshloppification that created the new calculator. You are not AI - no fat stack for you.
With numbers >1000 they are of course displayed with thousands separators as 1,000 (text) now like you would see in financial reports, how attractive. Big numbers have a few commas too. No longer displayed as unseparated numerical constants, like you know, computers have always used.
And if you copy the figure from the calculator display, by right-clicking for the context menu or CTRL-C, you get the whole separated text with commas included to paste into where you need it.
So the receiving textbox you pasted to now needs to have the commas manually edited out before you can go forward, unlike any other Windows calculator.
I guess somebody forgot that people might want it to be at least as useful as it was since the 1990's.
You can still paste plain numeric text in without any commas, it just doesn't copy back out in the same usable format like it always did before.
You can't make this up.
A calculator is supposed to be the perfect example of a no-brainer :\
Edit: If you do the math it must have been more than one person who forgot, you have to think, is it even possible for one person alone to be responsible for quality declines like we have seen on their own? If so who would that be?
Wow that's annoying. Just reproduced the issue on my work computer. It's real. It even localizes the commas into periods too which is amazing because it has the potential to be parsed as a floating point number!
Just for the record, I just timed how long it took for the calculator to open. Eleven seconds. That's how long it took for it to display a window on the screen. A useless blue filled window that did nothing. It took a total of 17 seconds for it to show the calculator controls and be usable. This isn't a loaded machine, it's a freshly booted Windows system that's been at rest literally doing nothing for over five minutes. Notepad opened and was usable in less than one second.
The old notepad would still open instantly so that can't be it. The updated machines with the new notepad are just as infuriating.
Reminds me of the shitty gamer laptop manufacturer apps that would take over a minute to display a glorified rectangle on the screen. All this to configure keyboard LEDs. I reverse engineered that garbage and made a Linux version that works instantly, proving their incompetence.
All I know is it's an infuriating experience that I basically have to speedrun through almost every single day before I can actually get work done. My Linux laptop must be over a decade old by now and it just doesn't have this problem. The Windows 98 computer I had as a child didn't have this problem.
Whatever it is that Microsoft is doing they should probably stop. A goddamn calculator application shouldn't require a high performance workstation to even launch. It worked fine before, now it takes ages and can't even handle input properly. That's stupid and there's really no excuse for it.
With Windows 11, all the stuff going on in the background and so much new excess disk I/O just dwarfs that of Windows 10 on the same hardware.
And that was orders of magnitude more than W98.
Your SSDs are getting hammered like never before.
The first time you open the new, sluggish replacements for old standbys they take way more time to load, but then if you don't turn off the PC completely they are already in memory lots of times so they pop up faster in subsequent times, and with simple things like Calculator the actual calculation is not any slower than it was in 1998.
At least as long as your PC hardware is 20X as fast :\
Its not faster bereft of context, its just bloated. If you have enough resource to throw at it, its roughly the same. Theres some specific things that can themselves be slower, the Windows 11 Start Menu has had a lot of words written about its new implementation.
That _is_ slower. The fact that it's possible to throw enough resources at it that both "look" the same speed, doesn't change the fact that one of them is 10x slower.
I dont know what to tell you. I have endless user complaints at i5 16GB RAM, and none at i5 32GB RAM. Not to mention that I run 32 myself and its mostly fine. I can open menus.
There are a ton of posts and bug reports about the Windows 11 File Explorer being slow. Personally, after a few minutes of use, changing directories can take on the order of 20-30 seconds!
The slowdown appears to be due to XAML Islands, which allow legacy code to use modern MS UI stuff.
I have a hard time believing this. I'm pretty sensitive to performance losses and I haven't noticed any difference between those. It wouldn't make sense either, given they should both host the same shell icon views. Are you sure the difference you're seeing is in explorer.exe? As opposed to something else, like a new shell extension or a new filesystem filter driver on Windows 11?