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by rightbyte 1253 days ago
I use Win10 at work and the Calc app lags for like 10s when opening before I can type in it. I firmly remember it started to do that after some reboot update ...
3 comments

The new calc app has always been a travesty. Taking at least a full second or more to load, with an obnoxiously large interface. The original calculator opened instantly and had a completely functional ui. I get angry every time I need to launch calculator on a machine I have not configured with SpeedCrunch. Almost better to use Excel.
I open the full bloody GNU Octave instead. I just timed it.

Calculator: 13s Octave GUI: 5s

The worst thing is that the calculator pretends to be running after like 2s but is unresponsive.

> The worst thing is that the calculator pretends to be running after like 2s but is unresponsive.

I can't stand this and it happens in a lot of places. It seems like pure metric chasing. We made it load faster boss. Well, no you can't use it but it yet but you should have been more specific!

If I open word doc over the slow VPN Word forces itself to the foreground only to show me a file loading dialog.

I will gladly hate on the calculator redesign, but 13 seconds feels like there is some other underlying issue.
Ye, probably architectural problem that somehow surfaces on my work laptop.

I googled abit and there seems to be people that have problem with load time of these system UWP apps.

"I just tested out the calculator again. Took 7 seconds to be usable."

It's also worse for mixed keyboard and mouse operation [1], because some of the buttons (2nd, the trigonometry, functions and history submenus) now retain input focus after clicking on them, so pressing Enter operates that button again instead of completing your calculation.

[1] If you can't remember the shortcuts for some of the more obscure functions – never mind that they're also badly documented and you have to find the list of shortcuts by searching for them yourself on the web. I have a memory that way back – possibly not even in Windows 7, but only XP – the calculator included an offline help with all the keyboard shortcuts listed. Nowadays the Windows 10 calculator doesn't include any sort of help at all, not even a link to the online help.

> Almost better to use Excel.

Ouch! I hope you mean Excel 2010 or earlier; all the later ones are so slow to launch or open document that I tend to leave Excel and files (that I'll need to access quickly) open until something forces a reboot or until I bork Excel's state by QAing or triaging somebody's unfortunate VBA (sometimes even mine, too; shhh!). This remained true on a performant gaming computer while working from home. It was always a delight, remoting into somebody's machine that still had a functional Excel 2010 on it.

I always install tne old calculator: https://win7games.com/#calc
Ty. It is depressing to read that list actually. Windows felt so much more fresh with those innocent apps like Minesweeper and Paint.

"Microsoft has removed the classic calculator app starting in Windows 10 and replaced it with a new UWP app that receives updates from the Store."

Ah I see. Remote code execution. Maybe it was a Store update that broke it for me, not Windows update.

That site is an amazing resource, thank you. I was having trouble finding a solitaire for my grandfather's new laptop
See also https://winaero.com/ for general Windows UI tweaking.
I hate the slow right click menu too, why is there a forced delay?

I think visual design peaked a few years ago and now we are deliberately overcomplicating every piece of UI for no apparent reason.

My favourite scapegoat is the agile dev process.

It takes away freedom and agency for devs which makes small things also suck where mainly complex things needing multiple programmers did without agile.

Since agile is so process heavy.

I imagine there are no dev owner of calc.exe anymore at MS.

They ruined paint.exe too btw.