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by runjake 1087 days ago
8700K with NVMe SSD and 32 GB RAM. My Windows 11 machine boots in seconds and is quite speedy. The only exception being the absolutely sluggish Start Menu.

I do uninstall anything that doesn't need to be installed and I also police startup items with the SysInternals tools[1].

If those systems are using a spinning HDD, you're doomed. W11 is designed for SSD systems. I doubt MSFT cares about HDD installs.

And with PCs and Windows, you're always running into oddball hardware and driver issues unless you take great care in picking components with good track records (as I did).

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

2 comments

> If those systems are using a spinning HDD, you're doomed. W11 is designed for SSD systems.

Does this mean anything except "Microsoft has decided not to bother being efficient with disc accesses"?

I'm not sure what it means other than "MSFT isn't really paying attention to making sure W11 works well on HDD boot drives".

Does it mean extreme inefficiency with disk access, or does it mean heavy read-aheads plus aggressive caching? Who knows, but if you Google for "Windows 11 SSD optimized" you'll get pages and pages of results about SSD bugs and issues that have plagued large swath of users. Eg. KB5007262

Yes

In games, for example, games that are designed around HDDs might pack 3 copies of the same tree so that I can be loaded at the same time as other assets in the scene with limited seek time and decompression time. SSDs, having no seek time, don’t need elements to be in adjacent locations.

Granted that is for video games, but to develop for hardware is always at the expense of every other hardware

With ssd and nvme drives being available for cheap, it's probably not worth devoting engineering resources to improve it. They still cater heavily to OEMs and many of those have stopped specing spinning disks for the boot drive.
Home machine is a Ryzen 7 5000 series on 11 pro and it's decently fast. work machine is a Ryzen 7 4000 series and it's dog slow, especially network shares or network applications and I haven't a clue why. 64gb ram in my home box and 32gb in my work one. both on nvme disks. the beta 1 of 11 was crazy fast compared to windows 10 but somewhere they made it dog slow before releasing it
Work computer probably has various agents etc running on it.

One of my favorites was a script pushed by GPO that was flagged by Crowdstrike, which caused some other stupid process to fail and freeze things.

We are rolling out Crowdstrike at work and it made my disk I/O plummet. Our team is still working out whether we have a misconfiguration or not, but some adhoc before/after perfmon tests indicate my NVMe SSD throughput is now exactly 10% of what it was before installing Crowdstrike.