[kyboren]

I've been pretty much exclusively Linux-based for over a decade now, but I used every version of Windows from 3.11 to Windows 7, so I still have some muscle memory from the good ol' days.

Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.

I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.

[netsharc]

What does happen? I'm using Windows 10 Enterprise (is that GitHub repo to activate any license still around?) , with policy to disable Internet search from the start menu... so your story makes me wonder what the astonishment is.

[rstuart4133]

I had a similar experience to the OP. After a new version of Windows I tried to run something, or maybe it was just pressing the Start button, and I waited, mouth open, wondering what in $DIETY's name was happening before it responded. The pause was completely alien to a Linux user, who is used to the Window manager unconditionally responding instantly. It would be alien to users of older versions of Windows too.

I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that.

I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.

[agumonkey]

I'm betting a very large loading time.

[ipdashc]

Bit of a clickbaity way of phrasing it, but I'm also curious what the result was? From googling it I don't see any stories about recent changes to the calculator app, other than a few features like graphing.

[kyboren]

I'm sorry, I wasn't intentionally trying to write clickbait, I was just agreeing with the parent and did not consider how it would come off to other parties.

What happens is the calculator window pops up ~immediately, but the entire contents of the window are a stupid logo--for at least 5 full seconds--until the UI elements actually load and you can actually use the calculator to calculate things.

The most basic thing our PCs do is they calculate. The Intel 4004 was designed... for a calculator. calc.exe, that erstwhile snappy, lightweight native Win32 application is now apparently some Electron abomination with a footprint the size of Windows 98 and a launch time to match.

[ipdashc]

No worries! Sorry, I phrased that rudely / like an accusation.

That makes sense though. Yeah, it is really depressing. I guess they just don't prioritize start time at all. The hilarious part is, like... Blender on my computer starts up almost instantly! Versus a calculator...

[Rohansi]

I just tried it on regular Windows 11 Pro and it just opened the calculator.

[novaleaf]

I bet the friend just pressed the Windows key, and typing "Calc" and quickly pressing enter caused Bing to search for calc instead. Common failure because window's start-menu search/load/discovery is a total mess.

[Rohansi]

Even in this case it opens the calculator. Web search results are further down.

[novaleaf]

if you are searching for something for the first time (or after caching invalidates), it seems like it prioritizes search sources that have already completed.

on my computer, that means web-search almost always completes first. So most of the time if I type in something "new" and don't wait, it'll bring up Bing.

Sometimes it looks like "downloads folder" file search completes before Installed app search completes, because on one occasion I typed in an app's name and it launched the INSTALLER for the app.

once all the searchs resolve it behaves "as expected". I am very surprised if you don't have the same symptoms I'm describing. Why is your computer behaving different from every Win11 install I ever interact with?

[Rohansi]

I just tried a search for "downloads" and the first result was "Downloads folder privacy settings". I never search for that so it wasn't cached. I even pasted in the query to give it less time to search before pressing enter.

I don't think I've changed any settings for search. Everything is still enabled. There's over 250,000 items in the search index so I haven't removed indexed locations. My computer is pretty much a high-end gaming PC using last generation CPU and GPU. But really I've never seen this behavior anywhere - including my very basic laptop. Maybe I could see this happening on computers that are still using a HDD but I haven't tested that.