It's just ridiculous. Windows 11 currently has this bug where the file explorer just freezes all the time. Everyone is experiencing it at work. I cannot believe how a core product gets away with this.
Every time I've investigated an issue like this, it was something outside of explorer. Most of the time some kind of plugin that I didn't want (PDF readers, Tortoise SVN/Git, document preview handlers, you name it), mapped network drives not responding, or file system corruption that went by seemingly unnoticed.
At some point I started Autoruns and just disabled every DLL that didn't come from Microsoft and that I didn't strictly need. It sped up Windows immensely, and I went back enabling maybe one or two of those DLLs at a later point because it broke functionality.
I could've saved weeks of my life if Microsoft had just added a little popup that says "7zip.dll is adding 24% extra time to opening right click menus, disable it Y/N" every time a badly programmed plugin slowed down my shell.
A tale as old as time. It always seemed wild to me File Explorer is allowed to have so much synchronously driven activity. Like sure, display a loading symbol in the content area if I open a network share that's not already mounted (or whatever else it may wait on)... but don't lock the whole darn window so closing it becomes unresponsive!
Process Monitor is invaluable for investigating cases like that - at least one can look at what Windows is actually doing at that moment of freezing:
>Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon ...
It's usually because there's some non-local stuff on your sidebar that it's trying to load - either a pinned item or a recently opened / frequently opened thing that's on network storage.
It's stupid but Windows has choked on that situation for many years.
Since I'm not seeing issues like this I'm assuming these are computers on an active directory... I remember XP having a few fun issues like this when a GPO refreshed links to a file that didn't exist and froze for a moment trying to resolve them.
I havent experienced that one myself, but I have other problems with the win 11 explorer. Like how when using the keyboard to navigate the right click menu, you cant just navigate into a submenu, but have to navigatw up or down after navigating into it, then the other way, to select the topmost item. And thats one thing I encounter many times a day at work.
That can happen if you have a mapped network drive which isn't immediately responding or which is offline. If you hover over the drive in Explorer (even accidentally) it will immediately try to query the network location. This can cause massive delay.
It's really stark when you compare it to something like a linux desktop running KDE or Gnome. Both pretty full featured desktops that were built for the computers I used as a kid.
While there's been a bit of polish, the two simply sip hardware requirements. So much so that you can put them on things like a raspberry pi 3 and still get a decent experience.
It's really funny to me as well. All this effort put into low level performance seems like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. The operating system (and core business software such as Office) is overflowing with bloat that absolutely tanks the performance and responsiveness of the system. On a fresh boot I might as well go for a 15 minute coffee break lest I end up with multiple hung applications blocked on the UI thread.
It's so bad that Microsoft is actually going to start preloading Office on boot to speed up the application start times.
It was quite the shock to me recently when I had to use a Surface Laptop (the ARM one). Snapdragon X Elite & 32GB of RAM and took almost double the time to get to the desktop from a cold start compared to my M2 Air. Then even once everything was loaded, interacting with the system just did not feel responsive at all, the most egregious being file explorer and the right click menu.
And I have my own gripes with macOS feeling like it's slow due to the animations and me wanting to move faster than it can. Windows used to happily oblige, but now it's laggy.
Microsoft is too caught up in shoving Copilot everywhere to care though.
It's bad everywhere. Every time I've upgraded Ubuntu on my old laptop, performance gets worse and worse because more and more junk keeps getting added. Absolutely maddening.
thevillagechief|5 months ago
jeroenhd|5 months ago
At some point I started Autoruns and just disabled every DLL that didn't come from Microsoft and that I didn't strictly need. It sped up Windows immensely, and I went back enabling maybe one or two of those DLLs at a later point because it broke functionality.
I could've saved weeks of my life if Microsoft had just added a little popup that says "7zip.dll is adding 24% extra time to opening right click menus, disable it Y/N" every time a badly programmed plugin slowed down my shell.
zamadatix|5 months ago
r721|5 months ago
>Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon ...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...
rrrrrrrrrrrryan|5 months ago
It's stupid but Windows has choked on that situation for many years.
pixl97|5 months ago
toyg|5 months ago
Akronymus|5 months ago
jmull|5 months ago
Probably all you can do is keep poking your IT support and hope it goes up the line until someone finds or creates the fix/workaround.
wackget|5 months ago
ravenstine|5 months ago
Zambyte|5 months ago
cogman10|5 months ago
While there's been a bit of polish, the two simply sip hardware requirements. So much so that you can put them on things like a raspberry pi 3 and still get a decent experience.
chongli|5 months ago
thewebguyd|5 months ago
It was quite the shock to me recently when I had to use a Surface Laptop (the ARM one). Snapdragon X Elite & 32GB of RAM and took almost double the time to get to the desktop from a cold start compared to my M2 Air. Then even once everything was loaded, interacting with the system just did not feel responsive at all, the most egregious being file explorer and the right click menu.
And I have my own gripes with macOS feeling like it's slow due to the animations and me wanting to move faster than it can. Windows used to happily oblige, but now it's laggy.
Microsoft is too caught up in shoving Copilot everywhere to care though.
xenophonf|5 months ago
DobarDabar|5 months ago