Windows 11 start menu search is slowest shit i've ever seen
I can't stand when I type app name (e.g paint or vs) and it appears but click needs like 5-10 sec to be registered
what the hell
It worked perfectly fine on Win10 on the same hardware (my OS has been updated recently either automatically or by company).
I'd call Windows 11 pretty OK once you tweak one or two things in register settings, maybe the lack of right click menu on task bar sucks (e.g show desktop), but search being slow is ridiculous, it should be blazingly fast
As a life-long Windows user, the most frustrating part is how broken search is, and always has been, but… in new and unique ways in every version I’ve ever used!
It’s astonishing: they’re clearly working on it, making material changes, but only ever sideways. I’ve never observed an improvement.
To those people that say “version x has worked”: I doubt it. Maybe after a month it successfully indexed the 100KB of text in your start menu. Maybe you just got used to what search terms work, and forgot about it. But I assure you that it has never “just worked”.
I still have a habit of searching for “management” in the start menu because if I type “SQL”, it won’t ever find “SQL Management Studio”.
>Maybe after a month it successfully indexed the 100KB of text in your start menu
Yet another beef of mine. The Search Indexer runs frequently, chews up a lot of CPU, and always engages my fans into turbo mode. I know that 99% of my files at any given moment are identical to the last month. Windows, you have all the hooks to know the last time a file was modified. Stop re-scanning everything forever.
It's been baffling to me how such a high % of the world is using this OS for work but the search function is fundamentally not functioning.
I have the same set of files on two machines and its actually faster for me to turn to the mac, search on there to find where the file will be on my windows machine than to watch the windows search churn away for minutes only to not find it.
Not to mention if it does find it there is this obtuse dance you have to do to get it to actually open the containing folder in a way thats navigable because the search results are all fake shortcut links or something that burn the path hierarchy. Rolls my eyes every time I bump into that.
Don't worry, I expect Microsoft will replace their search with gpt in the future. "Hey Windows, find me that work presentation I worked on a while back".
And 3rd-party apps like Everything are lightning fast, so it's certainly possible to have fast Windows search. I'm genuinely buffaloed as to why MSFT hasn't fixed this obvious flaw in the last 20 years.
VoidTools Everything FTW. Naming things using /common words is a wee pet peeve, but the software is pretty great. Just a few random things are either mouse-only, or a sequence of focus-shifting keystrokes.
Yup, even on a slow machine with a mechanical drive you could blind type the first 3 letters of a program name and slam the enter key. The search filtering was so quick it would have completed the operation in time for your enter key-press to be registered.
Try the same thing on 10 or 11 and you're probably going to end up with a new edge window running a Bing search.
Heck, it's bad even on reasonably fast machines like my surface pro. I've recently found that if I "blind type" a search query at my normal (very fast) input speed, it actually enters the keypresses _before_ loading fully, blinks the correct app up for about 1 frame, then resets the input field to nothing!
Former MSFT employee here. Not every keystroke, but a surprising amount, yes. A startling amount. (Disclaimer: I was on Azure platform, so I can't speak directly to Windows.)
You can disable it (there are lots of articles all over) but the sheer scale of the problem makes these mitigations rather unreliable.
On the other side of the one-way mirror, there's this thing called Kusto which lets you sort of surf through someone's sessions, at least for the web apps. Someone brilliant in my unit hooked it up with emojis, which you could read in columns; it was very nearly like those columns of green figures in _the Matrix_, but, you know, with emojis. Just scan down from top to bottom; dude opens file... dude renames file... dude copies file... dude wanders away for 15 min... etc
Because EU regs, we can't see PII, but frankly if you named your folder 'Bob Bobberson's Bobfiles' whoever is on DRI is seeing your name. "Don't name your folder your name," we always said, to our customers. They always did anyway.
This was always uncomfortable but since the political breakdown has progressed, I've started to worry that these reams of data will either (a) be seen by some True Believer for one side or another or (b) quietly collected by the usual (legal) means, by a federal agency that is itself compromised.
This is in the context where there are literally states with bounty programmes for e.g. people seeking (or helping) women get abortions. How long is it until $10K sounds good enough to a disgruntled layoff-rattled rank-and-file? What happens if those programmes are expanded to include other things? What if you had a folder named, say, "Getting my wife TF out of TX?" What if you did five years ago? Think it through.
The worst part is I'm sure it's no different anywhere else, in 2023, at least so far as commercial apps go. Even some FOSS stuff like Audacity.
That's why I run OpenBSD and NixOS, and have even managed to wean myself off VSC.
I definitely did not enjoy seeing the sausage be made.
I can't stand when I type app name (e.g paint or vs) and it appears but click needs like 5-10 sec to be registered
what the hell
It worked perfectly fine on Win10 on the same hardware (my OS has been updated recently either automatically or by company).
I'd call Windows 11 pretty OK once you tweak one or two things in register settings, maybe the lack of right click menu on task bar sucks (e.g show desktop), but search being slow is ridiculous, it should be blazingly fast