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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
pretty weird, i have a few moderately high-end pc's and cheap laptops and they all have the same issues. Maybe me disabling a bunch of telemetry stuff screws up the caching.