> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.

I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is fast. There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files.

If I have to browse network CIFS shares with a lot of files, Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile. I've switched over just to Windows a time or two just to deal with high file count shares.

> If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else.

I put Windows 11 on an old low powered laptop for a family member. FYI you can easily circumvent some of the Windows 11 requirements and put it on old hardware.

It's fast. It doesn't have any of the problems you're describing.

I do wonder how many of the "Windows 11 is painfully slow" comments are coming from people with corporate laptops with extremely laggy endpoint management overhead.

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience with explorer.

And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual Studio is on its splash screen.

And another that has written a debugger with the same performance.

And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust opening in just under 2 seconds.

Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance. Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable future.

More a reply to few fellow comments: I have few Win 11 hosts that I use. No management software other than just antivirus. 90% of them are super slow, on every hardware. The latest super-feature on one of them is empty Task Manager. It just doesn’t display a single process. Of course Process Explorer works, open faster and show all data without thinking how to display table with 500 rows for dozens of seconds.

Same experience here, but I'm not sure it's just MS fault; companies have a way of installing a bunch of stupid software on top of one another, that you can't get rid of without admin rights, that continuously do things that slow the system down.

(And, you can have a tabbed file browser on Win7. I still have a Win7 box at home that works perfectly well and that does have tabs in file explorer. I think it was an addon I installed a while ago; don't remember exactly, but it works perfectly.)

Similar story here.

Started a new job about a year and a half ago and got a powerful laptop with a really top of the line CPU and GPU, 64 GB of RAM (Now upgraded to 96GB, needed for my work, even with these specs compile times are longer than I'd like...), and it was a terrible experience, coming from someone who's used to Linux having used it for a bit (started in 2013 with Ubuntu with a dual boot. Moved all-in to Arch in 2016, distro-hopped or played with different desktop enviroments/wms after that (Recently switched to niri), but all of which are leagues ahead of Windows 11 IMO. Only occasionally ran Windows on a spare device or a VM on the rare occasion I needed to, eg for work / school.)

Tons of issues, slow in some operations, weird bugs (in the explorer like you, or with my Bluetooth headphones, or other issues), and even occasional blue screens! It's not just my setup too, my coworkers have similar issues. Plus, it just isn't a nice environment to use.

At first, I tried to set up a nicer environment (as much as IT would allow). I installed PowerToys for QOL improvements, GlazeWM to emulate a tiling window manager setup, I tried debloating as much as I can, I installed Wezterm for my terminal (Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an extremely basic terminal emulator to me...), oh-my-posh theming for my shell, and several other things.

But every convenience program I added just noticeably slowed down my laptop, to the point I just gave up some of the niceties and lived with it. Why is such basic functionality able to be run so smoothly on a much weaker device on Linux, but struggle on Windows on a much more powerful device? I can only think of one reason...

I vibe-coded my own apple system-6 style shell in rust and use that. If I don't like a feature, I change it. It is lightning quick, in it's (emulated) 1-bit glory. There's no requirement for you to use the built-in explore.exe to launch things, even for games. The graphics are decoupled from the shell so I use it for windows and linux.

If vibe coding your personal GUI utopia is too much, you can use something like Cairo - https://cairoshell.com/

Your first gripe kind of sounds like DLP software is installed on the system and it is scanning files you're "accessing".

iirc the cause of context menu delay was there is an invisible animation I think.

The system is animating the menu opening, except there's no animation. So it just waits for a while doing nothing then the menu pops open.

I'm definitely not defending Windows but when I ran Windows 10 Pro for 11 years straight, I had no problem with performance.

We're talking a 4 core i5-4460, with 16 GB of memory and an SSD running WSL 2, Docker Desktop, real work loads, video editing, etc..

It was very performant and never got in my way. I'd leave the computer on 24 / 7 and only the monitors turned off. It only got rebooted for forced Windows patches.

With that said, my hardware can't run 11 and even if I did patch around that, I'm choosing not to run 11 so Windows for me was over near the end of 2025.

I'm running Arch now on the same box and except for GPU memory leaks, it's quite snappy. CPU intensive tasks finish faster and disk I/O feels even faster than Windows. There's also unlimited flexibility to tweak things however I see fit. Gaming performance is substantially worse for the few games I play. No regrets, except for gaming.

> If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.

Try wsl --shutdown. Works for me when WSL hangs for no apparent reason.

I've also noticed that, in my case, these hangs are somehow tied to Docker for Windows. Couldn't figure what triggers them so far, though. I just restart DFW and kill WSL when that happens.

My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call, and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing piece of hardware.

It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better.

The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.

Honestly - I think it must be a laptop thing. I have a similar spec laptop [0] for work, and it's... borderline unusable. I can ignore the upsells, always online, etc but the OS is just fundamentally falling apart more and more every other release. If I unplug the power cable, it throttles itself to the point of being neutered, and if I try to put it to sleep it _very regularly_ will just stay awake and drain its own battery.

My work desktop on the other hand (i9, 64GB ram, 4080 GPU) is absolutely screaming and I have some of the same problems but they're nowhere near as bad.

I don't think I could genuinely buy another windows laptop.

[0] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/dell-xps-...

I have the same specs in my work machine.

Task manager takes 10 seconds to load the list of processes. Right-click on the desktop takes about 1.5-2 seconds to show the 'new' context menu. Start menu is actually fast to start drawing but has a stupid animation that takes about half a second to fully load.

I sort of understand how the anti-consumer 'features' (ads) get added to a piece of software. But I have no idea how they manage to continuously degrade the experience of existing parts of the system for seemingly no one's benefit.

Please try https://filepilot.tech/ Its like explorer but so much faster in every single way. I have it pinned on the taskbar, it launches quickly than a new explorer window.

Main one is no-multiline support atm. Which means that the icon view does not show full file name, list view etc are perfectly fine though.

Current problems I have with it are no native zip support, which means you must use 7-zip, winrar etc and set them as a defualt viewer for zips. Otherwise, double clicking zip opens the explorer.exe.

Had the same issue with slow file explorer in Windows 10. A couple of things helped a bit, such as disabling "Show recently used files" and "Show frequently used folders". I also cleaned up the Quick access list. For some reason if you have a network share there it makes browsing local dirs slower, go figure. It's still not instant but a lot faster than the 3+ second delay.

I tried OneCommander and they're super fast, so it's not something slowing down disk IO, it's purely File Explorer.

Now I'm still struggling with closing chrome tabs being super slow sometimes.

I'm using it on a work-issued ThinkPad with 8 gigs of RAM and an Intel i3. It's fucking horrible

Your experience is very far away from mine. I don't experience any of these issues on a standard 32gb office laptop, or my home gaming machine.

I have dual boot on decent laptop, doing nothing, on windows fan is always on, computing something? On Linux it is just silent

I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did some optimization - namely turning off some services.

AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things.

They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.

Maybe investigate the background apps that are running on your laptop?

By the way, I just opened a directory that I hadn't accessed in months. It contains 10945 log files, and Windows Explorer displayed them instantly.

I am also subjected to Windows at work and I hate it. WSL is an okay experience until it just crashes and stops working.

The only reason I was forced on Windows was because they couldn't find an edge management system for Linux

> There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.

Its non-deterministic, as if developed with LLMs....

Your work laptop might have an excessive amount of "security" software installed that causes it to lag far more than it would normally without such bloated software installed that runs in the background and slows down practically every process you do with the machine.

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

I've got bad news for you. Nautilus also lags when opening some directories.

KDE is bloated garbage too! Half of the OS didn't work. The only DE's that I haven't had poor experiences with are xfce, bspwm, i3/i3gaps, and xmonad. Note how 3 of these are tiling WMs.

I swear windows is just full of sleeps and it doesn't matter how faster your system is.

If it's Intel then it might not be fully down to Windows 11. The PC laptops are universally crap. I had a few latest ones, Ultra 9 and they are atrocious. Experience reminds me using a netbook in early 2010s.

I would refuse to work anywhere without a Mac. If x86 then it would have to be linux, as that would be passable (apart from fan noise).

[dead]

Corporate probably loaded up the laptop with work monitoring software, and some terrible AV software. Among other bloatware. A PC of your spec should run without noticeable delay, something else is going on there.

Having said that, Windows has made a lot of the basic functionality way to resource heavy.