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

You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco. It’s not a good look when expensive laptops render their darn File Explorer slowly.

Also re endpoint management, corporate Macs also have endpoint management and still provide better experience vs corporate Windows PCs.

Microsoft isn’t a mute participant in the corporate device market. Their recommendations and best practices carry enormous weight. Windows division can work with security vendors and customers to improve UX. But they maybe haven’t done enough. Maybe because Windows is an increasingly small fraction of Microsoft’s bottom line? Who knows.

But today you’ll see increasing numbers of Macs in even super-Windows-heavy workplaces, especially in digital/cyber/AI/leadership roles. That’s not a one-company quirk.

I don't share his experience entirely, by even on my desktop built for gaming I can notice the right click menu is delayed in comparison to Windows 10. Even more heinous, before you remove it, the AI button would lazy load causing you to sometimes hit it by accident when you mean to hit something else. God forbid I'm not 80 years old and click my menus with any sort of speed.

Also, if I'm going to have to adjust anything to use an operating system, I might as well use Linux. The only value prop for me to use Windows was gaming, but at this point I'm just completely ripping the band-aid off because it doesn't seem like Microsoft is going in a better direction.

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

I know you're getting hammered on this, but this is also an indicting statement. If your brand-new OS requires you to have endpoint management that locks it down so much that it affects how long it takes to open files, that's on the OS, not the endpoint management.

Okay, it's on both... endpoint management as a rule is horribly written software, which is shocking knowing how intrusive it is into the system. But, if the OS has so many vulnerabilities that you're required to have endpoint management, that's not a good look on the OS.

My current and former $JOB both required endpoint management on Macs (and a limited amount for folks who used Linux), so it's not a blanket statement. But the impact of the endpoint software on Mac and Linux were still much lower. That is, once I figured out that a certain (redundant) enterprise firewall was crashing my work Mac anytime I plugged in a USB network adapter.

I guessed the same thing. Probably the fault of employer-mandated software gumming things up. But since the only reason to run Windows is because my employer mandates it, almost all of my Windows experiences involve enterprise-managed lag in the extreme.

It may not exactly be Microsoft's fault, but it piles nicely onto a pre-disposition against them and all pro-MS IT departments who can't seem to tie their own shoelaces. It takes a maturity that is sometimes lacking in moments of frustration not to blame all the world's problems on MS.

>>> 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.

This can also be due to OneDrive / Sharepoint / Teams etc. Which I suspect supports your point.

A hard lesson I learned was that cloning a git repository into a directory managed by OneDrive is a recipe for interesting behavior.

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

I disagree. I've got windows defender as the only endpoint software on both my daily driver machines, and I see the same issues.

In 2019, I was working for a place that installed Carbon Black on my desktop and it went from fast to unusable overnight. I've since changed jobs, and I've seen a decay in the baseline of the OS over the last 6 years.

"I have a Windows 11 workstation ... There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files."

You have the same Windows updates as everyone else and it will be painful. Also you should be keeping those CAD and games up to date and that will be very painful. Updates often happen at unfortunate times.

The Win 11 start menu has managed to be worse than the Win 10 effort and jumped to the middle of the task bar because ... reasons. Search on it is ever so slow. For some reason Win server 2025 has decided that I want to use a welsh keyboard (I'm english and tend to en_GB) when I RDP to one. Cymraeg (soz if I got "welsh" wrong) is alphabetically first in the en_GB list of keyboard mappings and I didn't even know there is a welsh keyboard! I suppose they must have some accents and diacritics not found in english. Its all just a bit weird that a bug like that surfaces after well over two decades of me using RDP from a Linux box to a Windows server.

You wag your finger at endpoint management in the same way that most software vendors used to do at AV back in the 90s and 00s (and 10s and 20s!) Its nothing new and basically bollocks! Modern AV is very good at being mostly asynchronous these days and besides, we have unimaginably faster machines these days and very fast CPU, gobs of RAM and SSDs. Copy a multi GB file and yes AV will take a while but at least you might be saved from nasties.

There is a good reason that corp devices have to run things like inventory agents, log shippers and the rest too - its about security. You doing your own IT security is fine and I'm sure you'll be fine.

You can get Win 11 to work on an old machine for now but as you say, you have to circumvent things. When you do that, I think you are storing up issues for later. Perhaps you will be lucky but perhaps not. My dad will soon be rocking Linux instead of blowing a grand+ on a new PC. He will get a secure booting Ubuntu based effort that looks quite similar to Win 11 that is fully supported by the vendor ... and me. I managed to "port" my wife some years ago and she is a much tougher proposition than my dad!

If I were an assuming feller I'd "almost guarantee" that you haven't been blessed/cursed with anything besides Windows 11.

A lot of my beef, personally, can be chalked up to Windows' aggressively long animation times. It's serviceable with them turned off. But even with animations turned off on an aggressively debloated consumer PC there is either a notable delay or a perception thereof in context menus and file explorer that did not exist with Windows 10, or on my Linux machines.

The endpoint stuff kills laptop performance. I left my previous job and they let me keep my X1 Nano (1st gen; 16GB memory) which was performing abysmally towards the end.

Deleted all the partitions and did a 100% clean install (multi boot Win11/Fedora), and it's suddenly what feels like 2-4x as fast. Made sure to disable some of the Copilot and Internet content in search menu rubbish etc with a few registry tweaks (yay for having admin access to get rid of the bloat/junk).

Fedora/Wayland/Plasma still feels faster though - I just had some issues getting my video to work properly across all of Teams and Zoom.

I have similar suspicions. I have a decent but not spectacular company Thinkpad. When I first got it, it was super-fast; it didn’t matter that sleep very quickly turned into an automatic shutdown, as it booted in mere seconds.

Gradually, over the past 9 or so months, it’s just become progressively worse and worse in a range of ways. It might be Windows updates, but the magnitude makes me suspect it’s layer upon layer of corporate management and security nonsense.

How about a right click on the desktop? I have a very fast computer with no bloatware on, yet it takes half a second for the desktop context menu to appear. When I do this repeatedly. The first time takes 1 second or more.

Compare with a right click menu in a browser which is instant.