At my last job I was responsible for 70 windows 11 machines. At my current job it’s 20. These are i7/i9 spec with 64+GB memory and NVMe drives. No endpoint management software, just Intune for device registration.

They all have _very significant _ performance issues out of the box, with very long app startups, and very confusing slowdowns. I am 99% sure it’s windows defender doing an absolute crap ton of work on every single file open, and ignoring file and folder exclusions.

The best demonstration of the delay is typing Calc in the Win+R Run dialog. There's a difference between instant and "way faster than Word".

On Windows 7, you could hit enter and immediately start typing numbers and it would work. I have never worked on a Windows 10 or 11 machine where it launches instantly.

I get a similar lag when launching Notepad. Not a huge disruption to the day, but annoying to see on a simple utility that used to be better.

Just give her a little of the ole "works on my machine."