> 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.
For a lifetime license incl updates forever that seems quite reasonable to me. It's a bit over a year of Netflix.
In fact, given that it includes perpetual priority support (within a business day!) I expect the author's gonna change that soon, once he gets one of those infinitely demanding customers and realizes what a terrible mistake he made (inf support for a one-time payment, oops!). So better bite while it's hot!
The €40 option for one year of updates is a lot more economical and is still a perpetual license for the software itself.
Imagine paying for a file browser. This is why windows will always win. They have the most docile userbase ever. They'd rather pay 250 bucks for a file picker than to change OS.
I wonder if a lot of Windows users are also BMW drivers. If they're willing to shrug off $250 a year to be able to copy files efficiently on their computers, they are likely also to applaud the wonders of $50 a month for heated seats.
£50 for a heated seat, perhaps, but you also get by far one of the best turbocharged inline-6 engines ever put in a 4-door saloon, the S58. Analogous to Windows NT, a well-engineered kernel.
My solution to the nag screen was that I never turned off my computer, just put it to sleep, so Total Commander was always running.
Interestingly, TC was one of the few software that I considered paying for, but in the end I didn't because they asked for too much information at the time. Not long later I switched to Linux, and I couldn't use TC there.
I've tried this a few times. Windows 10. Downloaded the 2MB file, double-clicked on it, and nothing happens. Same thing when I tried it a few months again. Put it in a command prompt and no output of an error.
I'm starting to worry I just launched something malicious.
The latter is normal on windows. Executables have a header flag which specifies they either use the terminal or not. If a terminal program is opened from outside a terminal, it opens a terminal window. If a nonterminal program is opened from a terminal, it instantly detaches.
The problem is on windows you're competing directly against the guys who own the operating system. So even when there is a gap for a better file manager the one that microsoft makes is so entrenched and microsoft can make sure they always win. It sucks.
hilariously, the last time I had a new windows machine and opened up edge to download firefox I got some sort of message about giving edge a proper try first.
I found chrome was putting itself into "eco mode" on my Lenovo (work) laptop all of a sudden. Meant that waking up took FOREVER, and accessing a web page (required as part of a daily login) took 15+ seconds to load when first logging in, as opposed to a few seconds, which caused our password app to timeout at times, etc. Who the heck comes up with these ideas? "Eco mode" by default? And no way to disable it easily? I had to add an obscure switch to the chrome startup to make it run normally again.
On newer laptops, and I’ve seen this specifically on thinkpads) if the power supply you are using is not the correct wattage, the system will throttle down significantly.
I started noticing this by looking at windows task manager and noticing the CPU would not scale above 0.8 GHz. Not sure if Chrome responds in the same way, but it’s worth looking into. Fix was easy, just get a proper wattage power supply (i went with oem)
A similar example: Microsoft's Windows Search function is so pathetic and slow, yet there's another little company who gives a blazing fast file search tool, that's available as (portable) freeware since 15+ years.
Everything Search uses the NTFS indexes to do blazing fast file or folder searches. It has a neat and clean interface, and no nagging ads (unlike.. cough, cough.. Windows 11). Everything Search is one of the first tools I install on any new Windows PC.
Amazing, perfect app! I use it frequently, and I love the response I get from customers or friends whom I turn onto it (or install it for).
I also encourage others to donate to this developer. The sad thing is casual users would not even think of donating as they assume this type of feature should be (properly) built into the OS; so I’ve made sure to donate on behalf of users I’ve turned on to Everything. Great app!
I was overjoyed when I saw that Microsoft had bought out the small Winternals team (Winternals Software LP, founded by Cogswell and Russinovich, who exposed the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy-protection DRM) that gave awesome freeware "power tools" to tweak and monitor MS-Windows. Microsoft renamed it as SysInternals, and Microsoft has since maintained it well and still kept it all free.
Everything Search is free, powerful and fast, and thankfully, unlike some other famous tools (CCleaner), it is not adware, spyware or malware. The only caveat, is that Everything Search's background indexing of drives requires administrative access, but user can run it without admin access, it's just that it would need to manually reindex (to add latest files/folders to its index database) on every run then.
For years, I have wished that Microsoft would acquire Voidtools (give them a good chunk of money for all the years of service they gave to the world in the form of this awesome freeware Everything Search), and integrated it into Microsoft Windows Search (to make it a rival to MacOS's Spotlight search) to make it blazing fast and finally useful.
(Remember, Microsoft acquired Skype and integrated its capabilities into MS Teams, which is available free for personal use, with some limitations (60mins session limit, 100 participants).)
It was VERY common in the spinning rust era to already open (office, etc) applications in the background. I think the launch operation only allocated window resources and finished the job; all the hit the disk work was already precached in memory while the OS was doing the slow computer starting up / logging into the network steps and the user was off getting a coffee or something.
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.