Comment by user34283
6 hours ago
The start menu seems to respond instantly for me.
That's on a 7950X3D with 64 GB RAM and a Samsung 990 Pro SSD. Maybe it performs worse on slower hardware.
I have 14 TB of SSDs connected, so it's not like there is no content on my PC.
Notably I don't have any HDDs connected, maybe that plays a role here.
The few win11 I've touched were all on NVMe drives, but I'm pretty sure they're fast enough for a start menu. I mean, your gear should not be needed to get a responsive start menu.
I'm curious, did you clean up what's by default in the start menu? Stuff like "recommended", "candy crush", and the likes? On the win11 I tested, those parts loaded slower than the rest, I wonder if the start menu has a timeout of "load then open".
Had I switched to win11 I'd have slapped Classic Shell on it, as I did on win10. It's a reimplementation of the win7 start menu with windows-version-appropriate design, but with win7 reactivity (opens literally the next frame, in no small parts thanks to the absence of animation).
After checking the responsiveness of the start menu earlier, I uninstalled or unpinned the useless stuff in Pinned.
I don't think it made a difference, it was already lag free before.
It's annoying they put Office Copilot and Instagram there, but it uninstalled with just two clicks per item, taking a minute or so to get rid of everything.