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[marko]

Elsewhere, both OT and out of frustration, I wrote this:

With the imminent EOL of Windows 10, I've recently moved to a new Windows 11 machine, and have to say, so far, everything about it has been like walking uphill through treacle. It's really not been a good experience. Why did they choose to remove the quick launch and custom toolbars? I've had to resort to an explorer.exe hack to get that back, and that's never a good thing!

I've had to merge a registry hack found on Windows support just to get the ability to mount an iso file. The whole sorry saga has made me quite grumpy

Am I alone in this experience?
I jumped now figuring that when Windows 10 EOL arrived in October, there would be a rush on the market, and parts could be hard to come by.
So far, all I can say is, "Jesus, what a right royal PIA Windows 11 is"

I use iMazing for working with my iPhone, and this has worked seamlessly for, literally, years... Now? I'm getting TPM errors for Bonjour, which, apparently, I need for my iPhone backups over WiFi. So far, it's just been one stumbling block after another, and yes, I am very grumpy about all of this.

Thankfully, breathe a huge sigh of relief, everything "MC" has carried on regardless. THANK YOU to the entire team at JRiver for that

-marko

[bob]

Elsewhere, both OT and out of frustration, I wrote this:Am I alone in this experience?
I jumped now figuring that when Windows 10 EOL arrived in October, there would be a rush on the market, and parts could be hard to come by.
So far, all I can say is, "Jesus, what a right royal PIA Windows 11 is"

I use iMazing for working with my iPhone, and this has worked seamlessly for, literally, years... Now? I'm getting TPM errors for Bonjour, which, apparently, I need for my iPhone backups over WiFi. So far, it's just been one stumbling block after another, and yes, I am very grumpy about all of this.

Thankfully, breathe a huge sigh of relief, everything "MC" has carried on regardless. THANK YOU to the entire team at JRiver for that

-marko

I was going to update one of my windows machines to 11. Maybe I'll wait a bit longer...

[marko]

Honestly bob, it's mental. This machine benches in MC 5000 points or more higher than the old Windows 10 system, that would be around nine years old now, but everything else around the system, especially launching installers, MC's included, is orders of magnitude slower than the old system. They're so slow, I think the double click has failed, and just as I go to double click again, it fires up on the screen.

The word "disappointing" doesn't even come close to describing my experience so far. I also don't think I made bad hardware choices...

•   ASUS PRIME AP201 Black Micro-ATX PC Chassis
•   ASRock B860M Steel Legend WIFI LGA1851 Micro-ATX Motherboard (DDR5)
•   Intel 15th Gen Core Ultra 7 265 2.4GHz 20C/20T 65W 36M LGA1851 CPU
•   Corsair Vengeance DDR5 32GB (2x16GB) Memory
•   Noctua NH-P1 Passive CPU Cooler
•   Seasonic PRIME Fanless 700W 80PLUS Titanium Modular Power Supply
•   UK Plug Mains Power Cord
•   Kingston NV3 500GB PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD (5000/3000)
•   Samsung 990 PRO 2TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD (7450/6900)
•   Samsung 990 PRO 2TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD (7450/6900)
•   Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

Did I? If my hardware choices were OK, then all this ball-ache is solely down to Windows 11

[JimH]

Doesn't seem right.  Win 11 isn't slower.

[Awesome Donkey]

Windows 11 has been a great experience for me. Installers are just as fast, if not faster than Windows 10 was.

One thought, in Windows Defender's window > Device security section, what does it say? Check the core isolation, security processor and secure boot sections and see what it's set to. I have seen issues when the TPM (and secure boot) in the UEFI BIOS wasn't properly setup and it causes performance issues in Windows 11 after setup (which I reinstalled Windows for after correcting the settings as Windows was still borked, after reinstall it was fine).

[zybex]

Yeah, Win11 has been solid. The slowness is likely the AV cloud-security thing, checking all EXEs before launching. It should get better by itself over time as it learns your patterns too.

Here's a flashback to your Win7->Win10 upgrade experience 
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,104981.msg729839.html#msg729839

Give it time.

[marko]

Me again

I have given up for now.
I swapped out that Kingston M.2 drive for a Samsung 9100 PRO, M.2 2280, PCIe 5.0 (x4) one, and the improvement was negligible.

I had to install explorer patcher in order to get the Windows 10 taskbar back, just so I can keep True Launch Bar operative.
I didn't like this approach though. Yes, it was working, but I would rather not be installing hacks for explorer.exe.
To that end, I've been exploring ways I can go about ditching TLB and that's not going well either. It's all just too time consuming. Explorer patcher is gone now, and I'm learning to live without TLB... It's frustrating, but just life I guess... nothing lasts forever.

The HTPC is four years old, runs an 11th Gen Core i5 11400 @ 2.6GHz
This runs a 15th Gen Core Ultra 7 265 @ 2.4GHz

The HTPC installs MC in 10 seconds.
This takes 25 - 30 seconds. It slows to a really slow crawl at "registering program files"...
What I can't understand is, out of the blue last night, I ran the MC installer and it was done and dusted in around five seconds. I tried it a few times... soooo fast. This morning? It's back to taking 25 seconds, again stalling at the "Registering..." phase. I now know how quick it can be, but need a break from it. so no more for at least a week. I do not have the energy for a Windows refresh, or clean install.

Despite all that, I am a lot more positive about things at the moment. Got everything more or less back the way I like it... Life's good 

[zybex]

That's annoying :/
Google says there are many reports like yours, usually on older hardware, but also seen on new machines. Check this one first:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/windows11/windows-installer-is-very-slow-on-windows-11-24h2/4381411

Some other proposed fixes:
- disable Intel RST and/or Intel VMD features (either in BIOS or using the Intel control panel for RST)
- disable OneDrive, if enabled
- completely disable Defender (just to rule it out) - this means not only disable it using the UI, but actually stopping all services. There's a script to do it, but make sure it is in fact reversible:
https://github.com/Msprg/Disable-Windows-Defender-Permanently

I assume you only have Windows Defender and no other security software.

[EnglishTiger]

Marko - Download and Install the Intel Driver & Support Assistant Ap - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/intel-driver-support-assistant.html

Unlike MS who have a tendency to add Updated Drivers to their updates very infrequently, and often the ones they do supply are older than the ones available from the hardware maker; Intel tend to release new drivers monthly, although they have been know to update some of them more frequently.


That slight performance improvement when you changed the M2 disc could well be down to a problem it took MS over 6 months to admit existed and has still not been eradicated - Win 11 inefficient handling of M2 type disks.

[marko]

Well, I had said "no more", but was intrigued...

@zybex...
"Check this one first"... Did that... "Smart App Control"? WTF? Only available from a clean install? OK. Saved a registry value to force it back on, and turned it off. I've never needed such a thing up to now, and it's not active on the HTPC as that was an automatic Win10 to Win11 upgrade....

This thing is flying now! I consider myself to be not too bad at getting what I need from search engines, but TBH, never even thought to search on this issue. Figured it one of those 'just me' things. Thank you so much.

@ET,
Thanks for that also. I already have the Intel support thing and am all up-to-date there.
Dunno what to say about the M.2 issue. All I can say for sure is that Windows 11 feels like software in its very early beta stages. Right now, I wouldn't call myself a fan (at this time)

[EnglishTiger]

Dunno what to say about the M.2 issue. All I can say for sure is that Windows 11 feels like software in its very early beta stages. Right now, I wouldn't call myself a fan (at this time)

At times I start wondering if Windows 11 is going to end up being an even bigger disaster than Windows 8 or going even further back the ill-fated MSDOS 4.0.

Every now and then I'll go into Explorer, right click on a file so that I can open it and Win11 will drop into totally stupid mode, the spinning blue circle will pop-up followed by Explorer closing itself down (or what is probably more likely crashing out), the taskbar vanishing and then having to wait, for what sometimes can seem like ages, till Win 11 decides the redraw the desktop and the toolbar.

That early beta stage has been going on for nearly 3 years now and MS continue to wonder why there are still more PC's out there in the Real World running under Win 10 than there are ones running under Win 11.

[JimH]

FWIW, we've used Windows 11 successfully since it was released.  MC is largely built on it.

[Awesome Donkey]

Call me curious, but what's the specs of the PC you've been doing this on?

[marko]

Call me curious, but what's the specs of the PC you've been doing this on?

Me? or Jim?

Mine are:

•   ASUS PRIME AP201 Black Micro-ATX PC Chassis
•   ASRock B860M Steel Legend WIFI LGA1851 Micro-ATX Motherboard (DDR5)
•   Intel 15th Gen Core Ultra 7 265 2.4GHz 20C/20T 65W 36M LGA1851 CPU
•   Corsair Vengeance DDR5 32GB (2x16GB) Memory
•   Noctua NH-P1 Passive CPU Cooler
•   Seasonic PRIME Fanless 700W 80PLUS Titanium Modular Power Supply
•   UK Plug Mains Power Cord
•   Samsung 9100 PRO, M.2 2280, PCIe 5.0 (x4) NVMe SSD (14700/13400)
•   Samsung 990 PRO 2TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD (7450/6900)
•   Samsung 990 PRO 2TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD (7450/6900)
•   Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

MC Benchmark is around 9700

[Awesome Donkey]

Wow, okay, those specs should be just fine for Windows 11 then. That's very strange, maybe it's an Intel CPU issue (or an issue with the scheduler on Windows 11 with Intel CPUs)? Brainscratcher, that's for sure.

[Hendrik]

Smart App Control caused some peculiar issues for me as well. I didn't notice it with average normal use, but one particular thing was crawling slow - namely opening the Unreal Engine Editor (I dabble in game dev and have been doing game modding for years), which went from seconds to minutes. So slow that it was really really annoying. But largely only the startup sequence, with some analysis it looked like loading each of the hundreds of DLLs that make up the editor took several seconds each, rather then being almost instant.

Started after I did a clean reinstall of 24H2, my old install that I upgraded from Windows 10 to eventually 23H2 didn't have it. Not sure now if Smart App Control was just off in the old version due to being an upgrade, or the issue is new in 24H2.

But after a week of off-and-on googling about the issue I finally found the hint about Smart App Control, and its all flying again now.
And my PC is certainly not slow.

As a bonus, since I thought maybe the slowdown is from Windows Defender or something like that, I finally investigated MS's new "Dev Drive" feature and my development drive is now a Dev Drive, which has some neat advantages (it uses ReFS for integrity and disables file system hooks for full performance)

[marko]

Well, yeah... I'm a little bit, deflated?, TBH.

It would seem that the culprit was, as discovered by zybex, this thing called "Smart App Control"
https://www.howtogeek.com/smart-app-control-windows-11-explained/

Smart App Control is a feature within Windows Security that provides protection against untrustworthy apps. When you try to run an app, SAC analyzes its credibility using Microsoft’s Intelligent Security Graph, a cloud-based security service. If the service is unable to make a confident prediction, it then checks the app for a valid signature (which identifies where the file originates from and if it's a trusted source).

Apps from known publishers or with valid signatures will run as expected. If not, the program is blocked. There’s no manual override option, nor can you add an app to an exemption list.

Since turning this thing off, installers are insanely fast. MC's goes through its thing so quickly, I don't have time to read what it's doing!
This is the WOW! factor I was expecting, you know, when you press the 'Power On' for that first time, and it never came.

Getting all that software I use daily back in place, every, feckin', installer, slower than a slow thing... Not what you expect from your new toys, right?
Smart App Control checking everything online? FFS 
I didn't even know this was a thing. The very least Windows could have done was let me know this active and give me the option to turn it off.

In amongst all of this, I learned that my ISP's router was having "provisioning" issues, whatever that means, so had to endure the phone call to India to get that sorted. To be fair, it seems to be sorted, I just get disheartened after waiting on hold for some time, to eventually be connected to some foreign land, talking to someone called Albert?? whose English is so accented it's hard to understand, plus, you can hear another countless calls going on around him, almost like you have a crossed line (who remembers those?) and my eyes roll to the ceiling, do some quick breathing exercises, thinking, the quicker we get through his script and I get passed to level 2 support the better...
But, credit where it's due, "Albert" could see there was a problem, and seems to have been able to fix it remotely, so no need to book an engineer visit. Way to go, Albert, two thumbs up

There now... Having just unloaded to all in the PC's and Other Hardware forum, and doffed my hat to zybex, I feel waay better now. Like a child, I've just run the MC installer many times in a row just to marvel at the speed it does its thing here. I can just about make out the installer stages... Lovely.

Made me wonder though, that Mac Mini of ET's..., benching in MC another 4 to 5k above this? That must be soooo fast? Do you even see the installer on screen for an auto update of MC?

[EnglishTiger]

Marko - Some of the reasons why that M4 Pro Mac Mini is so fast are - the M4 is Apple's 4th generation of their Arm/System on a Chip processor, the System Disc isn't a Single M2 Disc its actually 2 equal sized M2 discs on a single chip, another reason could well be that everything inside the outer case is designed by Apple and not a collection of hardware from different manufacturers.

Just to show how powerful the M4 Mac Mini is, right now it's doing something that nobody can do on a PC with an Intel or AMD CP. As the attached Image will reveal it's running the Mac Version of MC 33.0.72 and, thanks to a piece of software called Parallels, MC 34.0.19 for windows. MC33 is playing out through the Mac's onboard speakers whilst MC34 is playing out thru a small soundbar connected to the VDU. MC34 is actually running under Windows 11 24H2 for Arm which at times can be just as cranky as the bog standard Windows 11 24H2 running on my WIN PC.

[Awesome Donkey]

Ah! Smart App Control! Yeah, that'll cause headaches for sure. Luckily for me it's disabled and can't be enabled without a clean install (and I'll have to make sure it's on my list of things to check/change after doing a clean install).

There seems to be two versions of Parallels, one from the Parallels site and one from Ashampoo's site? They both the same company/software? I see the version on the Parallels site offers subscriptions only and the Ashampoo version offers a lifetime version, interesting.

[EnglishTiger]

AD - it is the same software with the only difference being that from Ashampoo you pay for a lifetime licence instead of paying an Annual Fee if you get it from Parallels themselves. It looks like Ashampoo have gone into partnership, or formed an agreement,  with quite a few other well known Software Companies including Coral.
Earlier today when I fired Parallels Up it downloaded and installed an update by itself and then when I started up Win11 for Arm it also updated itself with no input/intervention from me.

There is one thing about Parallels that not that is not very obvious on either web-site - it can also install and run quite a few flavours of Linux.

I only wish I'd found it earlier than I did because being able to view the Mac and Windows version of a Skin on the same machine and desktop cuts out  creating/modifying the skin on the win pc and then using a USB Thumbdrive to copy the skin to the Mac gets boring after a while.

[zybex]

Parallels has been around for many years, being the first(?) Virtualization software for MacOS. I think almost 20 years now.
Windows 10/11 ships with Hyper-V which, along with supporting regular VM functionality like running a full MacOS within Windows, also allows running individual apps inside a VM but rendering as a normal window on the desktop (instead of having a separate desktop), much like your screenshot with MC34 above. That's neat.

Just to show how powerful the M4 Mac Mini is, right now it's doing something that nobody can do on a PC with an Intel or AMD CP. (...)

This is likely possible on Windows with Hyper-V or VMWare too.