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No Start Menu for You

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Re: No Start Menu for You

#261

Post by brucedawson »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #37
esalman wrote: post #3

Can confirm that start menu random lag happens on Windows 11 too. I don't know if this is a good solution but I keep shortcuts to my most used programs on desktop. I don't necessarily click on them to open the apps, but if I hit Windows key, the text completion is faster for those shortcuts on desktop.

I sometimes encounter a slightly different situation: when I type something in the start menu, it finds it quickly. But then, when I press enter, nothing happens. There's the "select" animation, but the menu stays on-screen, and the app doesn't start. I will then proceed to press enter multiple times in frustration, each producing just the animation and no other discernible effect. Then, after a while, I'll get X tim…

This sounds like exactly my symptoms. Check for crashes.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#262

Post by acdha »

oriolid wrote: post #256
acdha wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically sockets add size, weight, and mechanical failure points (they can vibrate loose, you need an access panel, etc.). Since most people never use them over the life of the system it’s basically a bet that the RAM will fail less frequently than those other things, which is probably true but frustrating if you’re in the unlucky group.

It's a small sample size but I've seen more failed RAM chips than other components together. And a socket would make upgrades easier. Which of course isn't great if you're trying to sell higher spec up front instead of giving the option to upgrade later if needed. I'm not sure why a separate access panel would be needed, the whole bottom is easy to remove with a pentalobe bit.

Yeah, I’d be curious what the overall numbers look like for a large swath of users. I’ve never had a Mac I support fail do to RAM - hard drives back in the day, fans, GPU, or logic boards - but I did have multiple PC & Mac users who had reliability problems which were fixed by reseating DIMMs which had come slightly loose.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#263

Post by snuxoll »

dylan604 wrote: post #212
zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

The web stuff on Spolight is one of the first things I turn off on any new Mac. Siri is disabled, suggestions from the web are disabled, spotlight is only allowed to look at apps and files, etc. My mac works wonderfully after so that it returns results of what I expect when searched. Search is a lot less hard when you restrain it to searching only what you care about.

Spotlight, as in the underlying search technology and APIs originating from Mac OS X 10.4, is fantastic. Spotlight, as in the search box that appears when hitting Cmd+Space has become obnoxious and commonly thinks I want to know what 1 pascal is in inHg when I type "1pa" instead of thinking I want to open 1Password.

To this day Alfred remains one of the first things I install on a new Mac as a result. Still have access to Spotlight (the indexing service) search, but none of the extra "intelligence" (aka Spotlight the app thinking it knows better than me what I want) unless I explicitly ask for it by explicitly invoking an extra workflow for things like unit conversion, etc.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#264

Post by snuxoll »

Kwpolska wrote: post #100
xenonite wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is why I turn off search in Spotlight (also for privacy). For window management, please consider using the Rectangle app or some other keyboard window manager. Otherwise, I believe its possible to long press on the maximize button to put your windows on the left or right half.

The green button isn't a maximize button, it's a full screen button. Full screen on macOS is a separate virtual desktop, so you can't just quickly bring up another window to reference something. Some apps simplify/hide their UI in full screen mode, and until recently, the menu bar would always auto-hide in full screen (it's configurable now). There's also Zoom, activated by option-clicking the green button. This resi…

I'm still pissed at Apple for changing the default behavior of the green traffic light from Zoom to Full Screen. I never want to use Full Screen, and when they introduced it in Lion with a dedicated button I was content to ignore it. Even though I've developed muscle memory to hold down option every time I hit the green traffic light there's still times where I forget, let go early, etc. and I end up fullscreening the damned window instead and curse under my breath.

I never minded the application-specific Zoom behavior in macOS, in fact I find it much saner than Windows where you often end up with dead space inside an Application doing nothing. Safari pretty intelligently figures out the maximum horizontal width of a page before padding would be applied and resizes to that when zooming unless your window is already beyond that breakpoint, for example. Same thing with Word, for example. I don't want to see a bunch of dead space on my screen, I just want to show the maximum amount of content my application+display can show at once. (This is where I really dislike the change to the green traffic light, I don't want Window-like behavior on a Mac)

Re: No Start Menu for You

#265

Post by snazz »

roel_v wrote: post #111
grishka wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a while since I used Windows with any kind of seriousness (and the last version I did was 7), so I wasn't aware that this kind of thing is offloaded to separate, shared processes like that. > Not to mention, there isn't a whole lot of software left that doesn't need at least some networking for its 'primary' functionality. Case in point, Microsoft Office has no good reason to be aware of the existence of th…

"Case in point, Microsoft Office has no good reason to be aware of the existence of the internet." shrug I think the same, but it's a fact that new versions of Word heavily integrate with Sharepoint and Teams. I don't use that functionality (at least not a lot), but for some businesses it's the primary use case, and it's how Word can manage to stay relevant even when competing with Google Docs. The concept of 'files'…

explorer.exe is also responsible for the Windows "shell" (Start menu, taskbar, system tray, desktop background), at least historically. I think more of this started to be done by Metro and UWP subprocesses since Windows 8. (But explorer.exe is ultimately still important—if you kill its process, you lose everything but alt-tab and control-shift-escape). So I'm not too surprised that it would request network access given how much it's doing.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#266

Post by fluoridation »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #243
fluoridation wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the default program structure in C and C++ makes functions blocking, with the caller assuming that if the callee returned it completed . Jamming a non-blocking program structure smack in the middle of a blocking system is never pretty, and most people prefer not to deal with the additional complexity. For the same reason, even though Windows has overlapped IO and other asynchronous IO mechanisms, most pe…

For disk IO you usually get away with it, especially now with SSDs. For networking you don't even have to use overlapped IO, sockets can be used with window messages, winhttp can be used async, etc. I think "it's more involved" is a really shitty excuse, especially if we're talking about a Microsoft product, not some obscure shareware software a guy is developing in his shed in the middle of nowhere.

I'm not excusing this particular case, I'm just explaining the perspective of most developers regarding synchronous versus asynchronous operations. In this particular case there's no reason to do it synchronously, since multiple processes are involved anyway. The crash handler should definitely not be waiting on a network operation to let the process terminate (that's not even getting into whether crash dumps should be getting uploaded by default to begin with), and the fact that this is a central part of the operating system's UI is even more egregious.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#267

Post by snazz »

spijdar wrote: post #19
msla wrote: post #5

I've long thought that Windows NT might make a pretty good OS if it weren't married to the Microsoft Windows interface. I know I'm abusing the terminology here, but only because the concept of a replaceable graphical shell is utterly foreign to an OS which began as one of many replaceable graphical shells for MS-DOS.

Strictly speaking, I don't think there's any technological reason why you couldn't replace the shell, although practically I'd bet the boot chain will refuse to load e.g. a replacement compositor that's not signed by Microsoft, not to mention the lack of API documentation at that level. I mention it since sometimes I daydream about trying to force a newer Windows runtime/kernel to load an older shell... Still, in a m…

Getting rid of Explorer and using a different shell is much easier than you're thinking, just hold control+shift and right-click the taskbar, then close Explorer. However, you're still running dwm.exe at that point, which gives you window management, alt+tab, and access to Task Manager. Replacing that part of Windows would be harder.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#268

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

ptx wrote: post #188
LelouBil wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 100% sure it will happen someday.

It's been in the process of happening, albeit very slowly, since 1996: https://reactos.org/

I've heard of ReactOS, and it's not what I meant—the 'pipe dream' was Microsoft itself open-sourcing Windows and all its components, from the NT kernel to every single tiny program in Windows, like the various MMC plug-ins, Aero shell, Explorer, Task Manager, etc.

It's highly unlikely, ergo 'pipe dream'.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#269

Post by samplatt »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #76
samplatt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General question for the class... Is there any way to stop this? Is there some entries we can add to the hosts file so that Windows and Office will instantly return as failed, rather than timing out?

Hosts file would be your first way assuming you trust MS to honor that convention. You can always consider using a way that is not reliant on Windows goodwill ( for example, Pihole would allow you to limit various unwanted IPs based on your custom list; technically, your router should be able to do it too, but it varies wildly by mfctr/model ). That said, I am not that familiar with that functionality in Excel and it…

I've been running a PiHole for a couple of years now and love it. It's hard to go on anyone else's network.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#270

Post by samplatt »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #103
samplatt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General question for the class... Is there any way to stop this? Is there some entries we can add to the hosts file so that Windows and Office will instantly return as failed, rather than timing out?

I use W10Privacy. It blocks all MS servers except those needed to get updates and antivirus definitions.

That looks like exactly what I was looking for, cheers. Windows auto-identifies the download as a virus, but I see the author has a page about this frustration on the website.
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