▲ 7 points

Tell HN: Windows 11 made my $80 laptop much faster

by nateb2022·4y ago·3 comments·view on hn ↗

Coming from a Apple/Linux background, I recently got a budget Windows 10 laptop as my work machine (for my work as a field tech, I need something cheap that can flash IoT images and which I don't care about should it break, get dropped, etc). After scouring eBay for half an hour, I bought an $80 budget laptop, a HP Stream 11 with a whopping Celeron N4020, 4 whole GB of RAM, and 64GB of advanced eMMC.

Two months later, I have found performance to be predictably mediocre. Today I noticed that the option to upgrade to Windows 11 finally had been made available to me, and two hours later I was blown away. It feels like a totally different machine. While the performance gains probably won't be as noticeable on machines with better hardware, this budget-laptop definitely got a big boost from the update -- something I can only conclude is due to specific attention on this sector by Microsoft.

With Windows 11, lag is no longer an issue and I'm surprised to find myself discovering how nice of a machine it actually is. The keyboard has a good amount of travel (in fact I'm typing this on it right now since I have momentarily fallen in love with the keyboard), the case is well built and is not as apt to flexing as other budget laptops, and the battery life is decent since I treat it fairly well. It's hard to explain but there's something oddly satisfying about a slim, budget laptop that actually is mostly okay. It just feels oddly delightful.

I imagine ChromeOS is going to be taking a hit once more budget laptops with Windows 11 hit the market. And while I'm usually hesitant to give Microsoft credit, it appears they've gotten this one right.

3 comments

I've experienced a similar effect but from a fresh operating system reinstall from any of Windows, Mac and Linux. I expect it's due to a fresh disk format and install, so all the files should be unfragmented for faster sequential reads. Also over time the search indices and data builds up which just makes things slower.

I haven't used Windows 11 much myself but I just thought I would mention this. I've even seen this effect on an iPad where a fresh install makes searching fast again but over time the search function just becomes excruciatingly slow.

I have done clean installs of Windows 10, Windows 11, Ubuntu 22.04 and Fedora 36 on my ThinkPad over the last few months. From best to worse perceived performance the order is Windows 11, Windows 10, Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04. Windows 11 also has better power usage than Windows 10 on my ThinkPad. Fedora and Ubuntu have greatly improved over the last year as far as battery usage, kernel 5.17 seems to be when the big improvement happened, but are still significantly more power hungry than either version of Windows.

Yeah I always disable search daemons/services, since I don't rely upon those features much, and likewise I also disable thumbnails on whatever file manager I use -- between the two of those that probably accounts for a lot of the slowness that builds up over time.

Another big factor is browser caches -- they degrade the storage medium and slow with age. I disable on-disk and persistent caches entirely in Firefox by setting `cache.disk.enable` to false in `about:config`. I've found that by doing all three, I prevent a lot of needless read/write/thrashing of my storage, and also increase performance a lot since there's less IO going on. With the proper configuration, I've found that any OS can stay fast over time.