Somehow my work gave me $3k Dell laptops with the latest chip, 64gb ram, and it runs absolutely slow.
Where as roommates work gave 2020 arm mbp with 8gn ram runs smooth as butter.
Both running the same set of dev toolings.
And there were some issues with aux hardware so I had mine replaced twice, still slow at on all of them
Am I missing something? Is windows always this slow?
Posted Jan 5, 2023, 7:06 PM UTC
The problem isn't Windows. The PC is probably loaded down with crappy antivirus software and maybe other corporate spyware. IT needs to set up their stuff so that all common dev tools (Visual Studio, SSMS, Jetbrains tools, git, powershell, etc.) are excluded from antivirus. You probably also want to have one or two common directories for source code that can also be excluded.
My work laptop is a Dell with a Core i7 6 core/12 thread and 32 GB RAM on Win10 and it's plenty fast. My home desktop is a custom build with a Ryzen 9 5900 12 core/24 thread and 64 GB RAM, also Win10, and it screams.
Either something bad installed or maybe a driver issue
I’ve got an 8-9 year old Dell XPS15 i7 and a nearly new XPS i9, even the older one is fast as I need it to be for API development and quite happy hums away with mini-Kube running 20 containers
I only bought the new one so my son could have my hand-me-down
But when I blanked it, it didn’t reinstall the integrated graphics driver properly - and even though it has an nVidia 960 in it, ran like a dog, stuttery mouse and felt like 10hz refresh rate
It isn’t always enough to just run windows update. Go into device manager and see if the graphics card comes up as Generic - even if you are using the graphics built into the CPU it should say Intel IRIS or something. Update the driver through Device Manager
Another thing can be external USB devices. I have a Microsoft Sculpt mouse with a USB dongle and it doesn’t like my work laptop (works fine with the Dells) - it generates lots of system interrupts which hobble every other process even if the system interrupts only account for 2-3% of the CPU usage. Just pulling the dongle (and switching to a Bluetooth mouse) made it fly again
Unfortunately, as much as Windows has improved under the skin over the years, Macs still seem to be a bit more resilient. I personally would never use one though
I have a similar problem. But you learn to live with it.
Corporate runs multiple antiviruses and security software (that logs access and file copies).
The result is that work loads that use a butt tonne of random file access tends be did slow...
Nothing to do with Windows or Dell...
Heck my AMD Phenom 7950 (circa 2008) with SATA SSDs could beat the crap out of my work laptop which is an 11th gen i5.
Corporate keyloggers and screen recorders are resource hogs.
Some dev tools run slower on windows. I used to have performance issues with NPM and angular cli. Dotnet CLI, VS Code and VS all run (more or less) fine on Windows (particularly the newer versions of VS).
I use an 8 year old laptop to RDP into a desktop machine (assembled from about $1300 of parts about a year ago) and I never have performance issues.
Could be that $3,000 laptop doesn't have proper cooling and causes it to throttle, or it has really aggressive antivirus. Sometimes 'stock' and enterprise Windows machines have performance issues due to the extra software.
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Yes, you are missing something. No windows is not always slow. Also, you are comparing two different architectures running on two completely different sets of hardware.
What hardware do you actually have?
What set of tools are you running?
What additional software have you installed on both?
i guess your laptop use i5?
Nope, i9 11th gen
What about the disk? SSD? NVME? Spinning HDD?
Normally the biggest bottleneck. At work we also use a very ivasive A/V that will slow down anything. This was mostly mitigated by upgrading spinning Hdd's to SSD's.
I don't think HDD is even an option for $3K laptops, this one is with NVME.
I hightly doubt it's the hardware, even just waking it up takes a good 30 sec, fan goes on immediate upon entering the desktop.
I wish I've never had macs, the M1 ruined x64 blow dryer and windows bloat for me.
I9 11th gen but U cpu? Those stupid power saving CPU’s throttle constantly.
We have 8th gen i7 notebooks that run slower than a snail in gravel. loading up a solution takes ages (1-5 minutes) and cpu is constantly pegged at 100%
Combine that with a hp docking station whose monitors connections begin to stop working once cpu gets loaded.
Dell is trash, that's the issue. Definitely sounds like somethings going on if it's taking 30 seconds to wake up but the laptops are known for horrendous cooling and throttle like crazy which is probably why you're getting crappy performance.
It’s not the specs, it’s the corporate spyware/drive encryption/firewalls/zero trust.