Windows 11 is far from perfect. Updates cut features and force you to delete apps, Bing prompts can be super aggressive, and it demands higher system requirements than any other operating system. Even if you pass the bar, however, that doesn’t mean using it is sunshine and roses.
Andy Young worked at Microsoft for 13 years, ending his tenure as a senior software engineer. This makes him uniquely qualified to comment on the state of the OS, and he’s not happy. Blasting the brand over on X, he exhibits how the Start Menu barely even loads, dubbing the feature “comically bad.”
The video upload shows that the first and second clicks bring up a blank box with no signs of progress. Only on the third click does the function work as intended, displaying search options and local apps. “My favourite Windows feature is opening the Start menu, typing ‘notepad’, hitting Enter, and having it open Edge to a Bing search for ‘otepad’,” quips Young.
Putting to rest any claims that it’s a user error, this issue appears on a $1,600 gaming PC. He doesn’t divulge which generation, but you’d think an Intel Core i9 with 128GB of RAM would get the job done. To play devil’s advocate, we don’t know the state of his storage or how bloated his particular OS is. We like to keep things lean here at Club386 to avoid issues exactly like this. Pinning the search function to your taskbar might also help with this problem, even if it doesn’t look the tidiest.
I can’t say for certain that Copilot is the root cause here, but it’s a likelihood. Microsoft’s rapid pace of integrating its AI hasn’t been the smoothest process. It’s shifting people from other departments, like Teams, to keep up with rivals but it’s possibly at the expense of quality.
Young isn’t alone in his woes. Former Microsoft Windows Experiences Lead, Mikhail Parakhin, also reprimanded the Windows 11 Start Menu. In his case, it’s how menus are buried within menus compared to older versions of the feature. After all, no one likes clicking more than they have to.