Wait a minute . . .

When the typical programming approach deeply ingrained in the company is to waste disk space (and memory) you could stop right there.

But in more recent years there has been a noticeable effort to make more ads possible and allow more apps to waste other user resources. With apps, services, and logs that users didn't ask for running in the background. Even with notifications curtailed, it only hides things like popups, there's still all kinds of performance-compromising "initiatives" piling up, so it's just a lot stupider on the whole than it used to be.

And you're expected to pile on another app?

From the same outfit?

Which would not be needed at all if the root cause could be addressed. Somebody in an important position seems to know absolutely zero about a corporate concept known as "quality". Look up a thing called "root cause analysis" and pass it up the chain-of-command until you see where the grasp and/or commitment falters. Very few people are going to be recognized as a quality ninja, but at the other end of the spectrum isn't an absolute zero the kind of thing where true performance improvement would be warranted?

This app is just a blatant admission of the situation.

If you've been watching this company for very many decades at all, you know one of the early decisions which allowed them to grow as much as they have was to disregard the waste of users' disk space foremost, and RAM memory as collateral damage. This has not changed one iota, there remains a complete dependence on HDD's growing in both size and speed faster than their own waste of that same space. These were set in motion long ago, but the last ten years has seen the exponential rise in annoying background bandwidth usage too, both disk and network activity, where ideally there is almost none except when user-initiated. Now it's almost constant, so that's an even bigger decline in corporate quality in a shorter period of time.

As for HDD's growing faster than Windows could bloat, that was never under control of Microsoft but was well-anticipated decades ago and benefitted all kinds of users in many ways. It's now quite likely that the too-frequent data transfer usage continues to skyrocket unless something is done about it. Also possible that the space- & bandwidth-wasting approaches have already eaten their own tail and are no longer under control any more so than the hardware progress at other companies.

In Quality 101 that would be a major lapse compared to what was expected and routinely delivered in the past, and would bring under suspicion future efforts until a root cause was identified, addressed, and overcome. People notice when you no longer deliver quality, but the bigger the company, the longer it takes to hit the bottom line. Then the bigger it hits. Who knew? Or failed to know?

Anyway, nobody needs any actual special equipment to compare performance of current Windows to previous versions.

No oscilloscopes, no network analyzers or data bus sniffing, just do the same thing as any other decade :)

It just has to be a level playing field, use a brand new PC with an average business-class mainboard, and the biggest brand new HDD you can get, the HDD is the part where you need hardware that's above average in order to compare to how it was done so well with Windows 9x, XP, or W7. And to scale the way it needs to be scaled to make a valid comparison. Do a clean install of the current Windows and see what you think. I dare you.

This is the only real instrumentation, if you can't just go out and buy a new PC, upgrade to the biggest HDD they make, and have it run at least as decently as in previous decades, why not?

Fix this and quality skyrockets as a byproduct of a more effective corporation overall.

Without even a focused "quality program", doing "whatever it takes" to make Windows run real good on a big new HDD would put all kinds of employees at all levels back on the right track like they obviously haven't been in quite some time. Probably worth more money than the launching of Windows 11 when you think about it. If they just stuck with Windows 10 like they said they were, and kept focusing on making it run better on a big HDD, there has surely been enough time to exceed the performance of Windows 7 on the same hardware. Imagine what it would be like then when you did use a speedy SSD, this is what SSD's are supposed to be for, not to just barely get you by. Instead just the opposite happened. Failing the mission with HDD's was always a marker of complete failure since the arrival of HDD's. Is it that out-of-control completely, or that misguided? One thing's for sure, this is now easy to see with 20/20 hindsight.

I wonder who the top person is who's even tried a HDD recently. If they did the right person might find that the most effective strategy is to work on reversing the festering internal performance wound, rather than apply a band-aid to the early symptoms that users notice most easily. It's that bad.

How "hard" can it be? Just get everyone who works on Windows to use a HDD before it's too late to even remember the performance that was previously achievable. Hasn't anybody heard of eating their own dog food?

If they can't afford it for the entire company any more, at least get them for the top people so they can have a real physical benchmark which they probably haven't been paying any attention to, instead allowing some of the imaginary stuff to take precedence just because it's trending, or relying more on misleading documents rather than real-world performance.