Slow virtual desktop switching on windows 11

Copper Contributor

Hi,

 

I recently joined the windows insider program and installed Windows 11. But since then, I am facing a significantly slow virtual desktop switching, compared to windows 10 (4 fingers slide gesture on trackpad). 

 

I am on the beta channel, but I have been facing this problem since the very first release of windows 11, when I was on the dev channel. 

 

These are my hardware specs : 

yanismnsr_0-1630580957885.png

 

Is there any solution to speed this up ? 

 

Thanks in advance.

27 Replies
Same thing here with the following specs:

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor
32.0 GB of RAM
NVidia RTX 3070 GPU

@yanismnsr 

I solved this by making my background a solid color rather than the default image. Hope that helps.

I fixed mine with turning off the dynamic colors. Just pick a color under personalization preferences and you should be good. 

Thanks for your answers. I noticed that by choosing a solid color or a "Slideshow" as a background it makes it less laggy, but still not as fluent as on windows 10
Yup, same here. Using as Blade 15 Advanced laptop i.e. i7, 32Gb RAM, Intel UHD Graphis + Nvidia RTX 3080 w/ 16GB (but its probably the former that is handling the desktop.
Thank you, I was having the same issue and this helped!

@yanismnsr I have the same issue, (Threadripper 3960x, Radeon 6900 XT).  When using Bing desktop to set background images, virtual desktop switching becomes nearly impossible.

 

Sometimes it will pop to another desktop and seems to get confused.

 

As others have said, setting to a solid background does solve the issue, I'd like to point out that even using the Background settings panel is painfully slow.  E.g Selecting "Solid color" then picking a color, and seeing the change, took 36 seconds to accomplish.  These actions should be just a couple of clicks.

 

 

Kudos artistro08! An astute observation, with a fixed accent color the desktop switching is I'd say on par with Win10 now, even when using different solid backgrounds (to differentiate them). Thanks!

Can confirm that selecting a solid accent colour speeds up desktop switching.

Should we accept this as a fix though? I had similar settings on Windows 10 on a lesser machine and it worked seamlessly.

@Devopsterus There's definitely something wrong here, we shouldn't be forced to disable theming in order for us to get around our machines effectively.


@Devopsterus wrote:

Sometimes it will pop to another desktop and seems to get confused.


This occurs for me when I have automatic accents turned on. 

Turning that off alone seems to do the job and is less impactful on theming, but that said, it's still not ideal.

@danmul Yeah it's less than ideal, but the way that it's coded is the reason why. I'm sure they will fix it, but in the meantime, we got a temp fix

Hi there,

Still no solution to this problem? i´ve been working with w11 with a black color **bleep** a wallpaper since the begining.

Cheers

For what its worth I discovered that if I turned off the "Snap Windows" feature under "Multitasking" the lag time issue in switching between desktops went away without resorting to turning off my desktop slide show functionality that others said they had to do. I really like the "Snap Windows" functionality, but I can live without it if it means I can seamlessly move between desktops. @richardrama 

This worked like a charm! Even with Bing background. Night and day. Thanks!!!!!!

Glad to hear that, but if anyone at Microsoft is listening, I hope they will figure out the bug and fix it so both the snap to feature  and the multiple desktops work seamlessly without lag times. @tkolda 

@yanismnsr @artistro08 

Hello Everyone. As of Nov 5 2022, there is no OFFICIAL solution to slow touchpad desktop switching. However, I do have a solution THAT WORKS.

1) Set accent colour to manual, as suggested by @artistro08 
2) Now, what i noticed is, the keyboard shortcut for switching desktops is SO FAST AND SEEMLESS. So I have configured my touchpad settings as below:
a) Search "Touchpad settings > Advanced Gestures > Configure four-finger gestures".
b) Find "Swipe Left" and from drop down menu, select " Custom Shortcut".
c) Click "Start Recording" and click Ctrl + Win + Right Arrow Key.
d) Click "Stop Recording".
e) Now try and SEE THE SPEED!!!
f) For , Swipe Right, again do a similar procedure, but click Ctrl + Win + Left Arrow key.
g) DONE !! Enjoy!!
. THIS WORKS !!!! Do share if it helps :">

 

 

I had the same problem on Windows 11, and I realized that the reason was that I had different Bing wallpapers on different desktops. I fixed this problem by going into Settings >> Personalization >> Background >> Recent images >> right-click on one of the images >> Click "Set for all desktops". After that, the desktop switching was finally back to normal.

@yanismnsr 

 

So, it is over a year later and they still can't fix this?!?

 

If I had a script loading the image from disk, it would be faster than this. I had to switch to a solid background to make it tolerable. 

This seems like a solution for now.