InDesign Slow in Windows 11 Virtual Computer

Question

We previously had been working on a rather old VM host purchased in 2017, with virtual work stations running Windows 10 accessing virtual file servers on that same VM host.

Recently got a new VM host with Windows 11 work stations and felt like I was waiting for InDesign longer than I should have been when opening and saving files, so I did some testing. On the new host, file transfer time from the work station to the new file sever on the same host is a smidge faster than on the old one. Except for InDesign!

In InDesign, opening a set of 20 files on the new server is taking on average 7 seconds longer than on the old server with Windows 10!!! 😮

The Windows 11 work stations have an Enterprise edition of Windows that is very “clean” with none of the usual bloatware and do not yet have any kind of antivirus on them yet.

Has anyone seen problems like this with InDesign switching to Windows 11?

Thanks
Ken

Mike Witherell · Answer

To be fair, an install of InDesign can run slowly on any computer, and there can be many reasons why that happens. Another question from my end: Why open 20 files all at once? That would tax any computer.

Back to the idea of general slow-downs, here is a compendium of things you can try to experiment with:

And one of the first things I would inspect and turn off is InDesign > Preferences > Generative AI alt text generation.

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