Funny, that was my first thought as well. Sometimes I start cmd.exe instead of powershell on rotating-disk machines because of the startup time. On SSDs I find the startup time is negligible.

That's my biggest concern, I actively avoid PS just because I can't tolerate its startup time.

It's better but it's still slower than CMD on my computers.

In particular if you have left the prompt window untouched for a few hours and it has been paged out. Just pressing <tab> to complete a file name will hang for 3-6 seconds on my computer while PS wakes back up.

CMD is always instantaneous.

I realize that PS is doing a lot more work to match commands but sometimes simple is all that is needed.

Major improvements in V5.

Even more in V5.1 (which ships with WS2016).

But still slower than CMD.

CMD starts very quickly but then you have CMD. :-)

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

Still slower than cmd, fast enough that I'm actively trying to unlearn the cmd muscle memory.