Why Your MCP Setup Keeps Timing Out in 60 Seconds (And How I Fixed It on Windows)

Every developer hits this wall: add than 8 MCP servers to Claude Desktop (or Cursor, or VSCode) → it spins for exactly 60 seconds → red X, "timed out." It happens on every machine with limited resources. My i5-7300HQ laptop? Poster child for the problem. Tutorials skip it. AWS/Finch articles ignore Windows entirely. Docker's own docs don't cover it. But the problem is real, and I spent weeks diagnosing every failure mode until I fixed them all.