Will Windows 10 Finally Address OS Decay? 577
colinneagle (2544914) writes The real question on my mind is whether Windows 10 will finally address a problem that has plagued pretty much every Windows OS since at least 95: the decay of the system over time. As you add and remove apps, as Windows writes more and more temporary and junk files, over time, a system just slows down. I'm sure many of you have had the experience of taking a five-year-old PC, wiping it clean, putting the exact same OS on as it had before, and the PC is reborn, running several times faster than it did before the wipe. It's the same hardware, same OS, but yet it's so fast. This slow degeneration is caused by daily use, apps, device drive congestion (one of the tell-tale signs of a device driver problem is a PC that takes forever to shut down) and also hardware failure. If a disk develops bad sectors, it has to work around them. Even if you try aggressively to maintain your system, eventually it will slow, and very few people aggressively maintain their system. So I wonder if Microsoft has found a solution to this. Windows 8 was supposed to have some good features for maintaining the OS and preventing slowdown. I wouldn't know; like most people, I avoided Windows 8 like the plague. It would be the most welcomed feature of Windows 10 if I never had to do another backup, disk wipe, and reinstall.
The bigger Problem is their "updates" (Score:5, Informative)
Sadly the way updates work with MS they become the far bigger problem. You can easily see this by installing a "clean" system, examine its timing (please don't even think about using system internal benchmarks...), then patch it and notice just how much speed you suddenly miss.
That's a problem you probably won't solve quickly...
Re:The bigger Problem is their "updates" (Score:4, Insightful)
You can easily see this by installing a "clean" system, examine its timing (please don't even think about using system internal benchmarks...), then patch it and notice just how much speed you suddenly miss.
Not that I can be bothered actually doing that but since you're saying that I'm guessing you've done it and had significant results, what were they and for which version?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:The bigger Problem is their "updates" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Never said it was. You asked "what were they and for which version" and I replied.
Well you're telling me your Thinkpad "flies on XP" so it can't be that bad.
Are you a software/OS guy like most Slashdotters (I'm not, I'm hardware)? I ask because if you are, I can't believe you are actually advocating that I ignore every security patch that Windows put out- regardless if they will make no new ones.
What? I said you don't need to run Windows Update anymore, the bug that was reported in the spring about updates causing a huge issue was in Windows Update. Since there are no more updates once you're up to date you no longer need to run Windows Update because there will be no more updates.
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It's called the system registry, that buggy plague ridden POS idea that has contaminated windows for decades, remains a continuous problem. Originally done so M$ could pry into what software people are running in one location and prevent undesired software from M$'s point of view from running, an idea that had to be abandoned for obvious reasons but that POS registry crap was still left behind. A brand new clean install more than anything else tidies up the registry and that speeds up boots, shut downs and
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I don't know about if it's kept in RAM (tho it's not that big compared to typical RAM on concurrent machines) but the easy way to keep it tidy is to apply this free tool (which I've been using for 15? years now, and have never seen it screw up):
http://personal.inet.fi/busine... [personal.inet.fi]
And for ghu's sakes, defrag. I don't care what Windows says. Defrag. Regularly.
You wouldn't run your car forever without changing the oil, would you? Computers need maintenance too.
As to the wipe and reinstall thing... I consider that
Re: (Score:3)
I think the length of time it took to be officially recognised by Microsoft puts weight behind your question. I'd noticed it was slow for ages - even for freshly-installed machines. I didn't think too much of it, as it was always on old hardware.
And you're right, you weren't arguing. I apologise for flying off the handle at you when I should have been aiming elsewhere, your comment did not deserve that.
Re:The bigger Problem is their "updates" (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly the way updates work with MS they become the far bigger problem. You can easily see this by installing a "clean" system, examine its timing (please don't even think about using system internal benchmarks...), then patch it and notice just how much speed you suddenly miss.
Compared to osx and linux distro updates, Windows (at least Win 7) is a true dinosaur. Imagine how many man-hours are wasted worldwide while waiting for Windows to update, with a reboot required pretty much every single time. Even if you don't consider the time spent applying a patch during shutdown, there is often the additional waiting during boot, and more often than not it seems Windows want an additional reboot during startup. Which sucks hard if you have default dual-boot into Linux, because you fire up the PC, choose Windows, go grab a coffee, and when you come back ... behold, there is the Linux login. Because Windows of course decided to do some additional rebooting.
Yes, osx some times goes offline for a while when applying a large system patch, but this happens only every few moons, whereas with Windows you know you are in for a system update ride if you haven't touched that particular install in a couple weeks.
Application sandboxing (Score:5, Insightful)
Like on a modern mobile device, sandbox your apps so they don't clutter the whole system and when they're erased, they're completely gone.
Re:Application sandboxing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Application sandboxing (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I think it's OK if programs have arbitrary file access because it allow apps such as I have on my Surface 2 (RT) to access network drives just as easily as they would access any other file. On Android or iOS, an application has to be specifically coded to access network drives but not so on Windows (or Windows RT).
I think one thing that could be added would be for the OS to keep track of all registry keys edited by an application and be able to remove them after an application is uninstalled. You could possibly do the same for files, but then there would be risk of the user losing data they had created with that application.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except that "modern mobile devices" get messed up and bogged down exactly the same way - even if the apps are supposed to be sandboxed.
There is one million os wide settings , or system apps and services that can get screwed up and their internally stored data will start causing issues.
Is the battery drain on your android the same as it was after factory reset ? Didn't think so.
Android doesn't sandbox apps.
iOS does, and it doesn't suffer from this problem. All software is given a directory that they can read from/write to. There are a few places outside that which can be read, but virtually nothing has write access (except for a few cases where a system app will expose access to it's data via inter-app communication. Calendar for example has this).
When you uninstall the app, that directory is deleted. There is no trace at all that the app ever existed.
Re: Application sandboxing (Score:5, Informative)
Android does sandbox apps. The default internal directory for each app can only be read/written by itself. Prior to version 4.2, the SD card was public and could be read/written by anyone. 4.2 and later, only parts of the SD cared are publicly readable and only parts are publicly writable.
In both cases before and after 4.2 uninstalling will remove the private directory. It will also remove any private directory on the SD card, so long as the app used the default location. Some apps don't, purposely, so their data will persist if reinstalled.
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Re: Application sandboxing (Score:5, Informative)
Android doesn't sandbox apps.
Er.... Yes it does. Absolutely it does, it's right there in the docs.
http://source.android.com/devi... [android.com]
Each app gets a separate Linux user, so it's data is separate and inaccessible to other apps.
Re: Application sandboxing (Score:5, Informative)
Android doesn't jail() apps (where the application cannot see outside the space it sits in), but it does sandbox apps. Apps get their own UID, and by default, they cannot get into other apps spaces. /system is usually root owned and the whole volume is read-only, for example.
Recent versions of Android use SELinux, so if an app does get access it shouldn't have, it still is stuck in the role it was assigned. For example, some app getting root will still be constrained even with UID 0, so it couldn't remount /system read-write, for example.
Android 4.3 adds onto that by adding SELinux rules onto the external SD card, limiting its use. If you have root, you can use a utility like NextApp SD fix to change SELinux rules back to how they were previously, or SELinuxModeChanger to entirely disable SELinux on your device. Disclaimer: SELinux is a good thing overall, and killing it does weaken security.
iOS's security model is weakened by a jailbreak, while Android's is unaffected if the user has root (assuming the user didn't use the su app to give a rogue app root [1].)
Of course, Android's model has its issues... the all or nothing aspect [2] (where one can choose what stuff an app has access to in iOS), for example.
[1]: Newer apps have a special permission on install which shows the user that it might want root, and the su binary will warn or not allow access to any apps that don't declare that permission in their manifest.
[2]: Cyanogen's privacy features help, as well as XPrivacy. XPrivacy gives extremely fine grained control to what an app can use or cannot use. However, I'd not consider this part of Android proper, though it should be.
Antecdotes != Evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
No shit (Score:3)
I've found that there are really no issues with regards to running a new OS for long periods of time. There was a time when regular reinstalls were a part of my regimen but that is long past. I reinstall only when there's a specific need. That doesn't mean I just put up with a slow computer either, I demand very fast performance from my systems. A reinstall just isn't needed to maintain that.
Likewise, components have gotten much better, and upgrades more incremental, so I've found the need to buy new hardwa
Re:Antecdotes != Evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
My parents both use Windows 7, and both computers have slowed to beyond frustration. Perhaps the reason why yours still works is that you learnt how to use Windows. Most people never do.
Re:Antecdotes != Evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to have to do a clean install of Windows every few years to keep things performing well, but I don't recall doing that since the switch to NT-based systems (starting with 2000 for me personally). For users that keep installing malware/adware/spyware on their systems, it seems entirely likely that they'd have to do a clean re-install to get rid of all the cruft every once in a while. Some of that stuff is pretty hard to remove, and can really cause issues with system stability and performance.
When people talk about "OS decay", they're probably dealing with systems that have either a huge amount of software churn, a lot of crapware, or very often both. It's not so much about "learning how to use Windows 7" so much as not installing free, sketchy utilities that contain system-hogging spyware. Or perhaps it's better termed "learning not to abuse your operating system". People do the same sort of nonsense with their phones - install dozens of apps that all want do stay resident for whatever reason, and then they wonder where the battery life went. Same deal - if you give people the freedom to customize their device, some people will inevitably make bad choices.
I don't know if this applies to you parents or not, but I've certainly seen plenty of cringe-inducing systems for people to know just enough to be dangerous. My parent don't know enough to really do anything of consequence on their computer other than check e-mail, surf the net, and play solitaire, so their system (Windows XP) has stayed nice and tidy for the last seven or eight years (I think) they've had that machine.
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Re:Antecdotes != Evidence (Score:5, Informative)
Likewise. I've got a Windows 7 gaming rig that has seen LOTS of installs and uninstalls, driver updates and Windows updates and have seen zero performance reduction.
Maybe this was a thing in Windows 95, but I'm not sure it's a thing now as long as you're not getting infected with malware.
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"You are welcome on my lawn."
Always wondered about people with fences around their property. Seems unnecessarily antisocial to me.
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Depending on where you live, anti-social can be a strong survival trait.
Re:Windows 7 gaming rig (Score:3)
I don't even think that was on the same motherboard and cpu (second gen i5), but I'm not really sure. I don't know if it's the same speed or not, but it runs fine.
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I think that's exactly what this article is talking about. That single piece of shit software being some version of Windows that was either pre-installed or that they installed.
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My ten year old Macs are as fast as they where when I bought them.
If you have speed issues on a Mac you likely caught one of the rare viruses or trojans!
That whole 'degrading of an OS' thing does not occur on unix based systems!
Re:Antecdotes != Evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that unix is magical, but there are several very important differences that make unix systems far less susceptible to these problems than windows...
1, The biggest difference is probably the use of package management on unix vs arbitrary binary installers on windows... with a package manager, every install, update and uninstall is controlled by the same process which keeps track of what got installed and is able to cleanly remove it again, with windows an "installer" is just a binary program that you are trusting to write files all over the place but you have no real idea what its doing or if its working correctly. With the package manager its very easy to identify what package installed any given file etc. If you go outside of the package manager on unix and try to overwrite system packages by hand you can have serious problems too.
2, Transparency - Unix systems are much simpler and better understood, the boot process is usually just a series of scripts for instance, the filesystem is laid out in a mostly logical hierarchy and most configuration is stored in individual human readable text files, its much easier to understand exactly whats going on and much more difficult for poorly written programs to hide performance crippling cruft in unexpected places.
3, Lack of third party drivers - on most unix systems, drivers typically ship with the OS, get updated when the OS does and get tested together... Windows systems typically have a random collection of disparate drivers which sometimes don't play well together or with updates to other parts of the system. The other problems mentioned above also apply to drivers as well as userland.
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Many applications install the startup widget without asking, and often without informing the user at all. It could be solved through the use of a proper package manager and standard package format so that the package manager rather than an arbitrary installer program actually controls the installation and always gives the user the choice.
Looks you never used OS/2 :) (Score:2)
bennet haselton under a psuedonym? (Score:2)
j/k this post was only 1 paragraph, instead of 3 libraries of congress. The style and narrative is the same though. =/
It's the Windows Installer's fault (Score:2, Interesting)
Installed applications in Windows should be entirely self-contained. They should have their own directory, their own temp files, and their own registry hive. When the application is removed, all of this should vanish as well.
Re:It's the Windows Installer's fault (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to see package dependencies too. Microsoft applications are every much as convoluted as Linux apps when it comes to the files they depend upon. DLLs, shared directories, etc. But when uninstalling the applications they don't always uninstall the shared stuff cleanly. Ie, an app wants vbrun300.dll or such, so you visit the relevant Microsoft site and get it, but then you uninstall the original application but the dll is left behind; and there is no uninstaller for these libraries, they don't appear in the control panel.
I used to have a utility that would monitor all system changes during installation so that it could clean up later when uninstalling. Almost every time there would be some junk left over even after a successful uninstall. There would even be junk left over if you installed and immediately uninstalled without ever using the application.
Not possible (Score:2)
I personally never experienced that for daily use. Installing/uninstalling applications and updates do since there are always some left-over garbage, but that's simply not addressable unless Windows kills all non-standard installers and forces them to play by Microsoft's rule (sadly even their own left garbage, but it's the first step to make them manageable), as it is on various Linux distributions.
With SSD, since it gets slower with more writes, a reborn system wouldn't be faster. It'd be pointless and yo
Of course not (Score:5, Insightful)
You may find this interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
Vague click-bait (Score:2)
Excuse Me? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Excuse Me? (Score:5, Funny)
I heard you have to reverse the direction of the SATA cable to clean that crap out. Same goes for slow broadband - either reverse the Ethernet cable or turn the WiFi router upside down.
LOL. You expect MS to fix the problem ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... let alone understand it ? /sarcasm Naive ...
The continual bloat of _registry_ is the cause of the problem. That is not going away anytime soon.
Hmm, so why don't Unix machines have this problem ... gee, maybe because they don't use a single bloated binary config file.
Re: (Score:3)
No but the Dumb-ass developers and Distro makers throw config files all over hell in random places.
If your config files are not in /etc or ~/.appname then the developer is a complete moron. /opt/dev/random/stinky/appname/config.cfg is NOT acceptable.
Re:LOL. You expect MS to fix the problem ... (Score:5, Funny)
As for the registry, there's a great front end that fully resembles a file system view...
I've called regedit.exe a lot of things over the years, and great was never one of them.
Re:LOL. You expect MS to fix the problem ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Registry bloat is not a problem, it's clueless users who cannot maintain their system.
In other words, it's a problem. A solution that requires all users to have technical knowledge isn't a solution, it's a fantasy.
Windows XP was different... (Score:4, Informative)
XP was fast as hell until you patched it up to SP3. Microsoft borked the hell out of that OS. Windows 7 I have not had the gradual slowdown problem at all.
Decay is required... (Score:5, Informative)
for their business model to function...and they won't break it.
NO! (Score:3, Informative)
NO!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
There is an easy workaround (Score:5, Interesting)
Hu? (Score:5, Insightful)
No idea what TFA is talking about.. Only "decay" I've noticed is caused by people getting suckered into installing malware.
Dealing with slowdowns (Score:3)
Even if Windows slows down over time, there's easy ways to deal with it.
Since Windows XP, you have a program called "MSConfig" that allows you to remove any startup programs, especially ones that are pure redundancy or are otherwise not useful.
And with modern systems - Web browsers slow down the system more than anything junk that accumulates in the OS. I've had both Firefox and Chrome running at the same time, with the resulting commit charge around 8GB, sometimes approaching 12GB. Once I stopped using one of the two browsers, the constant thrashing stopped, and everything else is much more responsive. (Firefox is still freezing, but that's a memory leak issue.)
Betteridge's law... (Score:4, Interesting)
Betteridge's law of headlines:
Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by no.
I'll believe it when I see it. It's not just Windows that has this problem, after all. Android and Mac suffer from it, and even Linux isn't immune (or there'd be no Paco [sourceforge.net]).
The problem I have with this... (Score:5, Insightful)
So.... what, then?
This is a serious question. I'm a user of MSFT products. Until certain apps get ported to Linux, I'm likely to continue to be a user of MSFT products. But the OS to me has never been the app. It's a program loader and resource manager in which I run the apps that I actually use. I have no interest in new versions of the OS, as long as it'll still run my programs. I was one of the people who didn't leave XP until forced. And I won't leave Win7 until forced. I don't look forward to OS upgrades, I want to get work done. It seems to me that this frame of mind directly contradicts Microsoft's business model of endless costly upgrades. How are endless non-costly upgrades going to work for them? (It certainly works for me, but I don't really believe it yet.)
system (Score:4, Insightful)
As you add and remove apps, as Windows writes more and more temporary and junk files, over time, a system just slows down.
Yeah, it's a damn hard problem to solve. No surprise it's taken them 20 years to figure out that you could just put all of the files that belong to one application into a few folders exclusive to that application and then wipe them when the app is removed. Instead of, say, the absolute dumbest thing you can do, which is scattering them all over the place without keeping a record so you are absolutely guaranteed to never, ever, find them again.
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Your server isn't getting games installed on it, which put all kinds of settings in the registry, then removed later when the game is old and tired, leaving behind cruft (including DRM bullsit) in the registry.
When a program is UNinstalled, all traces of it should be gone. Apple took a different approach, which arguably works far better. Even if stuff is left behind, it just takes up a bit of disk space, and doesn't affect the system at all.
Re: (Score:3)
Not really. It's just bad design.
Your server isn't getting games installed on it, which put all kinds of settings in the registry, then removed later when the game is old and tired, leaving behind cruft (including DRM bullsit) in the registry.
When a program is UNinstalled, all traces of it should be gone. Apple took a different approach, which arguably works far better. Even if stuff is left behind, it just takes up a bit of disk space, and doesn't affect the system at all.
You'd think so, but it's pretty common to uninstall a broken program, then re-install it. Keeping the old parameter settings makes it easier (sometimes!) to re-install, since you don't have to set it all up from scratch. Network settings are a case where I often benefitted from this behavior.
Then there's shared files and components such as DLLs. It's often quite difficult to reliably determine when the last using application has been removed, especially if people have been brute-forcing stuff instead of usi
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. It's just bad design.
Your server isn't getting games installed on it, which put all kinds of settings in the registry, then removed later when the game is old and tired, leaving behind cruft (including DRM bullsit) in the registry.
When a program is UNinstalled, all traces of it should be gone. Apple took a different approach, which arguably works far better. Even if stuff is left behind, it just takes up a bit of disk space, and doesn't affect the system at all.
Yes it is bad design. It is bad design by the people who create applications. The level of incompetence is staggering and this includes all the big name vendors.
Funny you should mention Apple. The Windows version of iTunes (the shittiest piece of software ever written) installs support files for 34 different languages. There is no option to only select the language you want at install time and the user is completely unaware that iTunes has just dropped approximately 4,400 un-needed files onto his hard drive.
But wait! It gets better! iTunes also creates a registry entry FOR EVERY SINGLE FUCKING FILE!! I am not making this up. ~4,400 files AND registry entries that can be deleted with absolutely no effect on the functioning of iTunes.
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy shit.
I mean, it's general knowledge that iTunes for Windows is most likely the worst piece of software ever written... But what you describe takes it to a whole new level of stupidity.
Hell, it almost makes it sound like they're trying to slow down Windows on purpose...
Re: Here's the solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Hell, it almost makes it sound like they're trying to slow down Windows on purpose...
Bingo
Re: Here's the solution (Score:4, Interesting)
I just looked through my registry, and find no sign of these 4,400 entries you mention.
Not saying iTunes hasn't dumped a lot of gratuitous crap into my registry, because it has. But this "entry for every file" thing? Not... in evidence.
Re: (Score:3)
Well..... I'm not for one minute saying that iTunes on windows doesn't suck. But I couldn't find these registry entries anywhere. Care to share where you found them? If iTunes continues to run without them there, and doesn't recreate them, then how do you know iTunes put them there in the first place?
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
You should be able to install 1000 programs, uninstall them all, and your system should be identical to what it was before. Anything else is a failure.
The very existence of the registry is wrong. Operating systems like Unix, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, etc. don't have a registry, and don't have any significant "OS Decay".
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft went further than just having a bad registry, they essentially forced developers to use it if they wanted to get the approved sticker (ie, to say "works with Windows 95" or such).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Operating systems like Unix, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, etc. don't have a registry,...
True, and clearly a win.
...and don't have any significant "OS Decay".
ROFLMAO. IME, the only thing more painful than maintaining a Windows system over the long term is maintaining a *nix system over the long term.
Let's consider Linux. First, you probably get to choose between a stable or a not stable version of your distro. Choose stable and you're OK as long as you don't need to run any software released in the last 3 years and you're OK with being forced to upgrade the whole OS after maybe 2 years anyway (which will quite possibly trash your entire m
Re: Here's the solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Either way, if you want anything that hasn't got into your distribution's package management system yet, you're almost invariably forced into compiling your own software and manually installing it with makefiles. Those might, if you're really lucky, also offer a make uninstall option that actually does cleanly uninstall. That might, if you're even luckier, still work six months later, as long as no-one inadvertently installed a new version of the manually compiled code over the top to "upgrade" it, or just ran make distclean without thinking leaving you with no idea what make uninstall should have done. In any case, Linux is going to enforce absolutely no system hygiene at any point in this process.
If you want to install software that hasn't got into your distribution's package management system - you should compile it, make package and install package. How do you expect your OS to enforce system hygiene if you do not use correct procedures to install packages? If you install by 'make install' you are basically just copy bunch of files somewhere.
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When a program is UNinstalled, all traces of it should be gone. Apple took a different approach, which arguably works far better. Even if stuff is left behind, it just takes up a bit of disk space, and doesn't affect the system at all.
Apple took a different approach on iOS.
OS X suffers the same problems as Windows, although perhaps not as severe.
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Even with an SSD, if applications are leaving behind shit in the various places shit can run on startup, you might be losing CPU or memory to some task that doesn't need to be there.
You can have this problem on other OSes like OSX and Linux too, but Windows is the only OS where the SOP is to make a mess of things. Don't like an app on OSX or linux? Just delete them. most of the garbage goes with it.
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Compile and install a program on linux with ./configure, make and make install? then you will likely be left with no means to uninstall it at all. And I have no idea why there are non-library files in /usr/lib.
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is that you have to know what you're doing.
The problem is that it's not automated on an application level.
Even those tools which market themselves as cleaners of registry often pick up items which are still needed and delete them or miss things which aren't. The core problem is that for the average user keeping the system clean is not possible on a windows machine and an attempt to clean it often breaks things in strange ways.
Heck just thinking back to DLL hell days "It appears this file is no l
Re: Here's the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Even with an SSD, if applications are leaving behind shit in the various places shit can run on startup, you might be losing CPU or memory to some task that doesn't need to be there.
Win Rot is alive and well in Windows 7.
Both my gaming machine and personal laptop have serious performance issues after 8 or so months (OK, the laptop is 2 years old but I use that infrequently). Both have SSD's, both were blisteringly fast when first installed.
Surprisingly enough, my work laptop is fine but I dont install much on there.
As a sysadmin, the biggest issue I have with Linux servers are the servers running out of space (mostly because some slovenly developer or DBA didn't bother writing a script to clean up log files or other output so it just grows until the disk runs out of space). Clogging up disk space with garbage is sort of *nix rot. Whilst Linux and OS X have no registry to clog up things, running out of disk space is a lot more painful on *nix than it is on Windows.
Very few *nix machines ever get used in the same abusive fashion as most people treat their windows boxen though.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Both my gaming machine and personal laptop have serious performance issues after 8 or so months"
Meanwhile I've been running the same Windows 7 install since the tail end of 2009. That's with a fuckton of install, uninstall, and the occasional defrag and registry cleaning, especially on this tiny 120GB disk. Still runs exactly as it did back then.
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Funny)
Meanwhile I've been running the same Windows 7 install since the tail end of 2009. That's with a fuckton of install, uninstall, and the occasional defrag and registry cleaning, especially on this tiny 120GB disk. Still runs exactly as it did back then.
Its entirely possible you're slowing down at the same pace as your machine.
Re: (Score:3)
Whilst Linux and OS X have no registry to clog up things, running out of disk space is a lot more painful on *nix than it is on Windows.
If a Linux machine is left with zero space, it will still boot but you will not have any log of it since there is no space to write it.
If a Windows machine is left with zero space, it will fail to boot.
So failing to boot is less painfull ?
Your logic escape me
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember in the transition between INI files and the registry (how I miss the days when applications had their own discrete text-based configuration files... oh wait, *nix still does!), and Microsoft sent out countless missives all but ordering developers to move to the registry. The registry was the approved place to store configurations, likely, I'm sure, because sticking all user settings in a single hive that could be passed around from workstation to workstation for roaming profiles.
Of course, the down side has always been that the registry just becomes cluttered with crap, particularly on a system that sees a lot of software installed, updated, reinstalled and uninstalled. Throw in there nearly two decades' worth of COM objects being incremented and decremented unsuccessfully, and a computer that's been running for five or six years, and fragmentation of the file system, and it can lead to just awful response times.
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And then there was a transition to C:\Documents and Settings\username\AppData ? (or \Users\usernames\AppData which is the same)
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Except there wasn't. Well, there was. A bit. Sometimes. Naturally, this half-baked approach actually made the problems worse.
Even today and with native Windows applications, many aren't very well behaved in following the "standards" here, because Microsoft did such a terrible job of promoting good practices.
Anything that isn't a native Windows application -- including almost every darling of the open source world, for a start -- probably ignores not only the application data directory but also the program files directories and insists on spewing its crap all over your filesystem and environment. Oh, and $DEITY help you if you need to do anything with Cygwin, and $CHORUS_OF_DEITIES help you if you have more than one ported application that requires Cygwin.
It is telling that you can't even schedule a backup of the "official" place to store documents without considerable effort, because Windows itself sets up so many links that most backup tools can't handle them.
And that's before you get idiots like the Chrome team at Google who think it's clever to install executable software in your data directory in order to deliberately circumvent Windows' normal security model, just so their auto-updater can do things it shouldn't without anything silly like troubling the user for permission. I'm always a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't, with considerable and legitimate justification, flagged Chrome's installer/updater software as malware and automatically removed it at some point.
On the bright side, if Microsoft can actually manage to produce an operating system with a sensible filesystem structure and application installation/update/uninstallation tools that actually enforce that structure, they might yet salvage the Windows brand and convince significant parts of their potential market to upgrade again.
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ClickOnce
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Re: Here's the solution (Score:3)
If it is the application developer's fault (and frankly, the idea that every app has to be absolutuely perfect otherwise one permanently jacks up their OS is idiotic beyond belief), then why is the ONLY a problem in Windows?
You can install/uninstall crap on other OS's with no accumulative or persistent performance issues. Why? Because they weren't designed by idiots.
I have one W7 install that is *permanently* in limbo, unable to install Visual Studios redistributables because of a W
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is the kind of answer I do not want to hear: "The typical cost of hard drives is less than .15 Cents per Gigabyte. This means that a WinSxS folder that is 6GB costs around .90 Cents, and uses slightly more than 1 Percent of the drive. That's about the same cost as a large bag of potato chips. " (cite [microsoft.com]). Yeah, so? Maybe I'm on a laptop with a small SSD? Maybe it's a VM that I have a dozen copies of? Don't waste my resources and then try to talk me out of caring.
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This means that a WinSxS folder that is 6GB costs around .90 Cents, and uses slightly more than 1 Percent of the drive.
I think you just don't understand what WinSxS is, how it works, and what the problem is that it is designed to address, suggest you start reading [microsoft.com] a bit more.
The reason the old Sxs assemblies need to be kept, is that installed software may require the usage of an old assembly.
Just because an update has superceded a certain library version, does not mean that all applications that still
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Informative)
Then again, winsxs is only one of several directories that often have people asking, "can I delete this?" See also C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution, System Restore, and Windows.old, and c:\windows\installer. They are a mix of necessary and junk. From end to end, Windows is designed to keep everything, forever, just in case, instead of keeping track of things properly in the first place.
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I take it you and the parent haven't actually used any other operating systems? They're not all like this.
I provided a link to a Microsoft-provided process that can often delete gigabytes of garbage from these directories, if you go to the effort of making it. The whole setup is a wasteful mess.
Re: Here's the solution (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Here's the solution (Score:5, Informative)
This means that a WinSxS folder that is 6GB costs around .90 Cents, and uses slightly more than 1 Percent of the drive.
I think you just don't understand what WinSxS is, how it works, and what the problem is that it is designed to address, suggest you start reading [microsoft.com] a bit more.
The reason the old Sxs assemblies need to be kept, is that installed software may require the usage of an old assembly.
Just because an update has superceded a certain library version, does not mean that all applications that still rely on it should be broken.
When you've got a 19 GB Win SxS folder on a 40 GB HDD (which is plenty for a server and expensive on Tier 0 SSD's) it's a serious issue. 19 GB is not ridiculous, it's not even usual for a 2 yr old server that's been updated regularly. 19 GB across 250 virtual servers is a serious waste of space. Even 6 GB is a massive costs in infrastructure. Not every update needs to keep dozens of updates. Fortunately Microsoft has addressed this problem (as of April this year, so relatively quick in Microsoft time) so that the WinSxS folder can be cleaned up.
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Which is plenty for a server and expensive on Tier 0 SSD's
Microsoft's guidance on this is pretty clear last I checked; 32 gigabytes is the absolute minimum disk size for installing 64-bit versions of Windows server, and they wind up recommending a minimum of 80gb storage for most deployments, and their docs go on to state, you need to take into account the roles that will be installed, lifetime of the server and constant growth of the boot drive an additional 20gb per year due to updates. You do no
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32 GB "absolute minimum" and 80 GB recommended? An additional 20 GB per year because of updates? Are you butt-fucking kidding me? Do you Microsofties ever take a peek at the competition? Has it never occurred to you that this is not normal or even reasonable?
As a sysadmin who deals with both Windows and Linux (Debian and Red Hat mainly) I can say that most vendors seriously over estimate their minimum requirements for servers. 40 GB is plenty for a 2008 R2 server, 60 if you're feeling generous.
An extra 20 GB for 40 servers is 800 GB on tier 0 storage (and yes, for these 40 servers they are required to be on SSD).
Its not just MS, regularly see tiny little packages designed for accounting or some such that have stupid requirements for a low number of users.
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Years ago, people would joke that "emacs" stood for "Eight megabytes and constantly swapping". At the time, it was meant as an insult. These days, 8Mb is hardly anything.
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Servers don't have anywhere near as much software installed/removed as a desktop machine, so this is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Funny)
Will Slashdot finally admit to being paid by Microsoft for positive press?
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You consider this article positive? Troll logic astounds me!
Slashdot is the Fox News of the open source world. If you aren't blaming Microsoft for everything from Ebola to your dog's farts, you're a paid shill.
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That has nothing to do with OS 'decay': it's the user installing - wittingly or unwittingly - too many resource hungry programs. The solution is simple enough: just uninstall whatever is not actually needed.
no, its not quite that simple.
remember defragging hard drives? remember windows registry files? remember the "add or remove programs" control panel? all of these things represent design decisions that cause computers to be cruftier over time.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
As a counterpoint to this; I had a reasonable machine for work. Win7 Pro, then IT got hold of it and connected it to the new domain etc; now it is much slower. Booting, shutting down, launching programs...everything is slower then the day before.
Well known problem. Once attached to a domain, Windows attempts to do all kinds of stupid things. One of the most common problems is the open/save file dialog. The OS attempts to display it, then blocks until it contacts the domain servers to look up the user's actual name. Then there are similar delays that happen as it goes out and probes each drive, which is a problem if they are mapped network drives as the display waits until everything is built before the UI appears.
On a machine that is disconnected from the domain, perhaps a laptop away from the office, it gets even worse. Internally there is a 45 second delay on each of the network probes, and between Windows 2000 through Windows 7 they all fired sequentially. So if you had your own friendly name plus three mapped drives, that's three minutes of waiting for network connections to time out. It is somewhat faster under Windows 8, but in bad cases can still take ages.
For these specific issues they will not fix the root problems of the shell blocking until after data is loaded or probing the domain for security settings as it would break many shell plugins. It can be made partially better by disabling some of the features; they include disabling certain group policies on shell extensions, turning off certain domain security and SCAPI settings, and disabling drive mappings whenever possible. When disconnected, removing all VPN lookups and disabling proxy detections can also help. Even with those improvements, attaching a machine to a domain introduces an immediate performance penalty on everything shell-related.
Another similar set of problems is apps that try to probe the MRU file list when files are on the network. Many parts of the OS try to cache things based on prior use, and once you're wired in to the corporate network these probes (which stupidly are often blocking tasks) can take seconds to run while on the network, or minutes to run when they time out when off the corporate network.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
If IT "had their way" with it, they might have also loaded it up with antivirus or some other bloatware.
Re:OS Decay is largekly a myth. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi,
You're incorrect.
As I stated, the registry as an optimized database. A few extra records do not affect query time.
I will be happy to met money that my 3 year old install of Windows 7 will not have any speed decrease over a new install on the same hardware.
If the OS slows down, it is because there is something causing it that you can remove. It isn't due to "decay".
Re:OS Decay is largekly a myth. (Score:4, Informative)
I know it is a database, and slightly optimized. "A few records" would not affect query time, especially if they were not in the query path.
What about a lot of records? And how about a lot of records that are in the query path?
It's a database. IIRC it uses B* trees. Search time is proportional to the logarithm of total number of records. Even "a lot" of records may not cause the height of the tree to increase. You generally need to *square* the number of records to double to search time.
At the same time, the registry hives are really, really robust. Windows keeps to redundant copies and even protects writes through the kernel transaction manager as well as the journal of the file system. Corruption is virtually impossible until the hard drive decays to a state where even the redundancy cannot make up for it anymore. Unlike text files, both metadata *and* data are guaranteed to either succeed in an atomic transaction.
(compare to the Unix way, where config files can be corrupted if the system/power fails during a write: File system do not guarantees *data* consistency for regular files, only *metadata* consistency, i.e. the fs guarantees that its internal structures will not cause it to go haywire on your files afterwards)
I suspect that this is actually the reason why there's a myth about corruption of the registry: With all of the redundancy, the registry is often the last component to fail when a drive succumbs. At the same time, Windows will refuse to start *if* the registry is corrupted. At that point the drive is in such a bad state, that even restoring/repairing the registry corruption will not save the drive.
Re:unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
The ironic thing is that third party companies have been able to repackage Windows programs so only one file is needed to run it. Not an installer... just an executable that provides a virtual environment for the program, and redirects all file and Registry changes to a specific directory in the user's homedir. A couple examples: VMWare ThinApp or Evalaze.
Yes, it takes a bit to create a clean system (VMs are perfect for this with snapshots), pop a "before" run, install the software, then click that it is done. The result is a single file that takes every single change the installer did, and puts it in a sandbox/partition.
If third party companies can do this, why can't MS extend their virtual redirects (which are used with some legacy applications to redirect stuff that would be stored in Program Files to the user's homedir) to include everything the program does? Container functionality is a core part of some other operating systems (RedHat 7), so why not Windows? That way, uninstallation of a program is just tossing the file it is in.
Sandboxes are not new either. I use sandboxie to ensure that what is in my web browser stays in my web browser and doesn't get out. This isn't a 100% solution since an undocumented MS API call would allow a program to "leak" out, but it is usable.