Ask Slashdot: Are Post-Install Windows Slowdowns Inevitable? 517
blackest_k writes: I recently reinstalled Windows 7 Home on a laptop. A factory restore (minus the shovelware), all the Windows updates, and it was reasonably snappy. Four weeks later it's running like a slug, and now 34 more updates to install. The system is clear of malware (there are very few additional programs other than chrome browser). It appears that Windows slows down Windows! Has anyone benchmarked Windows 7 as installed and then again as updated? Even better has anybody identified any Windows update that put the slug into sluggish?
Related: an anonymous reader asks: Our organization's PCs are growing ever slower, with direct hard-drive encryption in place, and with anti-malware scans running ever more frequently. The security team says that SSDs are the only solution, but the org won't approve SSD purchases. It seems most disk scanning could take place after hours and/or under a lower CPU priority, but the security team doesn't care about optimization, summarily blaming sluggishness on lack of SSDs. Are they blowing smoke?
Security team (Score:5, Insightful)
The security team runs the scans during the daytime because that's when everybody's laptop is powered on and connected to the network. Too many people shut off their machines at night, or carry their laptops home, so the scans won't reliably run if they do them then.
There is probably some kind of creative, adaptive scheduling solution that could fix this, but their management software might not have that kind of support.
Re: (Score:2)
There may be some incremental improvements that the security people are stonewalling on; but certainly nothing that is going t
Re: (Score:2)
On-access scanning of something already scanned is redundant but A/V cant really do that because the mechanics of ensuring that a file hasn't been modified, i.e., infected since last scan is difficult. Despite that it's not that big of a deal and with faster storage and I/O handling in general it's becoming less of an issue.
Re: (Score:3)
I have one coworker I have told repeatedly not to shut down when she goes home so that the system can run updates at night.
she shuts down and ten minutes into her work morning her computer reboots on her. every single week.
Re:Security team (Score:5, Interesting)
You can just remove the shutdown option on the start menu either locally with the windows registry or remotely using AD. We did this for a bunch of our key servers at work because a couple of people kept fat fingering the servers.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem isn't when the scheduled scan runs, but how it runs. My corporation forced a really shitty solution upon us (because it was cheap) and when scheduled scan runs, it eats up resources and is also prioritized. it's fun when the applications you use to do your job are slowed down significantly because a background process which you don't care about takes over. On top of that, the weekly scheduled scan verifies every god damn file on disk. I scheduled my lunch according to the scheduled scan.
And the
Re:Security team (Score:5, Funny)
"There is probably some kind of creative, adaptive scheduling solution that could fix this..."
The one I've found to work the best is, boot Windows an hour before you need to use it.
Re:Security team (Score:5, Insightful)
The security team runs the scans during the daytime because that's when everybody's laptop is powered on and connected to the network.
Coincidentally, the staff also do most of their work during the daytime.
Too many people shut off their machines at night, or carry their laptops home, so the scans won't reliably run if they do them then.
Yes, damn those idiots who take their laptop out of the office so they can actually do their jobs. Those crazy kids are messing everything up.
Seriously, if you have security policies that are interfering unreasonably with your staff's ability to do its job -- and if you are dramatically slowing down their systems or causing disruptive behaviour like reboots during the working day, that is undermining the staff's ability to do its job -- then you're doing it wrong. IT is there to help people do whatever it is you do, not the other way around.
Re: (Score:3)
"IT is there to help people do whatever it is you do, not the other way around."
That's how you see it, not how IT, nor Management, nor lots of other orgs see it. WMIPRSRV and SCCM kick off a 5 o'clock because that's "close of business". It makes getting out of the office late difficult because:
1) WMIPRSRV and SCCM use a lot of disk I/O
2) Windows NT kernel sucks at heavy I/O
3) I'm trying to finish something quickly when the computer is slower than normal
4) It is close of business, and you should have finis
Re: (Score:3)
Until some drone with mapped server drives gets cryptolocker and gets everyone's files encrypted
If you have a network that is wide open to "drones with mapped server drives getting cryptolocker" and causing the entire organisation to lose a day of work, the kind of scheduled scans mentioned above probably aren't going to protect you anyway.
To defeat a threat like cryptolocker you need real-time measures to prevent it operating in the first place: proper scans on incoming mail and web downloads, internal firewalls, and so on. To limit the scope of the damage if cryptolocker manages to get in somehow an
Re:Security team (Score:4)
They shouldn't be doing their work at home - which is what the GP said.
Oh, OK then. It's not like full- or even part-time telecommuting is one of the most advantageous perks offered by many modern workplaces in terms of productivity or staff morale, so I don't suppose the business will suffer too much. Should I also recall our entire sales force and tell them they can't work on customer sites any more?
In other news, please be aware that due to a change in company IT policy, next time you get paged at 4am because of a network alert, remote access will not be permitted for security reasons. Instead, you will be required to get up, spend 20 minutes driving to the office, log in from a properly authorised and physically connected terminal, type the same one CLI command you do every time that alert goes off to confirm that it's still just the sensor that is on the blink, type the same second CLI command you do every time to shut off the alarm, spend 20 minutes driving home again, and then go back to bed. Sleep tight.
Rule Engine? [Re:Security team] (Score:4, Funny)
We have a similar scan problem, but our co's policy is to not shut down PC's at night so that they can get Windows updates. But the scanning still happens during the day even if one leaves it on.
Couldn't a scan rule be put in place that only scans during the day IF the night scan didn't complete? Anybody know of a tool like that for McAfee? Does McAfee have a scripting language or scheduling rule engine? Or, a 3rd party add-on?
That way ONLY those who turn it off at night get "punished" by sluggishness. (Or if a Windows update interrupts an anti-virus scan, which may happen from time to time, but that's better than always day-scanning.)
McAfee could make a nice profit even by selling such a rule tool. It's like being paid to create a problem and being paid again to solve it: Kinda like Congress :-)
Not necessarily windows (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is when you start installing other programs. In your post you mentioned installing anti-malware. Every time you open a file it takes 10s to 100s of milliseconds to scan it. The problem is exacerbated if you have an antivirus program, then every file gets scanned twice. If you want preformance then turn off both and do scans when the user isn't working on their machine.
I am afraid the answer is, "Yes!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask Slashdot: Are Post-Install Windows Slowdowns Inevitable?
When patches and updates together end up being larger than the original [OEM] install, you can see why the slowdown is inevitable.
Sounds easy to see why. No?
Re: (Score:2)
Ask Slashdot: Are Post-Install Windows Slowdowns Inevitable?
When patches and updates together end up being larger than the original [OEM] install, you can see why the slowdown is inevitable.
Sounds easy to see why. No?
No... Why don't my other OS's slow down when I update them?
Re: (Score:2)
Does your other OS hold on to outdated versions of system files for compatibility reasons, like windows 7+ does?
(Note, research the purpose of the WINSXS folder.)
Re: (Score:2)
Does your other OS hold on to outdated versions of system files for compatibility reasons, like windows 7+ does?
You can blow away all that stuff, and the uninstall files too, and it doesn't make Windows any faster.
I have a feeling that a lot of these Windows security patches are dodging race conditions with delays, and they develop actual fixes for thisversion+1
Re: (Score:3)
The answer is, pretty much, always yes. How many versions of GTK+ does the average linux distro come with? libav? gstreamer? Heck, the qt3 compatibility library is built-in to qt4. Then there's the 32-bit stuff on 64-bit systems which, granted, is optional, but almost always installed for something.
Re: (Score:3)
My other OS is android and yes it is much slower than before. The constant updates add features that didn't make it to release date and everything is in an unfinished state. Too bad if desktop applications follow this trend.
Re: (Score:2)
Those hundreds of MB of security patches are just the same binaries that already exist on your system, simply modified and re-compiled to patch security vulnerabilities. They don't appreciably change the runtime requirement of the OS. The *disk space* requirements ARE affected, but only because Windows retains the older copies of the systems files via it's "snapshot" system so you can roll back if needed. Keep in mind that this has NO effect on the runtime requirements of the OS.
Tinfoil hat on (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't help it, and maybe it's my imagination and perception bias, but to me it seems to be that as soon as a new version of Windows is approaching or even out the door, the old version starts to slow down considerably. And like clockwork you can rely on MS themselves and various testers claiming (of course with good benchmark proof) that the new Windows is so much faster than the old one was.
The rational person in me would say that after a bazillion patches and service packs, the stitched together hodgepodge is of course crawling along because there's a lot of dead weight being lugged around and worked around.
The tinfoil hat enthusiast in me on the other hand claims that it's deliberate to make the new Windows look better despite being essentially the same.
Re: (Score:2)
Just another anecdote:
I just whipped out my iPhone 1, and it is downright snappy compared to my iPhone 4s, and from a usability perspective in terms of "snappiness" comparable to my wife's iPhone 5s. Of course the iPhone 1 does a lot less than the newer models, but certainly appears to me that it did the core things just as fast (calling, messaging, etc).
Re: Tinfoil hat on (Score:5, Informative)
That tinfoil must make you see the past better. Back in the DOS days I would regularly see articles about how yet another researcher had decompiled DOS to uncover yet another instance of code in DOS that could only have been put there to slow down a competitor's product. In the early internet days, researchers would find instance after instance where Win95 was sending your personal data back to MS. They would deny it until it became undeniable, then say it was a bug (you know, a bug that accidentally searched for and collected your data, then accidentally waited till you were on-line, then accidentally opened a connection with MS owned servers, then accidentally transmitted your data, then accidentally covered it's tracks) and say they would issue a patch, which would then take forever.
It was common knowledge on Usenet that the mantra at MS before DOS 3.3 was released was "DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run."
Until recently, I used NetWare protocols over my home network but a Windows update (unrelated to networking) turned that off for no darn good reason.
So, I don't put ANYTHING past Microsoft. Of course, I wouldn't put anything past ANY of the big tech companies.
I have supported a LOT of PCs from DOS 6.2 up and I have noticed the same thing you speculated about. In addition to the slow, progressive slowdown that occurs over time, I have seen the "down-slowing" ramp up just as the next version is coming out. AND just after upgrades. Now this could just be all the cruft reaching critical mass, thus indicating the need for an upgrade. But I think there are plenty of valid reasons to be suspicious.
No way (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't help it, and maybe it's my imagination and perception bias, but to me it seems to be that as soon as a new version of Windows is approaching or even out the door, the old version starts to slow down considerably.
Correlation is not causation. The guys at MS are professional engineers--they may have different philosophies or coding styles or project priorities than you do, but they're not slowing things down in order to make you buy the next product. You're much more likely to run into that with a local guy or a disreputable company. And you might not like MS, but they haven't been a disreputable company for decades. Even if they had an inclination to be (and they don't), they're too big in the business-to-business space to risk their reputation.
What happens is your systems get slower as they get older, other systems get faster, you install more stuff, your drives fragment a bit, you add extra hardware, maybe you get malware you don't know about, etc...
Time for some regulation? (Shock! Horror!) (Score:3)
It's hard to do actual research as an end user when you're talking about devices costing hundreds of bucks and you have a software environment that won't let you move back if you "upgrade" and it renders your device effectively unusable. This is a very convenient situation for the device manufacturers and the people who don't want to bother with things like backward compatibility and long-term support of their software, of course.
But count me in for at least half a dozen similar anecdotes among friends and
Nope (Score:4, Informative)
1. Your operating system is very old at nearly 7 years. Time flies bye and I laugh at the companies who are angry at the prospect of starting a WIndows 10 migration acting somehow that 7 just came out last year and is all so new etc. The point is you will have 200 updates and the .net framework will need to re-compile to your cpu dependent architecture each time an update hits for better performance. Have fun with that one.
2,
Windows ROT is soo last decade with WindowsXP.
It is caused by poorly written programs that run as admin and write to the registry each time they run. So you run the app 200 days a year and it creates 200 forks of the registry that need to launch in parallel at startup :-)
With UAC WIndows 7 doesn't have this problem.
3. Do you own an Samsung EVO SSD?
If so they will slow to a crawl very rapidly without a patch. They will hang after a few months of heavy use for several seconds before a file even transfers. I only buy the pro drives. Go google this up as their is an engineering flaw which impacts the read due to the way the cells are manufactured.?
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the issue is also that newer versions of windows want to move away from just being an OS, and toward being an entertainment venue all of its own.
That's MS marketing and the UI graphic designers faults though.
Fun little thing to do:
Take a weak kneed intel Atom board, and do some simple office use tests with it with various older versions of windows. Start with NT4, then use Win2k, the XP, then 7, then 8.1. See how the ability to do simple things degrades as the OS expects more and more hardware just to draw the damned UI.
Now, realize that the biggest selling point for new windows versions is NOT a new shiny UI-- but continued security updates. Now you will understand why corporations get bitchy. They have something that works, on the hardware they already have-- but are going to be forced to buy a whole new iteration of hardware, to get updated software that gets updates against security threats-- because otherwise MS does not get money.
If it werent for the lack of security updates, win2k would be ideal for nearly all corporate drone installations.
(Note, there are other useful features that were added with each version of windows, and I am not discounting that. What I am saying is that even with those kernel space and user space feature enhancements, they could have been rolled into service packs for the older products, and you would have had more responsive product overall. The need to reinvent the OS constantly drives the need to constantly make it look different, (to set it apart from its predecessor), which constantly increases the HW requirements. It is pathological.)
Re: (Score:3)
Fun little thing to do:
Take a weak kneed intel Atom board, and do some simple office use tests with it with various older versions of windows. Start with NT4, then use Win2k, the XP, then 7, then 8.1. See how the ability to do simple things degrades as the OS expects more and more hardware just to draw the damned UI.
Go through Vista, 7, 8, and then 10. There would be no meaningful slowdown, and you might even notice that the computer would get slightly more snappy after each upgrade.
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like we hear this every time a new version of Windows is out (or about to come out): "Yes, $PREV_VERSION had this problem, and you are ignorant and silly for running it! $CURRENT_VERSION solves all these problems!"
And I'm sure a few years, when it turns out Windows 10 has the same issues, we'll be hearing it again.
Re: (Score:3)
It is caused by poorly written programs that run as admin and write to the registry each time they run. So you run the app 200 days a year and it creates 200 forks of the registry that need to launch in parallel at startup :-)
Um, the registry is an integral part of Windows. Lots of built in components read and write to it constantly. Fire up Process Monitor and you will quickly notice that there is lots of boilerplate registry accesses that go on that applications don't specifically perform (for example, if a program launches another program, Windows checks to see if there is an override in place for which application should actually be launched... in the registry). Registry access is a completely normal part of Windows, and is
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
wat?
Many many applications write to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software. Those actually go to C:\documents and settings\username\NTUSER.DAT.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Your operating system is very old at nearly 7 years. Time flies bye and I laugh at the companies who are angry at the prospect of starting a WIndows 10 migration acting somehow that 7 just came out last year and is all so new etc.
You know what I find even funnier? The answers I get when I ask what the value prop of windows 10 is over windows 7.
Not for me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Run the disk cleanup app under accessories -> system tools?
Select the updates/system files option. Now run the scan it will trim the SXS and temporary files used for system updates after your 7 system restarts.
Re: (Score:2)
Even with disk cleanup removing redundancies in the winSXS folder, it can still swell to be over 12gb in size.
A better solution is to turn NTFS compression on for the folder, then defragment the living shit out of it. (NTFS compression causes epic fragmentation.)
You dont want compression turned on as a rule, but when windows is basically warehousing data against an uncertain future, you might as well treat it like a "rarely used, if ever" archival store. The space is more valuable than the access speed in t
Re: (Score:2)
Windows 10 will help. Windows Server 2016 can install in just 8 gigs of space so my guess is 10.1 will be even more efficient
It already does that (Score:2)
It seems most disk scanning could take place after hours and/or under a lower CPU priority
It already does that. Deep scans are automatically scheduled by [more or less(?)] all antivirus and malware software for typical off hours. We use on-access scanning because it's a good idea. You would need hardware support to be "sure" that disk blocks hadn't changed while you weren't looking. And how sure are you? Are you going to trust your fs metadata? ha ha ha etc.
Windows without a SSD isn't worth it (Score:5, Informative)
Windows machines in recent years have become extremely bottlenecked by drive performance, especially in the case of laptops which are so popular in companies. Laptop hard drives are slow, capable of only about 80 IOPS which is about the same speed they were 10 years ago, whereas mainstream SSDs by comparison, can typically deliver 80,000 IOPS. Since once you get Windows loaded up with all it's random messy software it's disk access ends up being tons of tiny reads, IOPS is a much more important number than transfer rate, and SSDs are literally 1000x faster. It can mean the difference between a 20 minute operation and one that takes a few seconds.
If you are in any way in control over your corporate purchases, never *ever* buy another laptop without a SSD. It's false efficiency, wasting very expensive time to save a relatively cheap expense. 256GB SSDs are under $100 and will handle most corporate work just fine. Up to 1TB, the expense is almost negligible and it will pay for itself almost immediately. Your IT department will be happier, your workers will be happier, your machines will be more secure because scanning them is a lot less intrusive and can happen more often. Your IT department should have a pile of SSDs ready to be deployed into any machine that needs to be re-imaged or where the user needs the speed. Not doing so is wasting money.
> I recently reinstalled Windows 7 Home on a laptop. A factory restore (minus the shovelware), all the Windows updates
No you didn't. You *thought* you installed all the updates because Windows lied to you and said you had. Windows Update has a horrible habit of checking to see what updates are available **for the state of your machine right now** and then telling you that it's done installing updates when those are installed, when in truth there are pending updates that required previous updates to be installed before they could subsequently be installed that Windows Update won't tell you about until you re-discover what updates are available. After an install, force re-scan after every reboot to see what new updates are now available and when you reboot and re-scan and it says you are done, you are actually done.
Learn to preperly spec hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
things like this have been said about windows for decades. It's never been true. I know because I've had operational business machines at each version of windows running for over ten years each.
These types of problems happen *and are henced resolved with brand new way-more-powerful hardware) when multiple components aren't spec'd together.
Any given component has many bins. You can get any cpu at six levels of l3 cache, for example. Drives can be 5'400, 7'200, etc.
The trick is not to get the most possible performance (which is akin to buying a new machine a few years later). The trick is to match the performances across the various components, so a single component doesn't become the bottleneck.
Especially because some components, when acting as the bottleneck, can create serious slow-downs. Often actually making something else SLOWER will make the over-all machine much faster.
An over-simplified example is that a slow hard drive can create disk-thrashing scenarios -- one of the worst slow-downs common across the board. But a slow cpu will remain slow and steady, and never wind up thrashing the disk.
Learn to balance the vital components of a system, and it'll stay consistent for a decade.
(this was written on my 8-year-old vista machine, still working, still business, still gaming, still full-speed)
Inevitable, but doesn't really have to be bad (Score:4)
Windows update bug (Score:2)
There is a Windows update bug that will cause svchost to eat 1gb of ram everytime it does a Windows update check.
The workaround is to disable automatic updates and update manually, but that's not a good solution. The other fix is to upgrade to 10 in a month, since it doesn't have this bug.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a Windows update bug that will cause svchost to eat 1gb of ram everytime it does a Windows update check.
There's also another memory eating scenario. Try installing Windows 7 afresh and then try to install all updates from Windows Update. While the installation proceeds, TrustedInstaller.exe starts grabbing gobs of RAM, and the amount keeps creeping up after each update is installed. It can reach 10 gigabytes. :D
There's many other problems in Windows Update as well. It has always been kind of a hack.
SSDs (Score:5, Informative)
The security team is right. SSDs are the single biggest performance improvement you can add to a computer (even an old computer). If your company is upgrading computers after they get 5-7 years old, but refusing to buy SSDs, they're wasting money. In particular, if they're upgrading management's high-end machines while the low-end machines are still being used by the rank and file, they're doing it completely backwards.
The problem is most people focus on the high-end numbers. How many GHz does the CPU run at? How many MHz does the DDR3 memory run at? Improving the high end doesn't help as much to improve productivity. It's already fast, meaning you're waiting a very small time for it to finish. Making it twice as fast just means the very small wait period shrank a tiny amount and is now twice as small.
If you're serious about improving performance, you get the biggest return by upgrading the slowest components. The slowest part of a modern PC is the HDD. When reading small files (not sequential reads, which really come into play only when copying large media files from one drive to another), they max out at about 1 MB/s. In contrast, the next slowest component - system RAM - is currently on the order of 10 GB/s. In other words, in terms of wait times a 1% improvement in HDD speed will have the same impact as a 100x increase in RAM speed. Now, consider than a SSD will get you at least a 30x improvement in read speeds for small files (about 30 MB/s seems to be average) and there is absolutely nothing you can do with the RAM or CPU which comes anywhere close to the amount of time you'll save by replacing the HDD with a SSD.
If you've got old computers, you should be upgrading them with a SSD instead of replacing them with new computers (with a HDD). Continue to use the old computers + SSD for a few more years, then upgrade them and transfer the SSDs to the new computers. The only exception is if the computer is so old you can't install enough RAM to run modern applications. (Another rare exception would be Northwood and Prescott-era P4 CPUs, which burn so much electricity you'll actually make back the cost of upgrading them via lower electricity bills in a couple years.)
On top of that, SSDs can actually look up small files faster than the computer can request them. So if you've got a virus scan running on a SSD, you can continue using the computer like normal with almost no impact on performance. In fact I usually run my weekly virus and two malware deep scans simultaneously on my SSD laptop, and I can still use it for web browsing or office tasks. When a virus scan runs on a HDD, the HDD has to spend all its time reading files the scan is requesting. As a result anything you try to do with the computer which requests data off the HDD will bog down.
No I don't think so. (Score:2)
On NT based versions of Windows I don't recall ever having problems with windows getting slower over time.
Sometimes DDE freaks out which can cause lag even entering text into the command line or number of programs open causes weird/slow redraw artifacts or a program/browser goes haywire and gobbles up all the GDI objects or something gets locked up in kernel space that causes zombies until reboot... but this is about the closest I've seen.
Known a number of people who have had problems with windows slowing
2 Weeks? (Score:2)
Of course they arent (Score:3)
But you do have to be smarter than the average corporate drone.
http://www.debian.org/ [debian.org]
http://www.linux.org/ [linux.org]
I don't think so. (Score:4, Interesting)
One might be puzzled by my response, but I say no because technically anything can be fixed, the only question is how.
I've been struggling with this issue lately myself as my own laptop (which is not underpowered by any means) has been experiencing incredibly slow login times for the Windows 7 install I have on my HDD. I also have an install on my SDD, but aside from bootup the performance difference is negligible for me(I also use it a lot less so it doesn't have all my software installed). The hard drive in this case is a 2TB Samsung Spinpoint M9T at 5400 RPM. Slower RPM, but it's a super dense 2.5" laptop drive.
I've made some progress in speeding it up, especially the login time which was atrocious... Removed an update that caused some Windows crap to be re-verified or something all the time, removed several things from startup and switched non-essential services to automatic. Eventually I did get the logon process to not be too bad and Windows would become responsive after maybe 40 seconds instead of 5-10 minutes. It's still not as fast as I'd like, but it's much improved.
But the problem with this is that I'm shooting in the dark and have to rely on trying pretty much every suggestion on the web there is. And here is the difference between my Windows installs and my Linux installs. GNU/Linux is open source, virtually everything you use in it is. The system is also designed to be tinkered with and the bootup processes are all opened up for any level of configuration that you desire. You can screw with your init system, the kernel itself, your bootloader, anything... So with the sources to all these pieces, I think figuring out what's wrong is relatively easy.
Come Windows, everything is closed source. The problem can be fixed, but you're stuck with decompiling and trying to debug perhaps even the kernel itself if you want to solve any problems. How are you going to profile bootup or login times? Can you easily find a sink for disk or CPU usage in certain functions in the Windows source code? Probably not. It's really challenging to figure out what's going wrong in this case. The best I can hope for is to look to people who have gotten a lucky guess or someone who is so absolutely hardcore that they've debugged a closed source operating system.
Just my 2 cents.
Only half true (Score:2)
It's partly that Windows slows down, especially with Windows 8, but it's more that people adapt to the speed of a system and it only seems slower.
The cause? Anti-virus software (Score:4, Interesting)
I almost can't believe that people are still asking questions about this, but I suppose I'll have to have to let this one go off easy.
Windows is not responsible for doing this to itself. It is your anti-virus software that is doing this + assuming you aren't one of those people that downloads and installs every program trial and freeware from the net.
Try it. Uninstall your anti-virus software completely.
Back in the Windows XP days when Vista was released I figured out what caused all the performance issues and it was the anti-virus software. I had reinstalled Windows XP many times so I was quite familiar with its snappy and responsive performance on a new install vs one year later. After uninstalling the anti-virus software, everything was precisely as snappy and responsive as it was on Day #1. It still holds true today. The effect is lessened significantly if your system runs on SSD (anti-virus know nothing on Day #1 of their install, but over time they learn the system and gradually bring the system to its knees).
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Not the updates... (Score:5, Informative)
You user profile is what is slowing your Windows down (the content of c:\users\%USERNAME%), and NO you can't just delete it... try to login with a new user and you'll see. It has been like that since Win95 and Microsoft has never fixed this.
Not nessesarily..... (Score:5, Interesting)
From many years of working with Windows PC's there's one thing I know for sure and that's that one of the major reasons for Windows to slow down over time is the default setting of the virtual memory paging file which is "Automatically manage paging file size". As the page file expands and contracts on this setting the file gets ever more fragmented and access to it gets slower. When I first setup a new computer (with Windows pre-installed) one of the first things I do is change that setting from automatic to a custom size and make the initial and maximum size the same so hopefully it's allocated all in one piece and as close to the beginning of the disk as possible where access is fastest. If a computer has been running for years on "Automatically manage" it's page file many be in thousands of pieces and that could possibly slow the computer significantly when the page file is used. There was a utility called PageDefrag for Windows XP that allowed you to defragment your pagefile but the author Mark Russinovich never updated it to work with newer versions of Windows so there is no easy way to defragment a pagefile on Windows Vista and up but one method I've used with success is to use a partition manager to reduce the size of the boot partition (pushing it farther along the drive) and create a small block of space (perhaps 40 to 60gb) in between the system reserved partition and the boot / Windows partition; after that format it and give it a dive letter like X: and then put the page file there. When you do that it's as close to the beginning of the drive as possible and at a static size Windows never has to work to expand or shrink it and it never gets fragmented.
One other thing is that the author mentions Windows 7, at the end of 2014 over about a three month period I built eight new computers for people who wanted quality hardware (all eight were identical in motherboard, CPU, RAM and hard drive) and seven of them I installed with Windows 8.1 and one the person requested Windows 7; I noticed during installation and in general using the computer with Windows 7 that it was noticeably slower than the computers with Windows 8.1 so Windows 8 appears to be faster than Windows 7 on the same hardware, at least that's my observation. (and that's Windows 7 x64 versus Windows 8.1 x64)
Another thing that slows computers down is the accumulation of temporary files, there's a tool someone recommended to me called TFC (temp file cleaner), you can find it here http://www.geekstogo.com/forum... [geekstogo.com] and it really does a phenomenal job; many computers that I've used it on show marked speed improvement after running it.
Re: (Score:3)
I do know this for sure. There are ways to find out how many pieces the page file is in and I've seen Windows Vista / 7 / 8 that after a year or three were in hundreds and thousands of pieces and after doing the procedure I outlined and moving the page file to a partition in front of the boot partition and making it all one piece the increase in speed was noticeable.
Sorry, I'm not wrong at all. The automatic Windows defrag utility can not defrag the page file anymore than any third party software can, the p
I thought this was common knowledge (Score:3)
It is never in the manufacturer's best interest to optimize updates especially when the product being updated competes with newer more profitable products.
Not in my experience. (Score:3)
I ran windows from 3.1 through XP. When I installed any OS I would trim it down to the least greedy effects, shut down unneeded processes, disable updates. No virus scanner, I ran that manually if I ever had a concern and only ever got got once on one machine over many years, and I caught that one as it was installing. I only ran programs that I needed, never any dancing pigs or Comet Cursor junk. I would derfag occasionally and kept my filesystem clean. Every machine was running as fast as the first day when it died or was retired. I would clean machines for other people and they reported that I had restored if not exceeded the performance when new, and without reinstalling. I am more then happy to bash windows and MS all day long, but they are innocent of this one crime.
One thing I do.... (Score:3)
I learned a long time ago (...and am open to the idea that my information is out of date) that as Windows ages the registry gets bigger. Bigger registry, longer to take for Windows to do menial things.
One way I've combatted this is I have a lot of 'portable' apps. I.e. apps that do not require an install. I have a folder full of them that gets copied from one computer to the next. A lot of them I've arranged for on my own but some of them came from a site called portableapps.com.
This is anecdotal but I've been doing this for over ten years and I'm responding to you from a Windows 7 laptop that has not been reinstalled since 2012 and I'm still quite happy with it.
Re: (Score:3)
Windows 7 at release is fast on a core 2 duo. Today it needs a quad i7 at 3.6ghz or faster and a SSD drive to be as fast as the initial release.
Trash talk. It's likely that the Core 2 Duo machine just had a slow 5400 rpm hard drive. Windows 7 will work smoothly even on an Intel Atom with all updates installed.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree.
Windows 7 is still very snappy on my AMD phenom II. XP had WIndows ROT problems with poorly written apps and even updates which forked the registry many times which impaled the startup process. I have not seen a slowdown at all. I do admit I upgraded to an i7 and now have 8.1 on it but I occasionally use the other system.
I think he has .net framework recompiles going which happen after these updates are one of those defective evo 840 drives which will halt after a few months without a patch to fix the charge leakage bug.
Re: (Score:2)
What I'm trying to say is you should just offer intelligent GUESSES, but rather offer guidance in how to gather the necessary empirical hard evidence of precisely WHAT is causing the slowdown.
Process Explorer should help a lot in this regard, but Windows i
I have to disagree... (Score:2)
Our 5 year old Dell Optiplexes still give reasonable performance with the initial hardware configuration 4/8 GB RAM, 7200 RPM drives, 100/1000 ethernet. They've had all the MS patches applied over the years. Only software installed on them in Office 2010, Adobe writer & antivirus.
I'm guessing that the problem lies with some of the applications, and more likely antivirus.
Is the computer possibly overheating? (Score:2)
One issue I've seen mostly with laptops (although also with desktops in dusty environments), is that the fans get clogged with dust, grit and hairs that cause the machines to overheat and then the CPU goes into thermal slowdown mode. So from a cold start after installing the OS the machine is cool, after a couple of hours of installing updates the machine has reached a toasty temperature and the CPU throttles down. Looks like it's the OS, but it's really the hardware.
Look at the event log in admin tools and
Re: (Score:2)
Hard to clean the fan on most laptops, and may not be worth the time on many old desktops.
Not worth 5 minutes of work with a pair of tweezers? I got about a whole cat's worth of hair out of my laptop with tweezers and a flashlight in about 5 minutes, and now all of my thermal problems are gone.
Re:Yes. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually having experience. Oh and the fact that I just set up a new windows 7 VM and from the fresh install on the DVD and how it ran, compared to after applying all updates it lost all of it's speed.
Nothing installed but windows updates. on the exact same hardware. Absolute solid proof to me.
Re: (Score:2)
> It's a conspiracy between Microsoft and the CPU manufacturers
Blast from the past! Haven't seen the label "Wintel" mentioned in "eons."
i.e. /Oblg. "What Andy [Grove] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away."
Re: (Score:2)
This is true of all OSs, but the saying goes: "Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away."
Re: (Score:3)
Fragmentation typically isn't an issue anymore because Windows will defrag its own drives daily by default. Fragmentation is also irrelevant if you've got an SSD, which I'd hope most people have for their primary drive nowadays. Your registry only grows indefinitely if you're constantly adding new software AND it doesn't clean up after itself properly, something that's a bit less common than it used to now that most programs use the standard Windows Installer libraries.
Microsoft Windows runtime requiremen
Re: Hate to be that guy, but Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Define "worse." As someone who dual-boots Windows 7 Home and Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, I find Mint works much "better" in terms of responsiveness. It boots faster, shuts down faster, opens programs faster, runs quieter, etc. Sure, it requires more expertise, has less proprietary software options, and obtains the performance improvement, at least in part, by sacrificing certain bells and whistles, but I've gone from a 90-10 Windows-Linux time split to 10-90 as I've grown more comfortable with the latter.
Re: Hate to be that guy, but Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
If you run it on a slow laptop, the OS is ten times more responsive than a program on the same OS, like Chrome. You can be spending 100% CPU and Disk usage on a task, ALT-TAB, and it'll show you some sort of JPEG compressed cache of what the program used to look like before the program finished responding to the PAINT event. (To often hilarious results when th
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
In my experience, Linux desktop response suffers way more heavily under high disk load then Windows desktop response. Something with the way Gnome and KDE are prioritized in the kernel loop I would expect. Run something in the background that is chewing up the disk and expect windows to draw very slowly.
They're both pretty awful, I was updating a laptop I recently bought for travel (firesale before Win10, will update for free), 2GB to update on a 5400 rpm spinning rust disk. Oh. My. God. Fortunately it got 8GB of RAM, so most things run well once loaded into memory. I wanted some space for a media collection on the go, but boy will I miss an SSD as boot drive.
Re: (Score:2)
In my experience, Linux desktop response suffers way more heavily under high disk load then Windows desktop response. Something with the way Gnome and KDE are prioritized in the kernel loop I would expect. Run something in the background that is chewing up the disk and expect windows to draw very slowly.
They're both pretty awful, I was updating a laptop I recently bought for travel (firesale before Win10, will update for free), 2GB to update on a 5400 rpm spinning rust disk. Oh. My. God. Fortunately it got 8GB of RAM, so most things run well once loaded into memory. I wanted some space for a media collection on the go, but boy will I miss an SSD as boot drive.
You still cold boot? Just suspend to RAM/Disk (in that preference). No slow boots required.
My work laptop has 16GB RAM, but the usual dog slow HDD, but I don't notice any slowdown over my own laptops (which all have SSD but less RAM) because the entire working set of data fits in RAM with a couple of GB free. With suspend to RAM, I rarely have to go through the slowness of boot.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
ProTip: If you didn't spend so much time trying to show us what a small-minded jerk you're capable of being, and actually paid attention to what you're responding to, you'd look a lot less stupid.
Re: (Score:2)
Also keep an eye on OneGet which is coming out with Windows 10. It will support Chocolatey, but also have official MS repos.
Re: (Score:2)
messed up or unkempt (Score:2)
I have been using win7 and win8.1 on many windows systems for several years without noticing this kind of slowdown.
Something is either messed up or unkempt.
Uninstall stuff you don't use, make sure the registry is OK, and keep the PATH trimmed. Also, keep your non SSD drives defragmented.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Depends (Score:5, Insightful)
Not my experience. It used to be the case in Windows 98 but I haven't found my systems to be slowing ever since I bought an SSD. SSDs solved all of my problems and they're rediculously affordable.
I also have a cluster of windows machines performing raytracing and other extremely performance driven tasks--I can't tell the age of an install based on performance.
This is all just superstition at this point without numbers. Yes if you install a third party anti-virus solution and you have a bunch of auto-installers running in the background your computer will run "Slower" than it did without anything running in the background but that's not Windows' fault and that's true of every operating system regardless if it's *nix or Win*.
Re:Depends (Score:5, Informative)
I have 5 machines running Windows 7 and this is not a problem, but then again I am not using encryption, just standard antivirus software. The ones with SSD boot drives are faster, but none of them has issues with running slow. In fact, they are quite responsive. The oldest one has had Windows 7 running on it for over 5 years without slowdowns or problems and the control panel says that it has 163 programs installed.
Re: (Score:3)
Funny I have noticed slows downs with windows 7 with upgrades. The culprit being the habit of upgrades turning on unused services which inevitably slow the system down, this especially if you tend to tweak services (disabled, manual, auto, using guides like http://www.blackviper.com/ [blackviper.com] ), to better manage performance. M$ often, tend to reset services to default settings, less so now than before. Requiring a review of service settings to get performance back.
So likely they simply need to review the services
Try turning off superfetch (Score:5, Informative)
Running Windows 8 on non-SSDs, I just found performance went up incredibly when I turned off the superfetch service. There's some sort of bug where it gets to 100% disk usage after a while if you're not restarting every day or two. (Sleep isn't enough). Slows the whole damn system down and task manager and resource monitor just show that you're using the pagefile, making it tricky to track down.
It might not be a problem with SSDs, which have very different read characteristics.
Re: (Score:3)
While it's true that having crap running in the background will slow down any OS, it's only Windows that is generally plagued with things like this... Most Linux applications install and update through the package manager so they don't need their own background updater process running. And for the few things that do need to perform background actions, they generally hook into the crontab rather than running their own persistent process.
Linux also tends to keep applications and their configuration separate,
Re: (Score:3)
Not neccessarily. I made a maintenance procedure clearing temporary files and registry with ccleaner [piriform.com] and MyDefrag [mydefrag.com] to organize files on disk for our customers and it solves most slowdown by far (excluding the usual malware toolbars etc.)
That eliminated most re-installs and uneccesary expenses. Not to mention losing preferences.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How exactly does Windows "slow down"? (Score:4, Informative)
One way that windows 7 (in particular) slows down, comes from the use of the winSXS folder.
Basically, because the windows software ecosystem is so... Plagued.. with legacy software that expect older versions of system libraries, Microsoft invented a solution to detect those dependencies and satisfy them with those older libaries in a sandbox-- the WinSXS folder.
As time passes, and updates happen, system libraries get updated-- instead of being replaced, they get moved to the winsxs folder and archived. This is so when your bitchy internal-only legacy application that is oh-so-mission-critical that it simply cant be rewritten for a modern OS gets run, it can continue to run.
The downside is that as this treasure trove of old libraries grows, the penalty of the checking routine becomes more and more apparent. (also, it consumes more and more disk space.)
Other forms of slowdown are not specific to windows 7 and newer however.
The registry is a binary file that must be parsed to find entries inside it, and it too can become fragmented. As changes are CONSTANTLY happening to the registry, the (actual) structure of the registry can become more and more byzantine. Since such changes are completely unavoidable with daily use, the slow degradation of this system is also unavoidable unless you boot from a golden image each and every time. This has been a problem since at least the 9x days. Back then, you could automate registry defragmentation with a bootup script because of the complete lack of filesystem security on FAT-- (Tell regedit to dump the registry in its totality into an exported text file, then tell it to rebuild the registry from scratch using that text file dump, then cleanup the temporary files afterwards.) You cant do that with modern flavors of windows because 1) you cant invoke scripts that easily on bootup anymore 2) the registry files are protected with NTFS security descriptors, 3) the OS locks the registry basically as soon as NTLDR finishes, so you cant replace the registry files while live.
There are of course, the other causes of slowdown that come from cumulative misconfigurations that happen from automated updates, but meh.
Re: (Score:3)
Hey AC, dont worry too much.
You can boot UEFI bios systems into legacy OSes pretty easily with a second stage loader scheme.
Such as GRUB2.
It works in the reverse too-- allowing UEFI expecting OSes to boot on BIOS systems. Since upgrading to a 4tb drive, I had to switch to GPT instead of MBR. I use GRUB2 on the "fake" MBR of the GPT table as the primary loader to satisfy my legacy BIOS's need for a primary boot sector and MBR partition table, and since GRUB2 is GPT aware, it can read the GPT partition table
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
User error, really
Is he holding the mouse wrong?
Thank you! (Score:4, Insightful)
Wish I had mod points for that post. Run Process Explorer and TcpView to see what is going on.
Dear Slashdot, I am a self proclaimed computer expert. Windows seems slow to me. Give me reasons to install Linux even though I can barely operate Windows.
Re: (Score:2)
The truth is you don't need a third party anti-virus program the MS security essentials works just as good
Sorry, but this has never been true. MSE is pretty much a bottom-rung AV solution with the absolute WORST detection and recovery rates.
There are far better solutions out there, even free ones.
Re: (Score:2)