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Will Windows 10 Finally Address OS Decay?
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.
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...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Android doesn't sandbox apps.
Er.... Yes it does. Absolutely it does, it's right there in the docs.
http://source.android.com/devi...
Each app gets a separate Linux user, so it's data is separate and inaccessible to other apps.
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.