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.

Comments

Re: Here's the solution

[saloomy]

If the problem was really in the OS, then windows server which shares many of the same underpinnings as Windows desktop(s), would suffer the same fate. Since servers like domain controllers and exchange servers run for years without that issue, the problem seems to be from the crAPP that gets installed, as the parent explained, as well as the article. Bad headline to suggest the bad apps are M$'s problem

Application sandboxing

[whereiswaldo]

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.

Antecdotes != Evidence

[Galaga88]

1. Is there any actual proof that OS decay is still a thing? I'm running Windows 8.1 that was upgraded from a Windows 7 install that was put on years ago, and I've seen zero performance issues.
2. Shouldn't the person asking this question have actually used Windows 8 before asking if Windows 10 will "finally" fix a problem that may or may not even exist?

Re:Antecdotes != Evidence

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:Antecdotes != Evidence

[Bert64]

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.

Re: Here's the solution

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Of course not

[StripedCow]

You may find this interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Re: Here's the solution

[timeOday]

It is not just applications. If nothing else, Windows does burn disk space as if it were free. Every version of every update ever applied (and what else? registry backups?) hangs around "just in case," you're not supposed to delete it, ever.

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). 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.

Re:OS Decay is largekly a myth.

[metrix007]

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: Here's the solution

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

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

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re: Here's the solution

[sunderland56]

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".

Hu?

[WaffleMonster]

No idea what TFA is talking about.. Only "decay" I've noticed is caused by people getting suckered into installing malware.

Re: Here's the solution

[ericloewe]

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:The bigger Problem is their "updates"

[GigaplexNZ]

People don't tell you XP is old because of performance reasons. It's a security nightmare.

Re: Here's the solution

[Blaskowicz]

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.

The problem I have with this...

[roc97007]

...is that for Microsoft to create an OS that doesn't slow and become wonky over time removes one of the primary reasons to upgrade to a new version of Windows. Already Microsoft is dealing with Old Windows That Won't Go Away (XP, and now Win7). It is in their best interest for the OS to degrade over time. I can't imagine this obvious cash cow going away. And if so, what replaces it? MSFT tried floating OS as subscription before, and it didn't fly. Unlike the x-box, some phones and their competitor's platforms, Microsoft sells OS's and applications, not hardware. So an OS you can buy once and use forever (or for the life of the hardware) just isn't part of their business model.

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.)

Re:LOL. You expect MS to fix the problem ...

[Jeremi]

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.

Re:The bigger Problem is their "updates"

[CptJeanLuc]

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.