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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.
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.
... 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.
When I install Windows, I work hard to set up everything exactly as I like on install day. Then I make a backup of the OS partition - which has only programs, no photos, videos, etc. - using Acronis TrueImage. Then I proceed as normal, and when something gets screwed up, I just restore from backup. This completely undoes any effects of winrot, and the system immediately feels like it was installed that day. What I usually do then is update my applications and settings, and immediately make a new backup. A full restore takes about 4 minutes, and a backup with max compression takes something like 12. I find this so convenient that I use no antivirus. When I start to suspect that I may have installed malware, I just restore from a backup, and four minutes later, my system is perfect. I've been doing this since Win2K days, and if this method weren't available to me, I wouldn't be using Windows.
When I get my new PCs, the first thing I do is wipe them clean and reinstall windows.
I'm just careful when I grab the disk labeled "Ubuntu" because I know that version of windows doesn't come with all of the problems the OP identified.
Hell, it almost makes it sound like they're trying to slow down Windows on purpose...
Bingo
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
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).
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.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
As a sysadmin, you ought to know that Linux systems come standard with log rotation and management utilities that (surprise) sysadmins are supposed to know how to configure.
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.