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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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.