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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.
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
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.
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.
I personally never experienced that for daily use. Installing/uninstalling applications and updates do since there are always some left-over garbage, but that's simply not addressable unless Windows kills all non-standard installers and forces them to play by Microsoft's rule (sadly even their own left garbage, but it's the first step to make them manageable), as it is on various Linux distributions.
With SSD, since it gets slower with more writes, a reborn system wouldn't be faster. It'd be pointless and you should really just dump it after 5 years.
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.
You may find this interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
If your disk develops bad sectors, the OS most certainly does not "have to work around them". Any modern drive will self correct its own bad sectors upon identifying them. If a disk is developing so many bad sectors that this is a constant problem, then the disk is about to fail, and you should expect performance to be degraded. This has nothing to do with Windows.
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.
Agreed. I've noticed the aforementioned tendency for PCs "in the wild" to slow down, but not once has it been due to the length of time since the last clean install. The people with this issue fall into 2 overall categories: people who know nothing about system maintenance, and people who know just enough to be dangerous. Group 1 typically end up with tons of bloatware, malware, and random spyware toolbars installed. Group 2 is aware of the problems plaguing Group 1 and think that "registry cleaners" are the solution, turning a perceived slowness into real software problems which bog things down.
As a counterpoint to this; I had a reasonable machine for work. Win7 Pro, then IT got hold of it and connected it to the new domain etc; now it is much slower. Booting, shutting down, launching programs...everything is slower then the day before.
@Random_Adam
Sometimes a sig doesn't have to be funny!!
Will Slashdot finally admit to being paid by Microsoft for positive press?
That has nothing to do with OS 'decay': it's the user installing - wittingly or unwittingly - too many resource hungry programs. The solution is simple enough: just uninstall whatever is not actually needed.
no, its not quite that simple.
remember defragging hard drives? remember windows registry files? remember the "add or remove programs" control panel? all of these things represent design decisions that cause computers to be cruftier over time.
... 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.
XP was fast as hell until you patched it up to SP3. Microsoft borked the hell out of that OS. Windows 7 I have not had the gradual slowdown problem at all.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This means that a WinSxS folder that is 6GB costs around .90 Cents, and uses slightly more than 1 Percent of the drive.
I think you just don't understand what WinSxS is, how it works, and what the problem is that it is designed to address, suggest you start reading a bit more.
The reason the old Sxs assemblies need to be kept, is that installed software may require the usage of an old assembly.
Just because an update has superceded a certain library version, does not mean that all applications that still rely on it should be broken.
The SxS assembly backups have a vital role, and they don't actually use as much disk space as you think, due to hard linking --- Windows Explorer gives you an impression that more disk space is consumed by this folder than actually is.
The reason is... various installed files throughout the system will be hardlinked here, causing an appearance that a lot of space is in use here, but in reality --- these hard links are just a second Zero-usage copy of files that are installed elsewhere.
Only a couple gigabytes worth of files that have been updated and no longer have other hard links here, should actually be considered usage of the SxS system.
No but the Dumb-ass developers and Distro makers throw config files all over hell in random places.
If your config files are not in /etc or ~/.appname then the developer is a complete moron. /opt/dev/random/stinky/appname/config.cfg is NOT acceptable.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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".
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
for their business model to function...and they won't break it.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
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.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
NO!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
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.
You'd think so, but it's pretty common to uninstall a broken program, then re-install it. Keeping the old parameter settings makes it easier (sometimes!) to re-install, since you don't have to set it all up from scratch. Network settings are a case where I often benefitted from this behavior.
Then there's shared files and components such as DLLs. It's often quite difficult to reliably determine when the last using application has been removed, especially if people have been brute-forcing stuff instead of using the control panels and installers that keep count.
Still, I wouldn't mind having a "nuke" option that would at least remove all the files that belong exclusively to the app for cases where there's no possible reason why they would ever be referenced again. Murphy notwithstanding.
I've found that there are really no issues with regards to running a new OS for long periods of time. There was a time when regular reinstalls were a part of my regimen but that is long past. I reinstall only when there's a specific need. That doesn't mean I just put up with a slow computer either, I demand very fast performance from my systems. A reinstall just isn't needed to maintain that.
Likewise, components have gotten much better, and upgrades more incremental, so I've found the need to buy new hardware that would necessitate a reinstall to be less.
My guess? This person either has crap on their system that causes issues, or this is just a "magic incantation" they've always done for supposedly better performance without understanding or examination.
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.
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 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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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".
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.
Apple took a different approach on iOS.
OS X suffers the same problems as Windows, although perhaps not as severe.
You consider this article positive? Troll logic astounds me!
Config files go either under
* /etc/app - system wide, distribution provided /opt/app - foreign applications, system wide
* $HOME/.config/app - user specific, don't just dump to $HOME
*
Then you have 3 places. Maybe 4 for legacy $HOME/.app stuff
Why is this not the same as "The Registry"? Because it's filesystem level and there is no stupid GUUIDs for keys. Imagine if some application installed their config files under unreadable with GUUID paths. Then the under does not know WTF those things ever suppose to be.
But that's a system that COM and COM+ invented. It works great until someone does not follow the rules, which turns out to be quite a few users and vendors.
No idea what TFA is talking about.. Only "decay" I've noticed is caused by people getting suckered into installing malware.
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...
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.
Servers don't have anywhere near as much software installed/removed as a desktop machine, so this is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison.
Microsoft went further than just having a bad registry, they essentially forced developers to use it if they wanted to get the approved sticker (ie, to say "works with Windows 95" or such).
Then again, winsxs is only one of several directories that often have people asking, "can I delete this?" See also C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution, System Restore, and Windows.old, and c:\windows\installer. They are a mix of necessary and junk. From end to end, Windows is designed to keep everything, forever, just in case, instead of keeping track of things properly in the first place.
Years ago, people would joke that "emacs" stood for "Eight megabytes and constantly swapping". At the time, it was meant as an insult. These days, 8Mb is hardly anything.
I'm well aware of the hardlinking that Microsoft does. I've also done some actual analysis measuring the real disk usage of WinSxS by using tools that count the hardlink references. On my Windows 7 installation that had a 16GB WinSxS folder, 14GB of that was unique to WinSxS with no other hardlinks. It isn't as efficient as Microsoft claims it to be.
As for the registry, there's a great front end that fully resembles a file system view...
I've called regedit.exe a lot of things over the years, and great was never one of them.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
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.
Hell, it almost makes it sound like they're trying to slow down Windows on purpose...
Bingo
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
And then there was a transition to C:\Documents and Settings\username\AppData ? (or \Users\usernames\AppData which is the same)
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.
Even if Windows slows down over time, there's easy ways to deal with it.
Since Windows XP, you have a program called "MSConfig" that allows you to remove any startup programs, especially ones that are pure redundancy or are otherwise not useful.
And with modern systems - Web browsers slow down the system more than anything junk that accumulates in the OS. I've had both Firefox and Chrome running at the same time, with the resulting commit charge around 8GB, sometimes approaching 12GB. Once I stopped using one of the two browsers, the constant thrashing stopped, and everything else is much more responsive. (Firefox is still freezing, but that's a memory leak issue.)
I take it you and the parent haven't actually used any other operating systems? They're not all like this.
I provided a link to a Microsoft-provided process that can often delete gigabytes of garbage from these directories, if you go to the effort of making it. The whole setup is a wasteful mess.
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.
Win Rot is alive and well in Windows 7.
Both my gaming machine and personal laptop have serious performance issues after 8 or so months (OK, the laptop is 2 years old but I use that infrequently). Both have SSD's, both were blisteringly fast when first installed.
Surprisingly enough, my work laptop is fine but I dont install much on there.
As a sysadmin, the biggest issue I have with Linux servers are the servers running out of space (mostly because some slovenly developer or DBA didn't bother writing a script to clean up log files or other output so it just grows until the disk runs out of space). Clogging up disk space with garbage is sort of *nix rot. Whilst Linux and OS X have no registry to clog up things, running out of disk space is a lot more painful on *nix than it is on Windows.
Very few *nix machines ever get used in the same abusive fashion as most people treat their windows boxen though.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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).
This means that a WinSxS folder that is 6GB costs around .90 Cents, and uses slightly more than 1 Percent of the drive.
I think you just don't understand what WinSxS is, how it works, and what the problem is that it is designed to address, suggest you start reading a bit more.
The reason the old Sxs assemblies need to be kept, is that installed software may require the usage of an old assembly.
Just because an update has superceded a certain library version, does not mean that all applications that still rely on it should be broken.
When you've got a 19 GB Win SxS folder on a 40 GB HDD (which is plenty for a server and expensive on Tier 0 SSD's) it's a serious issue. 19 GB is not ridiculous, it's not even usual for a 2 yr old server that's been updated regularly. 19 GB across 250 virtual servers is a serious waste of space. Even 6 GB is a massive costs in infrastructure. Not every update needs to keep dozens of updates. Fortunately Microsoft has addressed this problem (as of April this year, so relatively quick in Microsoft time) so that the WinSxS folder can be cleaned up.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
make uninstall Also compiling from source should rarely be necessary. Most modern distributions will include a ports like system that will allow you to compile source into a fake root, use the information gathered to build a package, and then install the package with your package manager. This ensures everything is cleaned up properly upon package removal. Of course even building a package for the software is probably unnecessary as it's very likely someone has already done it for you. Linux' package management is vastly superior to both Windows and osx (don't you just drag a folder into the garbage can? Give me a break). You just have to know what you're doing.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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.
Which is plenty for a server and expensive on Tier 0 SSD's
Microsoft's guidance on this is pretty clear last I checked; 32 gigabytes is the absolute minimum disk size for installing 64-bit versions of Windows server, and they wind up recommending a minimum of 80gb storage for most deployments, and their docs go on to state, you need to take into account the roles that will be installed, lifetime of the server and constant growth of the boot drive an additional 20gb per year due to updates. You do not need to install your C:\ drive on a SSD; there is no document recommending or stating that it is cost-effective and worth placing your boot disk on size limited high cost devices.
My recommendation would be that on servers you use the enterprise SSD devices for additional caching purposes or storing small files, such as SQL server tempdb, or your system paging file.
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.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"Both my gaming machine and personal laptop have serious performance issues after 8 or so months"
Meanwhile I've been running the same Windows 7 install since the tail end of 2009. That's with a fuckton of install, uninstall, and the occasional defrag and registry cleaning, especially on this tiny 120GB disk. Still runs exactly as it did back then.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Operating systems like Unix, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, etc. don't have a registry,...
True, and clearly a win.
...and don't have any significant "OS Decay".
ROFLMAO. IME, the only thing more painful than maintaining a Windows system over the long term is maintaining a *nix system over the long term.
Let's consider Linux. First, you probably get to choose between a stable or a not stable version of your distro. Choose stable and you're OK as long as you don't need to run any software released in the last 3 years and you're OK with being forced to upgrade the whole OS after maybe 2 years anyway (which will quite possibly trash your entire machine to the point of not being able to boot, or at least breaking minor features like RAID arrays, assuming you actually managed to configure one of those properly in the first place after your distro's "user friendly" installer messed it up completely). Alternatively, choose unstable if you want to run more recent software but don't mind stuff breaking all the time instead of every couple of years on a schedule.
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.
OS X is of course doing much better with a similar foundation, as anyone who has spoken the words "Apple" and "shellshock" in the same sentence over the past few days can testify. Or at least, they'll be able to testify, just as soon as they've finished wiping and reinstalling their botnetted systems, because the patch everyone else had within hours only arrived for Apple gear several days later and long after exploits were widely found in the wild.
You're absolutely right that we should be able to install many programs and uninstall them with no lingering effects. But the idea that the registry is the only thing preventing that on Windows or that *nix systems do better is crazy. The only reason *nix systems don't break more often is that the only people running them are geeks and professionals, and those kinds of people are less likely to install random junk and more willing to dive in and fix internals when stuff goes wrong.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
For batch file and CLI use, %appdata% will do. Unless you're looking for local, non-roaming stuff. Then it's %localappdata%.
If you're developing in .Net, be sure to use Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData) or Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.LocalApplicationData) unless you want to clutter your code with calls to Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariable().
Any of these will avoid the ambiguity you have in your post.
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.
Unless Winqual disqualifies your application for storing settings in an INI, XML, or JSON file in %appdata% or %localappdata% instead of in the registry.
Meanwhile I've been running the same Windows 7 install since the tail end of 2009. That's with a fuckton of install, uninstall, and the occasional defrag and registry cleaning, especially on this tiny 120GB disk. Still runs exactly as it did back then.
Its entirely possible you're slowing down at the same pace as your machine.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
32 GB "absolute minimum" and 80 GB recommended? An additional 20 GB per year because of updates? Are you butt-fucking kidding me? Do you Microsofties ever take a peek at the competition? Has it never occurred to you that this is not normal or even reasonable?
As a sysadmin who deals with both Windows and Linux (Debian and Red Hat mainly) I can say that most vendors seriously over estimate their minimum requirements for servers. 40 GB is plenty for a 2008 R2 server, 60 if you're feeling generous.
An extra 20 GB for 40 servers is 800 GB on tier 0 storage (and yes, for these 40 servers they are required to be on SSD).
Its not just MS, regularly see tiny little packages designed for accounting or some such that have stupid requirements for a low number of users. Some things like a full version of MSSQL server, 8 cores, 16 GB of RAM and it only deals with about 10 GB of data, even some Linux applications that specify it must be a physical (and they'll refuse to help you if you install it on a virtual). Its sloppy testing and sloppy marketing.
As I said, in 2014 Microsoft finally admitted that the growing WinSxS folder was a concern and created a way to clean it up. It shrunk my 19GB down to just under 2. I understand why Windows needs to keep some old assemblies, but they dont need to keep all of them.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
As a counterpoint to this; I had a reasonable machine for work. Win7 Pro, then IT got hold of it and connected it to the new domain etc; now it is much slower. Booting, shutting down, launching programs...everything is slower then the day before.
Well known problem. Once attached to a domain, Windows attempts to do all kinds of stupid things. One of the most common problems is the open/save file dialog. The OS attempts to display it, then blocks until it contacts the domain servers to look up the user's actual name. Then there are similar delays that happen as it goes out and probes each drive, which is a problem if they are mapped network drives as the display waits until everything is built before the UI appears.
On a machine that is disconnected from the domain, perhaps a laptop away from the office, it gets even worse. Internally there is a 45 second delay on each of the network probes, and between Windows 2000 through Windows 7 they all fired sequentially. So if you had your own friendly name plus three mapped drives, that's three minutes of waiting for network connections to time out. It is somewhat faster under Windows 8, but in bad cases can still take ages.
For these specific issues they will not fix the root problems of the shell blocking until after data is loaded or probing the domain for security settings as it would break many shell plugins. It can be made partially better by disabling some of the features; they include disabling certain group policies on shell extensions, turning off certain domain security and SCAPI settings, and disabling drive mappings whenever possible. When disconnected, removing all VPN lookups and disabling proxy detections can also help. Even with those improvements, attaching a machine to a domain introduces an immediate performance penalty on everything shell-related.
Another similar set of problems is apps that try to probe the MRU file list when files are on the network. Many parts of the OS try to cache things based on prior use, and once you're wired in to the corporate network these probes (which stupidly are often blocking tasks) can take seconds to run while on the network, or minutes to run when they time out when off the corporate network.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Yep, I just ran "C:\Users\Dzov>CMD /K WMIC OS GET InstallDate" and got an install date of some 5 years ago:" InstallDate 20090808155049.000000-300"
I don't even think that was on the same motherboard and cpu (second gen i5), but I'm not really sure. I don't know if it's the same speed or not, but it runs fine.
Well..... I'm not for one minute saying that iTunes on windows doesn't suck. But I couldn't find these registry entries anywhere. Care to share where you found them? If iTunes continues to run without them there, and doesn't recreate them, then how do you know iTunes put them there in the first place?
Riddle me this, Batman...
If it is the application developer's fault (and frankly, the idea that every app has to be absolutuely perfect otherwise one permanently jacks up their OS is idiotic beyond belief), then why is the ONLY a problem in Windows?
You can install/uninstall crap on other OS's with no accumulative or persistent performance issues. Why? Because they weren't designed by idiots.
I have one W7 install that is *permanently* in limbo, unable to install Visual Studios redistributables because of a Windows patch bug, and there is literally no information on how to fix it, other than "reinstall OS" from the M$ horse's mouth.
That is when you know a design is pitiful and worthless.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
The problem is that you have to know what you're doing.
The problem is that it's not automated on an application level.
Even those tools which market themselves as cleaners of registry often pick up items which are still needed and delete them or miss things which aren't. The core problem is that for the average user keeping the system clean is not possible on a windows machine and an attempt to clean it often breaks things in strange ways.
Heck just thinking back to DLL hell days "It appears this file is no longer needed do you want to keep or remove?"
The only thing Microsoft missed from it's uninstaller package is "ARE YOU FEELING LUCKY PUNK?"
That's the kind of nonsense that happens when you let Windows devs write Linux apps.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Windows changes a lot of its behavior as soon as you change that radio button from "Workgroup" to "Domain". Before you even get to the log in prompt, Windows has to connect to a domain controller to download Group Policy settings and the like. Having to run login credentials through a DC and load config from it as well will add at least a slight amount of lag - possibly a lot, depending on how responsive the network and the DC are. Then, there's the matter of which Group Policy settings the admins have chosen, many of those can slow down the computer on their own.
If IT "had their way" with it, they might have also loaded it up with antivirus or some other bloatware.
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.
As you add and remove apps, as Windows writes more and more temporary and junk files, over time, a system just slows down.
Yeah, it's a damn hard problem to solve. No surprise it's taken them 20 years to figure out that you could just put all of the files that belong to one application into a few folders exclusive to that application and then wipe them when the app is removed. Instead of, say, the absolute dumbest thing you can do, which is scattering them all over the place without keeping a record so you are absolutely guaranteed to never, ever, find them again.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I know it is a database, and slightly optimized. "A few records" would not affect query time, especially if they were not in the query path.
What about a lot of records? And how about a lot of records that are in the query path?
It's a database. IIRC it uses B* trees. Search time is proportional to the logarithm of total number of records. Even "a lot" of records may not cause the height of the tree to increase. You generally need to *square* the number of records to double to search time.
At the same time, the registry hives are really, really robust. Windows keeps to redundant copies and even protects writes through the kernel transaction manager as well as the journal of the file system. Corruption is virtually impossible until the hard drive decays to a state where even the redundancy cannot make up for it anymore. Unlike text files, both metadata *and* data are guaranteed to either succeed in an atomic transaction.
(compare to the Unix way, where config files can be corrupted if the system/power fails during a write: File system do not guarantees *data* consistency for regular files, only *metadata* consistency, i.e. the fs guarantees that its internal structures will not cause it to go haywire on your files afterwards)
I suspect that this is actually the reason why there's a myth about corruption of the registry: With all of the redundancy, the registry is often the last component to fail when a drive succumbs. At the same time, Windows will refuse to start *if* the registry is corrupted. At that point the drive is in such a bad state, that even restoring/repairing the registry corruption will not save the drive.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Are you sure about that? It;s been my experience that the "Install for this user only" option usually just places the program's Start Menu items into the individual users' Start Menu rather than the All Users. Possibly the same with the registry settings - never looked that close. But AFAIK, the actual executables still installed in their normal places,
You consider this article positive? Troll logic astounds me!
Slashdot is the Fox News of the open source world. If you aren't blaming Microsoft for everything from Ebola to your dog's farts, you're a paid shill.
Whilst Linux and OS X have no registry to clog up things, running out of disk space is a lot more painful on *nix than it is on Windows.
If a Linux machine is left with zero space, it will still boot but you will not have any log of it since there is no space to write it.
If a Windows machine is left with zero space, it will fail to boot.
So failing to boot is less painfull ?
Your logic escape me
Avoid the MS tax, always buy I.B.M. PC's (I Built-it Myself)
Couldn't agree more. /etc/application/logs quoted. give it it's own damn partition if it's big, mount --bind it maybe?
and parent had the answer to his
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
I seem to recall reading about it on slashdot, but the closest reference I could find is here: http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
.NET applications may be what I was thinking about.
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