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Ask Slashdot: Are Post-Install Windows Slowdowns Inevitable?
blackest_k writes: I recently reinstalled Windows 7 Home on a laptop. A factory restore (minus the shovelware), all the Windows updates, and it was reasonably snappy. Four weeks later it's running like a slug, and now 34 more updates to install. The system is clear of malware (there are very few additional programs other than chrome browser). It appears that Windows slows down Windows! Has anyone benchmarked Windows 7 as installed and then again as updated? Even better has anybody identified any Windows update that put the slug into sluggish?
Related: an anonymous reader asks: Our organization's PCs are growing ever slower, with direct hard-drive encryption in place, and with anti-malware scans running ever more frequently. The security team says that SSDs are the only solution, but the org won't approve SSD purchases. It seems most disk scanning could take place after hours and/or under a lower CPU priority, but the security team doesn't care about optimization, summarily blaming sluggishness on lack of SSDs. Are they blowing smoke?
if you use it...
I know the organization probably has applications that won't work on Linux, but quite seriously, that was my solution. All through college I did Windows reinstalls twice a year until I got sick of it and installed Linux.
The security team runs the scans during the daytime because that's when everybody's laptop is powered on and connected to the network. Too many people shut off their machines at night, or carry their laptops home, so the scans won't reliably run if they do them then.
There is probably some kind of creative, adaptive scheduling solution that could fix this, but their management software might not have that kind of support.
open task manager. Add the column for image path name. Maximize. Screenshot and post.
We'll tell you how you've managed to screw it up.
It's a conspiracy between Microsoft and the CPU manufacturers to make sure you're always upgrading your computer and upgrading to the latest version of Windows. I'm sure the government spooks are in on it as well.
Seriously though, I would check out the second answer at this link:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/84068/windows-gets-progressively-slower-over-time-why-doesnt-ubuntu
Hammer Software http://hammersoftware.ca/ Good service, Creative solutions - Hamilton, ON
The problem is when you start installing other programs. In your post you mentioned installing anti-malware. Every time you open a file it takes 10s to 100s of milliseconds to scan it. The problem is exacerbated if you have an antivirus program, then every file gets scanned twice. If you want preformance then turn off both and do scans when the user isn't working on their machine.
No specs provided, but updating to 8.1 ( and using Classic Shell if needed ) could help. Or the Windows 10 Preview is snappy now.
Ask Slashdot: Are Post-Install Windows Slowdowns Inevitable?
When patches and updates together end up being larger than the original [OEM] install, you can see why the slowdown is inevitable.
Sounds easy to see why. No?
I can't help it, and maybe it's my imagination and perception bias, but to me it seems to be that as soon as a new version of Windows is approaching or even out the door, the old version starts to slow down considerably. And like clockwork you can rely on MS themselves and various testers claiming (of course with good benchmark proof) that the new Windows is so much faster than the old one was.
The rational person in me would say that after a bazillion patches and service packs, the stitched together hodgepodge is of course crawling along because there's a lot of dead weight being lugged around and worked around.
The tinfoil hat enthusiast in me on the other hand claims that it's deliberate to make the new Windows look better despite being essentially the same.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It appears that Windows slows down Windows!
I don't know what Microsoft does inside Windows, but over time Windows always seems to be unable to get out of its own way.
If you do most things based on a cloud, I would use Deep Freeze or something similar, when you restart the computer all changes to the hard drive are discarded. Stop Deep Freeze for updates and then turn it back on.
And how do you know this?
I would also ask your security team to look at what is being scanned and like you said, optomize resource usage. Most anti malware software has real time scanning and on demand or scheduled scans. Things such as pagefiles and other non critical Windows components can possibly be excluded from your scanning. SSDs are basically a must. I get the cost but the performance increase is exponentially better.
I am an InfoSec professional and I can tell you that security solutions should never impact business processes if possible. Anti malware software is often the cause of performance issues.
if you don't install every tray thing and toolbar like a maniac.
My Windows 7 installation dating from 2010 is still kicking as smooth as when it was installed.
No, Windows 7 will not turn itself from snappy to a slug with updates. This is either anti-windows propaganda or your own fault. It works fine for everyone else.
I wound agree with you that it seems Win7 over time has slowed down. I can't speak for what you have loaded at startup or runtime (check taskmanager and msconfig) but I know you may not be able to go to it but Win 8.1 ( load Classic Shell that makes it look like Win7) made the difference for me. Also, I don't load any of the commercial grade Antivirus. Symantec, Kaspersky, etc all just bog my system down. Turn off startup items that are not required, load CCleaner and run it often and things run smoothly.
1. Your operating system is very old at nearly 7 years. Time flies bye and I laugh at the companies who are angry at the prospect of starting a WIndows 10 migration acting somehow that 7 just came out last year and is all so new etc. The point is you will have 200 updates and the .net framework will need to re-compile to your cpu dependent architecture each time an update hits for better performance. Have fun with that one.
2,
Windows ROT is soo last decade with WindowsXP.
It is caused by poorly written programs that run as admin and write to the registry each time they run. So you run the app 200 days a year and it creates 200 forks of the registry that need to launch in parallel at startup :-)
With UAC WIndows 7 doesn't have this problem.
3. Do you own an Samsung EVO SSD?
If so they will slow to a crawl very rapidly without a patch. They will hang after a few months of heavy use for several seconds before a file even transfers. I only buy the pro drives. Go google this up as their is an engineering flaw which impacts the read due to the way the cells are manufactured.?
http://saveie6.com/
I actually don't notice that Win 7 has become slower, but I have a lot of stuff always running in the background on my dev machine. Maybe there would be a noticeable effect on a clean machine.
I have a 4 year old tower for my dev machine. I wanted to speed it up, so my first thought was a new mother board, but that was pretty expensive, so I decided to try an SSD. That fixed the problem. The computer is not only much faster, it runs cool and silent. No more hum under my desk.
I'm sorry that an SSD isn't in your future. I might be the solution you need. Mostly I am sorry your support and security people don't care if you can work productively.
Windows 7 at release is fast on a core 2 duo. Today it needs a quad i7 at 3.6ghz or faster and a SSD drive to be as fast as the initial release.
Trash talk. It's likely that the Core 2 Duo machine just had a slow 5400 rpm hard drive. Windows 7 will work smoothly even on an Intel Atom with all updates installed.
I disagree.
Windows 7 is still very snappy on my AMD phenom II. XP had WIndows ROT problems with poorly written apps and even updates which forked the registry many times which impaled the startup process. I have not seen a slowdown at all. I do admit I upgraded to an i7 and now have 8.1 on it but I occasionally use the other system.
I think he has .net framework recompiles going which happen after these updates are one of those defective evo 840 drives which will halt after a few months without a patch to fix the charge leakage bug.
http://saveie6.com/
I had this problem all the time with XP but I have not noticed it since I installed Windows 7 over 5 years ago on my current PC. The only problem I have now is that the WinSxS folder is gigantic, likely due to all the Windows Update patches over time. My poor SSD. Windows 10 claims to use "3GB" as a minimal requirement, we'll see how that holds up (I expect not well at all) but Windows 8/8.1 supposedly cut down on used disk space by the OS a bit so I'm optimistic for now.
People frequently talk about Windows slowing down over time, but they are rarely specific in what is actually slower. Does it take longer to start up? More time to open applications? More time copying files from one location to another? Responding slowly to mouse clicks? Freezing up for several seconds at a time? Unless there are specifics given regarding what exactly is wrong, people can only speculate as to what the problem could be. Most issues with windows systems in my opinion tend to be more related to 3rd party applications that have been installed than with the system itself. Virus and malware scanning can be a big one, especially if it is running constantly or while you are using the computer. And as more and more windows updates get installed, that is just more and more files that the virus scanner has to check.
I have been running Windows 7 on a desktop for 5+ years and on a laptop for 3+ years, and I can tell no difference between their performance no and when it was first installed.
Then yes.
If not, no.
Most likely from something called experience?
But if you require a citation, go perform the tests for yourself and let us know the results.
I have been using win7 and win8.1 on many windows systems for several years without noticing this kind of slowdown.
Something is either messed up or unkempt.
Uninstall stuff you don't use, make sure the registry is OK, and keep the PATH trimmed. Also, keep your non SSD drives defragmented.
It seems most disk scanning could take place after hours and/or under a lower CPU priority
It already does that. Deep scans are automatically scheduled by [more or less(?)] all antivirus and malware software for typical off hours. We use on-access scanning because it's a good idea. You would need hardware support to be "sure" that disk blocks hadn't changed while you weren't looking. And how sure are you? Are you going to trust your fs metadata? ha ha ha etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Take a look inside your (probably) c:\windows\winsxs\ folder.
Probably many gigs and thousands of files/directories in there.
There's your patch bloat. You can get rid of some of it.
From HowToGeek.com:
To clean up such update files, open the Disk Cleanup wizard (tap the Windows key, type “disk cleanup” into the Start menu, and press Enter). Click the Clean up System Files button, enable the Windows Update Cleanup option and click OK. If you’ve been using your Windows 7 system for a few years, you’ll likely be able to free several gigabytes of space. The next time you reboot after doing this, Windows will take a few minutes to clean up system files before you can log in and use your desktop.
-tct
Well, is the HDD busy LED flickering when this sluggishness happens? Then the bottleneck is just the mechanical HDD working its ass off. You are only wasting your time trying to optimize things around it. Put an SSD as your system disk and the problem goes away immediately.
Microsoft does that, particularly after new versions of their OS is available to encourage both new PC sales and or upgrades. .NET framework integration with Windows XP in SP3 was a big slowdown to make VISTA's performance not seem AS bad...
Most of my computers run Windows XP SP2 behind a NAT; No further updates done, virus scanners NOT left installed but checked periodically and always report clear.
The slow demise of legacy bios and with future win10+ installs to be secure boot/locked(no ability to run Linux on budget hardware that comes with Windows)... I don't relish the future...
Our 5 year old Dell Optiplexes still give reasonable performance with the initial hardware configuration 4/8 GB RAM, 7200 RPM drives, 100/1000 ethernet. They've had all the MS patches applied over the years. Only software installed on them in Office 2010, Adobe writer & antivirus.
I'm guessing that the problem lies with some of the applications, and more likely antivirus.
I mean come-on guys, this is old news...
I've been using windows since it was in its 3.11 infancy and the rules for me and amongst my peers was always that you'd do a clean re-install between 1 and 2 times a year, as windows just becomes slow and sloooooower with each patch, fix and whatever software that you install and that may or may not add to / mess up your sys files and re entries...
I am not a specialist in these things, but that's just how it's always been...
on Mac OS however...
well it used to be different, not any longer thought BUT your reinstall is much faster (imho)
of course if you can go Linux :)
win7 is just fine on an 1.3 GHz amd neo II k325 (235?)... with a samsung 830
the software you want to run on it however (eg firefox) are painfully slow
You can use dism command in Windows. I have Windows 8.1 for 1 year and file system started noticably slowing down. I have used dism command, and some software from some other vendor to clean up. After all I used disk defragmenter. Windows's file system now is more responsive and have better performance, but I think it is still a little bit slower than after clean install.
I've been using Windows since '95 and would reinstall at least once a year myself just because it would get slower than I'd like. I remember having friends PCs being insanely slow and after malware scans and defrags it would still be slow as molasses even on good hardware. I'd check the windows folder and the installation would be like 5+ years old, after a fresh install it would be good as new.
I do wonder why this happens. I've always had the vague explanation in my head that the OS gets clogged up with files that it has to catalogue, parse, etc, but I suspect it's not that simple.
When I switched full-time to Macs about 2 years ago I thought it would be great that I'd never again have to put up with my OS slowing down. But sure enough, it did, and every 6 months or so I have to blank my Mac and reinstall. Which to be honest I don't mind doing because it's super-easy on a Mac, and I like knowing that my system is clean again.
Although curse you Apple the last install has left me with a weird issue whereby every time I boot the machine OSX asks me to verify the iCloud keychain from another device. I've done this maybe a dozen times now and have finally given up. I've had to accept that until I reinstall OSX, for some reason I'm going to get the keychain nag every time I boot up. But pretty much everything on iOS/OSX is broken at the moment so no big surprise.
Windows machines in recent years have become extremely bottlenecked by drive performance, especially in the case of laptops which are so popular in companies. Laptop hard drives are slow, capable of only about 80 IOPS which is about the same speed they were 10 years ago, whereas mainstream SSDs by comparison, can typically deliver 80,000 IOPS. Since once you get Windows loaded up with all it's random messy software it's disk access ends up being tons of tiny reads, IOPS is a much more important number than transfer rate, and SSDs are literally 1000x faster. It can mean the difference between a 20 minute operation and one that takes a few seconds.
If you are in any way in control over your corporate purchases, never *ever* buy another laptop without a SSD. It's false efficiency, wasting very expensive time to save a relatively cheap expense. 256GB SSDs are under $100 and will handle most corporate work just fine. Up to 1TB, the expense is almost negligible and it will pay for itself almost immediately. Your IT department will be happier, your workers will be happier, your machines will be more secure because scanning them is a lot less intrusive and can happen more often. Your IT department should have a pile of SSDs ready to be deployed into any machine that needs to be re-imaged or where the user needs the speed. Not doing so is wasting money.
> I recently reinstalled Windows 7 Home on a laptop. A factory restore (minus the shovelware), all the Windows updates
No you didn't. You *thought* you installed all the updates because Windows lied to you and said you had. Windows Update has a horrible habit of checking to see what updates are available **for the state of your machine right now** and then telling you that it's done installing updates when those are installed, when in truth there are pending updates that required previous updates to be installed before they could subsequently be installed that Windows Update won't tell you about until you re-discover what updates are available. After an install, force re-scan after every reboot to see what new updates are now available and when you reboot and re-scan and it says you are done, you are actually done.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Many updates seem to slow it down, but after some updates I've actually seen it get faster.
If speed is a higher priority than software compatibility and saving time then by all means go with Linux on the desktop. For myself, the speed of a modern Windows desktop (with Linux in virtual machines) is fast enough.
One issue I've seen mostly with laptops (although also with desktops in dusty environments), is that the fans get clogged with dust, grit and hairs that cause the machines to overheat and then the CPU goes into thermal slowdown mode. So from a cold start after installing the OS the machine is cool, after a couple of hours of installing updates the machine has reached a toasty temperature and the CPU throttles down. Looks like it's the OS, but it's really the hardware.
Look at the event log in admin tools and see if you are getting CPU throttle notifications.
Hard to clean the fan on most laptops, and may not be worth the time on many old desktops.
Basically. And there's no friggin WAY the performance from a quad i7 today could have been obtained from a core 2 duo, in any case.
1) Windows sucks. Always has. Always will.
2) You've been hacked. And your admins are idiots.
3) Use BSD or Linux instead.
Actually having experience. Oh and the fact that I just set up a new windows 7 VM and from the fresh install on the DVD and how it ran, compared to after applying all updates it lost all of it's speed.
Nothing installed but windows updates. on the exact same hardware. Absolute solid proof to me.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It could be System Restore, Indexing, fragmentation, buggy processes causing memory leaks, sata drivers needed especially for amd systems otherwise you get disk thrashing, or some temp folder grown too big and needs to be cleared out. Do a disk cleanup.
The truth is you don't need a third party anti-virus program the MS security essentials works just as good, but, you need for all users in the organization including yourself to run as a standard user with Group Policies in place to limit what a user can and cannot do with the machine they are using and this is where windows servers come in handy. You can also automate computer shutdowns after a virus scan is finished and this can be done after hours.
If the systems you're using have fewer than 4GB of RAM, then your slowness issue is probably due to the constant thrashing you're subjecting the HDD to because Windows eats a large chunk of RAM by itself. Switching to SSDs would definitely help, but they'd just be thrashing faster until you add enough RAM for everything to be loaded at once.
things like this have been said about windows for decades. It's never been true. I know because I've had operational business machines at each version of windows running for over ten years each.
These types of problems happen *and are henced resolved with brand new way-more-powerful hardware) when multiple components aren't spec'd together.
Any given component has many bins. You can get any cpu at six levels of l3 cache, for example. Drives can be 5'400, 7'200, etc.
The trick is not to get the most possible performance (which is akin to buying a new machine a few years later). The trick is to match the performances across the various components, so a single component doesn't become the bottleneck.
Especially because some components, when acting as the bottleneck, can create serious slow-downs. Often actually making something else SLOWER will make the over-all machine much faster.
An over-simplified example is that a slow hard drive can create disk-thrashing scenarios -- one of the worst slow-downs common across the board. But a slow cpu will remain slow and steady, and never wind up thrashing the disk.
Learn to balance the vital components of a system, and it'll stay consistent for a decade.
(this was written on my 8-year-old vista machine, still working, still business, still gaming, still full-speed)
I don't use windows at all, but while doing some testing at work, we had a bunch of windows computers with various versions, and all of them continually accessed the hard drive at least once per second, even while idle. No wonder windows is slow. Also, no wonder an SSD on a windows box is a miracle performance boost while on my *nix boxes, it isn't so dramatic since they don't start out so bad.
Non-windows user _ever_, so take with as much salt as you want, but this is what I observed.
Yep, that's true of course.
We have tons of Win7 at work and I have several at home. None of them feel slow, even 7+ year old Core2's.
There's no way around the sludge that is the Windows registry, or f.e. Windows' tendency to regularly enter a heart-stopping "drive frenzy" for no apparent good reason, but it doesn't all have to end up with the familiar ugly crawl we all know friends' and family's Windows boxes come to just months after freshly installed. Next to me is a Win 7/64 machine whose current installation is close to 5 years old, and has seen thorough use (as with all my Windows machines during the 15 years I've used it on personal level) but it's still quite snappy and acceptably fluent even if slightly more sluggish than when the installation was new. The only difference is that I take care of my personal computing, and avoid the pitfalls that "computer illiterates" so often fall for.
...and not a single person thinks to investigate the problem with Process Explorer. Everyone pokes around in the dark and talks about the perceived problem, without a shred of real hard evidence.
I have noticed that this is typical of Windows users. They have no clue how to debug and test software. The geek cards of all the previous commenters should be forfeited.
I agree about the .NET recompiles which seem to always occur just after a Windows Update, but proposing that as the cause of the OP's problem is just a WAG. Proper investigation into the problem is the only reliably way to get to the bottom of the problem.
What I'm trying to say is you should just offer intelligent GUESSES, but rather offer guidance in how to gather the necessary empirical hard evidence of precisely WHAT is causing the slowdown.
Process Explorer should help a lot in this regard, but Windows itself has a Performance Monitor feature that should allow them to dig even deeper.
Don't guess. Know.
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
There is a Windows update bug that will cause svchost to eat 1gb of ram everytime it does a Windows update check.
The workaround is to disable automatic updates and update manually, but that's not a good solution. The other fix is to upgrade to 10 in a month, since it doesn't have this bug.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Windows needs more sp's / mini sp / update roll ups.
If just to make it easier to get see with a quick look how up do date a system is / easier reinstalls / off line / low bandwidth sites updates / etc.
Windows 10s should got like 10.1 10.1.5 10.2 10.2.5 and so on. Maybe have a 11 or have it go 10.0.1 10.0.2 10.0.3 with maybe a 10.1 down the road. But no more of what they did with 8 where they had 8.1 and then 8.1 update when it should of been 8.11 or 8.2.
Install Monitor http://www.mirekusoft.com/ was designed to deal with Windows rot and poorly written apps.
Wish I had mod points for that post. Run Process Explorer and TcpView to see what is going on.
Dear Slashdot, I am a self proclaimed computer expert. Windows seems slow to me. Give me reasons to install Linux even though I can barely operate Windows.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
The security team is right. SSDs are the single biggest performance improvement you can add to a computer (even an old computer). If your company is upgrading computers after they get 5-7 years old, but refusing to buy SSDs, they're wasting money. In particular, if they're upgrading management's high-end machines while the low-end machines are still being used by the rank and file, they're doing it completely backwards.
The problem is most people focus on the high-end numbers. How many GHz does the CPU run at? How many MHz does the DDR3 memory run at? Improving the high end doesn't help as much to improve productivity. It's already fast, meaning you're waiting a very small time for it to finish. Making it twice as fast just means the very small wait period shrank a tiny amount and is now twice as small.
If you're serious about improving performance, you get the biggest return by upgrading the slowest components. The slowest part of a modern PC is the HDD. When reading small files (not sequential reads, which really come into play only when copying large media files from one drive to another), they max out at about 1 MB/s. In contrast, the next slowest component - system RAM - is currently on the order of 10 GB/s. In other words, in terms of wait times a 1% improvement in HDD speed will have the same impact as a 100x increase in RAM speed. Now, consider than a SSD will get you at least a 30x improvement in read speeds for small files (about 30 MB/s seems to be average) and there is absolutely nothing you can do with the RAM or CPU which comes anywhere close to the amount of time you'll save by replacing the HDD with a SSD.
If you've got old computers, you should be upgrading them with a SSD instead of replacing them with new computers (with a HDD). Continue to use the old computers + SSD for a few more years, then upgrade them and transfer the SSDs to the new computers. The only exception is if the computer is so old you can't install enough RAM to run modern applications. (Another rare exception would be Northwood and Prescott-era P4 CPUs, which burn so much electricity you'll actually make back the cost of upgrading them via lower electricity bills in a couple years.)
On top of that, SSDs can actually look up small files faster than the computer can request them. So if you've got a virus scan running on a SSD, you can continue using the computer like normal with almost no impact on performance. In fact I usually run my weekly virus and two malware deep scans simultaneously on my SSD laptop, and I can still use it for web browsing or office tasks. When a virus scan runs on a HDD, the HDD has to spend all its time reading files the scan is requesting. As a result anything you try to do with the computer which requests data off the HDD will bog down.
On NT based versions of Windows I don't recall ever having problems with windows getting slower over time.
Sometimes DDE freaks out which can cause lag even entering text into the command line or number of programs open causes weird/slow redraw artifacts or a program/browser goes haywire and gobbles up all the GDI objects or something gets locked up in kernel space that causes zombies until reboot... but this is about the closest I've seen.
Known a number of people who have had problems with windows slowing over time. This behavior was always attributable to accumulation of malware and assorted crap... usually the accumulation just runs the system out of limited memory it had and starts swapping like crazy.
I expect any general purpose operating system if loaded under same conditions would exhibit similar properties.
Looks like we have a shutdown here http://www.dailymotion.com/vid...
Bullshit. Sure, cosmic rays will randomly flip bits over time and cause OS degradation. But that is over months or years. It is it noticeably slower after a few weeks that is something else, most often installing random shit. Note: Chrome, by default, is always running in the background.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
But you do have to be smarter than the average corporate drone.
http://www.debian.org/
http://www.linux.org/
One might be puzzled by my response, but I say no because technically anything can be fixed, the only question is how.
I've been struggling with this issue lately myself as my own laptop (which is not underpowered by any means) has been experiencing incredibly slow login times for the Windows 7 install I have on my HDD. I also have an install on my SDD, but aside from bootup the performance difference is negligible for me(I also use it a lot less so it doesn't have all my software installed). The hard drive in this case is a 2TB Samsung Spinpoint M9T at 5400 RPM. Slower RPM, but it's a super dense 2.5" laptop drive.
I've made some progress in speeding it up, especially the login time which was atrocious... Removed an update that caused some Windows crap to be re-verified or something all the time, removed several things from startup and switched non-essential services to automatic. Eventually I did get the logon process to not be too bad and Windows would become responsive after maybe 40 seconds instead of 5-10 minutes. It's still not as fast as I'd like, but it's much improved.
But the problem with this is that I'm shooting in the dark and have to rely on trying pretty much every suggestion on the web there is. And here is the difference between my Windows installs and my Linux installs. GNU/Linux is open source, virtually everything you use in it is. The system is also designed to be tinkered with and the bootup processes are all opened up for any level of configuration that you desire. You can screw with your init system, the kernel itself, your bootloader, anything... So with the sources to all these pieces, I think figuring out what's wrong is relatively easy.
Come Windows, everything is closed source. The problem can be fixed, but you're stuck with decompiling and trying to debug perhaps even the kernel itself if you want to solve any problems. How are you going to profile bootup or login times? Can you easily find a sink for disk or CPU usage in certain functions in the Windows source code? Probably not. It's really challenging to figure out what's going wrong in this case. The best I can hope for is to look to people who have gotten a lucky guess or someone who is so absolutely hardcore that they've debugged a closed source operating system.
Just my 2 cents.
It's partly that Windows slows down, especially with Windows 8, but it's more that people adapt to the speed of a system and it only seems slower.
If you've got an SSD, disable indexing. Yes you lose search function, oh well. What I need is reliable disk imaging s/w - like Acronis *used* to be, way back when. If Windows ever went sluggish, restore that disk image, and BAM! Got my snappy system back. But no go anymore, not with Windows 7 - at least not from Acronis. Forget about Norton Ghost waste of time. Reinstalling Windows 7 from scratch is a freaking nightmare w/all the stuff I'd have to reinstall along with it. Don't even want to think about it, but I think I have some god damned malware that can't be taken care of by Malwarebytes nor Eset, so I might have to :(((((
Damn all the ransomware lamers out there using prebuilt kiddie tools.
I found that if the following directory: C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download contains thousands of files, it tends to slow things down.
The short answer is YES! The more updates and software that gets installed in windows, the slower it gets. The more things running in the background (like antivirus), the worse the slowdown gets.
On the same machine (its a dual boot setup) Linux runs faster, and does not experience slowdowns. Linux boots faster, Firefox (installed in both OSs and configured the same)) opens faster in Linux. This is with Windows 7 and Linux Mint 17.1 installed in a dual boot setup with Windows 7 on the first partition of the hard drive. I have limited experience with Windows 8 on other people's computers, but I will NEVER DOWNGRADE to it!
Sorry M$ shills!
Rather than be pithily sarcastic, so a bit of a change for me.
Yes, you CAN avoid post-install windows slowdown, but only if you don't visit the internet with your browser much. NOTE: May be less of a problem with Firefox et al, but still a problem eventually.
It isn't bit rot per se, but the internet cache gets accumulated and added and updated and fragmented and spun, cycled, and stripped. And probably to make windows "faster" the OS appears to try to read much of this crap first: it may be trying to predict what your browser may load first so the internet "experience" appears to load faster because it can recognise a cache hit quicker.
The end result is that the longer and longer you've looked at the internet in total, the slower windows gets. Eventually, at least with IE as the browser, the only way to fix this slowdown is to reinstall. No amount of cleaning up appeared to help. Maybe duped info into the swap. Or hid in OS-invisible files.
My gaming rig NEVER sees the internet.
Kept pace for three years.
Previously, it needed a reinstall 6-9months, with it being noticeably slower well before 6 months, but not really a horror until 9 months or so had passed.
I recently started a new position at a new company. The old organization - was there for years, while they placed encryption, antivirus and application scanning (inventory) software on the machines. Given that most people had laptops - and they tried to keep them all similar and as cheap as humanly possible, this meant low speed spinning media, and 4GB of ram. Each morning's boot up I would have the machine (in startup) auto launch resource monitor on the disk tab, and wait for the queue depth to go below 10 (5, ideally). Once that requirement was met, I could start my day. This would take at a minimum 10 minutes post-login. Then, Fridays between noon and 1pm they'd start up a full disk scan. Can't blame them on timing, usually laptops get turned off when taken home - so when else you gonna do it?
New organization gave me an ultrabook for use, complete with SSD and a fairly hefty i5 chip, and 8GB of ram to start. Obviously I can't compare apples to apples given the configurations are entirely different from a software (antivirus, inventory scanning etc) perspective, but the machine is just snappy all around.
I'm not saying I'm hugely more productive with either setup; however the stress level of having a machine that just does what I need it to when I want it to makes all the difference in the world.
...to force obsolescence and upgrade$
I almost can't believe that people are still asking questions about this, but I suppose I'll have to have to let this one go off easy.
Windows is not responsible for doing this to itself. It is your anti-virus software that is doing this + assuming you aren't one of those people that downloads and installs every program trial and freeware from the net.
Try it. Uninstall your anti-virus software completely.
Back in the Windows XP days when Vista was released I figured out what caused all the performance issues and it was the anti-virus software. I had reinstalled Windows XP many times so I was quite familiar with its snappy and responsive performance on a new install vs one year later. After uninstalling the anti-virus software, everything was precisely as snappy and responsive as it was on Day #1. It still holds true today. The effect is lessened significantly if your system runs on SSD (anti-virus know nothing on Day #1 of their install, but over time they learn the system and gradually bring the system to its knees).
> disk scanning could take place after hours and/or under a lower CPU priority
CPU priority will make almost no difference. A tiny amount of CPU will destroy your spinning disk performance. If only the OS or AV had some way to stay dormant until there's no other disk activity.
I can translate from KMH to feet per minute. I know that seconds and even jiffy exist, but what is this 'snappy' and 'sluggish' you talk about.
Most likely you are now used to the speed and now just want it to go even faster.
First: do a complete new install and see if it is still 'snappy'. If it isn't, then it is your perception of the speed. If it is, start adding things as you lost likely did and see when it starts to happen.
I must say, my PCs are just as fast as they were when I got them out of the box, or at least almost. Yes, I have added software that will slow things a little bit down, but only if I measure it, not when I actually use it. At least, I am unable to notice the difference.
So please come back with information like: when I reinstalled Windows 7, the time to load a 17MB image into GIMP was x time. After 4 weeks, the time it takes is X+Y. I have only done upgrades and between upgrades A7 and A8 I noticed a time increse in the loading if the same image from 0 to +Y.
The update did change FileA.exe and FileB.exe. What I further did was ...
And that is how you do a technical posting. Not "I think it might be, like, you know, sluggish like a slug, not, I don't know,. like snappy, like a snapper."
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
http://www.blackviper.com/serv... I've used it and don't experience any apparent slowdowns even on older ULV notebook processors.
Waka Waka!
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/sh...
Waka Waka!
Recently I had the pleasure of setting up a Windows NT system. It took about an hour from initial power-up to fully installed system. Windows NT absolutely rocks. It is faster than any other operating system I have ever seen. Just about everything happens instantaneously. Honestly I have never ever before seen a computer run so fast. It runs just great in 256 Mb of RAM and it uses less than 1 Gb of disk storage.
I can't say about the first submitter, but the second puzzles me. Why would you schedule more malware scans when the machines get slower? Heck, that might actually be a case of reversing cause and effect, since scans are notoriously slow.
As for encryption... Yeah, no, that's pretty much terrible to do on an HDD, even an SSD. What you want there is OPAL-compliant SSDs, since those will be able to perform on-disk encryption using the SSD's hardware, dramatically improving performance.
What slows Windows down are not the updates. You can have a Windows server running for years, installing updates and never slowing down.
You user profile is what is slowing your Windows down (the content of c:\users\%USERNAME%), and NO you can't just delete it... try to login with a new user and you'll see. It has been like that since Win95 and Microsoft has never fixed this.
It's a matter of keeping things clean. After that, it's a matter of what is actually installed. Yes, Windows will be fastest when that first "default" install is made. However, that's not the system you're running for production, so consider that an incomplete install. When you're done throwing .NET, the security software, virus scanner, production software, and fully configure and patch everything; then that is your install. In particular, if your business software needs .NET, and .NET + patches adds 15 GB to your Windows install, that should be considered part of the install.
There is a slowdown that is due to Windows Update simply having to keep up with more updates, though Windows 7 hasn't been nearly as bad as XP, year for year. But it's minor compared to the increasing amount of malware for Windows out there that should be scanned. That slowdown should be part of your TCO for the rest of your human existence in front of a Windows PC.
SSDs for everybody would be nice. So would more processor power. Some people would rather have cheap PCs to save money in the short term, only to lose that money in the increased time that it takes to use those PCs over the lifetime of those PCs. That's the way it goes. It's simply hard to put a number on what the delay-related expense of (((variable 2 to 3s) x (number of users) x (times per day) x (days in PC lifetime) x (salary per user)) + (support costs)) will be, though it should be more than the "deal" that somebody thinks they got short term. Convincing the person in charge of acquisitions of that, though, can be a different matter, especially if math scares that person.
From many years of working with Windows PC's there's one thing I know for sure and that's that one of the major reasons for Windows to slow down over time is the default setting of the virtual memory paging file which is "Automatically manage paging file size". As the page file expands and contracts on this setting the file gets ever more fragmented and access to it gets slower. When I first setup a new computer (with Windows pre-installed) one of the first things I do is change that setting from automatic to a custom size and make the initial and maximum size the same so hopefully it's allocated all in one piece and as close to the beginning of the disk as possible where access is fastest. If a computer has been running for years on "Automatically manage" it's page file many be in thousands of pieces and that could possibly slow the computer significantly when the page file is used. There was a utility called PageDefrag for Windows XP that allowed you to defragment your pagefile but the author Mark Russinovich never updated it to work with newer versions of Windows so there is no easy way to defragment a pagefile on Windows Vista and up but one method I've used with success is to use a partition manager to reduce the size of the boot partition (pushing it farther along the drive) and create a small block of space (perhaps 40 to 60gb) in between the system reserved partition and the boot / Windows partition; after that format it and give it a dive letter like X: and then put the page file there. When you do that it's as close to the beginning of the drive as possible and at a static size Windows never has to work to expand or shrink it and it never gets fragmented.
One other thing is that the author mentions Windows 7, at the end of 2014 over about a three month period I built eight new computers for people who wanted quality hardware (all eight were identical in motherboard, CPU, RAM and hard drive) and seven of them I installed with Windows 8.1 and one the person requested Windows 7; I noticed during installation and in general using the computer with Windows 7 that it was noticeably slower than the computers with Windows 8.1 so Windows 8 appears to be faster than Windows 7 on the same hardware, at least that's my observation. (and that's Windows 7 x64 versus Windows 8.1 x64)
Another thing that slows computers down is the accumulation of temporary files, there's a tool someone recommended to me called TFC (temp file cleaner), you can find it here http://www.geekstogo.com/forum... and it really does a phenomenal job; many computers that I've used it on show marked speed improvement after running it.
It is never in the manufacturer's best interest to optimize updates especially when the product being updated competes with newer more profitable products.
Use msconfig.exe to clean up some of the garbage running at startup. A lot of bloatware and crapware can sneak in over the years even if you are careful.
An SSD makes another world of difference, and they are not very expensive these days. A 500GB one is under $150 and should be plenty for most folks.
Scans should not run during the day unless your machine was off the night before. If your management lets your IT be this stupid, maybe look elsewhere for a better company. Seriously, if the company does not provide good enough tools and maintenance on them for you to effectively do your job you should polishing upmyour resume.
I ran windows from 3.1 through XP. When I installed any OS I would trim it down to the least greedy effects, shut down unneeded processes, disable updates. No virus scanner, I ran that manually if I ever had a concern and only ever got got once on one machine over many years, and I caught that one as it was installing. I only ran programs that I needed, never any dancing pigs or Comet Cursor junk. I would derfag occasionally and kept my filesystem clean. Every machine was running as fast as the first day when it died or was retired. I would clean machines for other people and they reported that I had restored if not exceeded the performance when new, and without reinstalling. I am more then happy to bash windows and MS all day long, but they are innocent of this one crime.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
As per:
http://www.informationweek.com/how-to-disable-ipv6-on-windows-7-/d/d-id/1099490
Rene Pilon
If it's slowing down after a couple of weeks, you're doing something wrong.
I learned a long time ago (...and am open to the idea that my information is out of date) that as Windows ages the registry gets bigger. Bigger registry, longer to take for Windows to do menial things.
One way I've combatted this is I have a lot of 'portable' apps. I.e. apps that do not require an install. I have a folder full of them that gets copied from one computer to the next. A lot of them I've arranged for on my own but some of them came from a site called portableapps.com.
This is anecdotal but I've been doing this for over ten years and I'm responding to you from a Windows 7 laptop that has not been reinstalled since 2012 and I'm still quite happy with it.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Why I hate Windows! I only run Windows in a virtual machine (when absolutely necessary - about once every 3-4 months at worst) on my Linux workstation. It uses less memory. Has a better GUI, And pretty much does every thing I want. Most of the Windows-based software that I absolutely need will run nicely with Wine. I think that at this point it is 2 or 3 applications, including Sparx Enterprise Architect which is my main software design tool. Right now, the only thing I have to run on native Windows (in the VM) is my scanner software when I need to scan a document to a real PDF instead of an image file.
Yeah, this is it. If you do the things that slow down windows, it will slow down. I've had Win boxes that have been horrible to boot, but it's because I installed a lot of services in the background (often without realizing it.....auto-updates come with device drivers, etc). I've also had Win boxes that are just as snappy as ever, because I kept them clean.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Disable pagefile if you have sufficient ram. Disable hibernation. Disable system restore. Keep your computer on overnight so the updates and defrags happen in the middle of the night instead of when you first turn on the machine. That should help.
Because binary logs and bloated config files are clearly the future.
Running Windows 8 on non-SSDs, I just found performance went up incredibly when I turned off the superfetch service. There's some sort of bug where it gets to 100% disk usage after a while if you're not restarting every day or two. (Sleep isn't enough). Slows the whole damn system down and task manager and resource monitor just show that you're using the pagefile, making it tricky to track down.
It might not be a problem with SSDs, which have very different read characteristics.
There's a few things that are hard to avoid on Windows. Startup slowdown is one of those, because way too many software do stupid shit on startup. An SSD will largely solve this problem.
For the OS itself? It should stay snappy for years and years.
Certain pieces of software will kill it. Many popular anti-virus are worse than the viruses themselves, including very popular ones (Avast used to be a prime offender. I don't know about today, but so many people kept recommending it...).
Another major killer is iTunes. This one is even worse because of the psychological aspect. Its an Apple product, and it makes Windows go to a crawl. People using itunes are very likely to be also using MacOSX at time, even if they use Windows at others. So then they compare Windows with itunes to MacOSX, and conclude that Windows is far worse than it truly is.
I can't help it, and maybe it's my imagination and perception bias, but to me it seems to be that as soon as a new version of Windows is approaching or even out the door, the old version starts to slow down considerably.
Correlation is not causation. The guys at MS are professional engineers--they may have different philosophies or coding styles or project priorities than you do, but they're not slowing things down in order to make you buy the next product. You're much more likely to run into that with a local guy or a disreputable company. And you might not like MS, but they haven't been a disreputable company for decades. Even if they had an inclination to be (and they don't), they're too big in the business-to-business space to risk their reputation.
What happens is your systems get slower as they get older, other systems get faster, you install more stuff, your drives fragment a bit, you add extra hardware, maybe you get malware you don't know about, etc...
With Linux and pretty much every other os, you back up the home directory and install over the top of the other partitions.
You and I have very different experiences of Linux-based systems, though admittedly I am mostly using Linux on servers rather than workstations, and really the problems are more about the distro/software running on top of Linux than Linux itself.
My experience of trying to back-up a real world Linux system is that you start with backing up /home. Then you also figure out what you need to back up from other places, like /root, /etc, /opt and /var. Some of the configuration files in there will be automatically generated from others, but if you overlook any of the underlying ones, you'll be running at 640x480 forever or your RAID won't be as redundant as you thought. Some of the configuration data will be specific to the particular version of something you currently have installed, and the new version will fail to initialise properly after you've upgraded because it doesn't update the previous configuration completely and correctly without user intervention. Some of the executable code you run will be under those directories too, because web apps and scripting and interpreters.
And that's just with standard applications that are provided with your distro. $DEITY help you if you want to install anything else or need to build anything from source, because no-one else is going to. Try not to allow too many breaking conflicts under /etc or /usr/local, where there are essentially no naming conventions and everything just gets a short/abbreviated name and goes into the global namespace. Oh, never mind, we forgot to add the important things under /usr/local/somedirectorymylastdistrodidntevenhave to the back-up scripts anyway.
And then you upgrade your distro to the next major revision because the price of OS stability in the Linux ecosystem is falling behind with all your applications as well, and... Well, in my entire career, across different organisations and with different teams of sysadmins, I can probably count the number of completely smooth major distro upgrades I've seen on no hands. On the server side, I now see a lot of "one install only" policies: the expectation of success with any in-place update process is so low that the standard MO is to set up a new clean machine with the new software required, figure out how to migrate specific configuration and data from the essential applications from the old system to the new one, and then retire/reformat the old machine. Even then, the actual applications and packages installed are tightly controlled; there is an entire industry these days making tools like Puppet or Chef or Ansible because trying to manage these things manually on modern Linux systems is crazy, and making any local changes to standard configurations is frowned upon. Personally I prefer to run Windows for my main workstations for various reasons, but I work with several colleagues who prefer to run Linux workstations and they seem to run into analogous problems with end user/client applications too.
Linux is great in many respects, but with most popular Linux distros, having a clean filesystem structure and code/config/data set-up are not among them. Maintaining most real world Linux-based systems is absurdly complicated as a direct result.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I don't see any proof here, just your unsubstantiated conjecture.
Moron fanboys like yourself are part of a problem, not part of a solution.
I've been running the same Windows install on my laptop for 4.5 years and it still feels quite fast to me. I installed an SSD last year, which obviously helps a lot. Prior to that there was the predictable delay whenever I launched a program that I hadn't run for a while (that wasn't in the disk cache), and now I don't even have that. I have *lots* of programs installed, but I see none of the sluggishness which you describe.
A noticeable slowdown in four weeks is quite odd, unusual, and not normal.
The problem with your report is that it is hopelessly vague. What is slow? Launching programs? Running programs? Poor frame rate in some games?
Do you have enough memory? Do you have enough CPU cores?
Three possibilities come to mind:
1) You don't have enough RAM. If so (if there aren't many GB available at all times according to task manager) then get more.
2) Your CPU is overheating. While doing performance investigations for Valve I found that a lot of game slowdowns were caused by thermal throttling: https://randomascii.wordpress....
3) Something else is wasting CPU or memory. When I did hit sluggishness a few years ago I investigated and found the buggy device driver that was clearing the system disk cache: https://randomascii.wordpress....
So no, it's definitely not normal. To figure out what is going on you need to monitor specific details about your system in order to find and fix the root cause. slow/sluggish is not an actionable bug report.
It's hard to do actual research as an end user when you're talking about devices costing hundreds of bucks and you have a software environment that won't let you move back if you "upgrade" and it renders your device effectively unusable. This is a very convenient situation for the device manufacturers and the people who don't want to bother with things like backward compatibility and long-term support of their software, of course.
But count me in for at least half a dozen similar anecdotes among friends and family with various mobile devices, particularly the expensive ones like Apple/iOS and Samsung/Android phones and tablets.
I am increasingly of the view that there should be a certain degree of mandatory regulation in these industries, where the commitment (or lack of it) to future proofing such devices against software-related breakage must be clearly stated before purchase and failure to do so is automatic grounds for a refund if the device does then get bricked or otherwise rendered effectively useless. I am generally very wary of regulating software and liability issues, because of the difficulty in establishing objective standards for what is reasonable, but there is so much abuse in our industry now because of continual updates and built-in obsolescence that I'm starting to think consumer protection authorities should actively intervene.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I do not have the same problems with Windows 7. I have an interesting distinction though: I rarely reboot my system. I work at home, on desktop computer, and it usually runs 24/7. So maybe, just maybe, with every reboot something grows (registry or some logfile, I don't know), which causes system to slow down. Also, I'm always switched to "windows classic" UI theme, because it works fast and I don't really need transparent windows, shadows, and other shitty effects.
My company rig has VMWare Workstation 11 running on Fedora 21 XFCE.
Corporate Windoze 7 image runs as a VM. Separate Winders VMs (linked clones) for each client environment I support. Numerous demo images, mostly CENTOS, also run as VMs.
Wouldn't do it any other way.
My home PC is running Windows 8, but started off as Windows 7. It is as snappy as the day I bought it.
The issue with your organization, as with more organization is they install so much crap on there that it slows it down. It would happen if they installed so much crap on linux or mac or whatever.
It just so happens that tend not to for those system. But if enough regular users switch to those, they will.
I hate my work laptop. It auto installs software, demands reboots at varying times, runs a really shitty custom backup that backsup/restores/sometimes overwrites my local files, runs slow enterprise anti virus software, endpoint configuration, reporting tools, software scanning tools...
Heck, just recently, they started doing HTTPS man in the middle monitoring. So even google throws cert errors when I use firefox/chrome. Heck, I'm not using Bing just to avoid google HTTPs. Officially we must use IE.
In my last job, if we got our PCs to use a test domain, we could avoid all the corporate crap. But not at my current company.
Long story short, there's nothing that will cause windows 7 or 8 to slow down in time. It is generally enterprise install bullshit or users installing bad software.
I had two computers that had issues, one physical win 7 with 2gb RAM, one VM with 4gb. Turns out windows update (running in svchost.exe) was using excessive amounts of RAM on windows update runs (And I mean excessive). The whole system became unusable for what felt like 20mins while the Windows Update run going. Lots and lots of paging until Windows update released the memory, and then very sluggish while applications were paged back in.
https://support.microsoft.com/...
Nice one Microsoft releasing this as an "optional" update. The perfect upgrade push. How many Joe Average uses would just be "Wow, my computer is really slow, time for an upgrade" because they aren't aware there is an optional update hiding there under Windows Update to fix it.
Unless you want to waste time manually cleaning out the registry every 2-3 months, slowdown is inevitable.
Stop using substandard OS's.
They happen you know, especially when someone can't figure out how to post "Ask Slashdot" stories in the "Ask Slashdot" section of the site. This site has sections and the ability to selectively ignore those sections for a reason. If editors fail to post stories in the correct section then it defeats the purpose of this feature and in turn that it undermines the value of the site as a whole. Quarterly revenue goes down, earnings estimates are missed, and executive bonuses take a hit. Rumor has it that several senior level executives had to move their kids to public school systems as a result. Please Timothy, post the stories in the right sections. if you can't do it for yourself, at least think of the children!
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
We have a similar scan problem, but our co's policy is to not shut down PC's at night so that they can get Windows updates. But the scanning still happens during the day even if one leaves it on.
Couldn't a scan rule be put in place that only scans during the day IF the night scan didn't complete? Anybody know of a tool like that for McAfee? Does McAfee have a scripting language or scheduling rule engine? Or, a 3rd party add-on?
That way ONLY those who turn it off at night get "punished" by sluggishness. (Or if a Windows update interrupts an anti-virus scan, which may happen from time to time, but that's better than always day-scanning.)
McAfee could make a nice profit even by selling such a rule tool. It's like being paid to create a problem and being paid again to solve it: Kinda like Congress :-)
Table-ized A.I.
Windows has been a POS since day 1. Even Xenix sucked and died. Xo~
Windows? The universal remote version of a registry? Stupid, stupid, stupid design. Every current BSD/linux is superior in literally EVERY way.
By sneaking all the anti-trust OEM deals... Microsoft enlarged their audience. Game companies are looking for the largest audience - for the most revenue. Windows is even weak as a game OS. Every game can be coded to run on Linux, BETTER, than it runs on Windows. Why? Because Linux is better. Modular. Registry? What is a registry? A big wish list for gay weddings.
Still waiting for the masses of sheeple to wake up and ditch Windows or at least add Linux multi-booted. Funny how Microsoft and "secure boot" came around isn't it? Things that make you go hmm.. Let's complicate dual booting Linux. Require a microsoft-signed key to install Linux on an OEM machine. SSDD. That's been worked around. Pro-tip: skip Ubuntu third world linux and Redhat microsoft-model-wannabe linux. I've used the majority of distros. Redhat 7.3 was the last Redhat before they started being a Microsoft b-tch. distrowatch.com
A huge amount of people already use Android (which is Linux) way more than any other phone or tablet OS. Put it on the desktop, it rocks. If more people ran Linux, more game companies would code games to run on Linux. This is a natural flight to quality.
Playstation 3? Linux ran on it.
The problem? Nvidia.
http://www.linux.com/learn/answers/view/490-is-it-possible-to-put-linux-on-my-ps3-without-the-use-of-any-other-pc
Funny now how Nvidia is suddenly selling an ANDROID (linux) cloud gaming device. It's a POS. $199/$299 and it is WEAK. st-st-stutter. Not even mkv support, etc. Nobody forgot what Torvalds said nor did anybody forget Nvidia are dicks. 3dfx was great and was bought by Nvidia. Everybody hated that they bought 3dfx even back then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw
Playstation 4? BSD. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/16/sony_playstation_4_kernel/
Google servers? Were BSD, now Linux. Amazon? Linux. Netflix? BSD. etc. Windows is the short bus of OS's.
Linux initially had a learning curve because it was designed wisely. That learning curve right now is no higher than Mac OSX (which is BSD/bash shell). A Linux install is faster and simpler than a Windows install. You end up with a far more stable OS, faster and sooner. Not to mention all the software you have access to. Sure, some of the more popular apps like VLC have been ported to Windows.
Windows is on a lot of machines, but not popular because it's worth a sh-t. It's junk. They schemed the larger audience with OEM *wink* *wink* deals before the anti-trust came to light.
http://www.top500.org/featured/top-systems/
Windows is not on the list. At all. Ever. It's garbage.
BSD is outstanding with so much programming wisdom and talent, documentation is sometimes lacking. pc-bsd (google it) is a no-brainer install.
If you use a Mac and can navigate partitions and a bash shell, it's just a different fork of BSD.
I haven't had this problem since Windows 9x.
Buy an SSD.
SSDs are not necessarily the answer. Try finding out what there are so many scans, what are the parameters used, what extra software is installed and is it required, get rid of local admin privs and extra user profiles, clean up the Registry, reset the swap file instead of allowing Windows to manage it and set it to a reasonable figure for the amount of RAM, consider adding RAM, look for suspicious processes. Above all, find out WHY it's happening. IT Security are concerned with security, and may not be IT experts in the broader sense.
You start off with a machine that runs like a greased greyhound and once the users put flash, dropbox and other non-work related shit on there it slows to a crawl. Meanwhile identical systems with linux or similar on them and only work related stuff stay at around the same speed unless disks start filing up or new software needs a bit more grunt than the old machine can provide.
This is 2015; do you really think there's people out there who don't know fake forced upgrades are what keeps Microsoft in their billions? That they're only being used for their money? Nonetheless I've known people who seemingly can't wipe their ass without starting Excel.
Since the year 2000 Microsoft has been doing that too because it turns out to be a really good idea for anything more multi-purpose than a game console.
"but the security team doesn't care about optimization, summarily blaming sluggishness on lack of SSDs. Are they blowing smoke?"
They're blowing smoke to a large degree. SSDs are lot faster however as anyone who ever bought one knows, they are not capable of speeding up the movement of a large number of files \all THAT much since the Windows Explorer builds in a huge overhead around every file transfer and this is what takes files so long to be copied from point A to point B. So to the extent that you're opening a lot of files, transfering their bytes into RAM, then closing them,. it's still going to take a significant amount of time.
Sure, if you have one HUGE zipped file then SSDs are all that and a slice of cake, as advertised, but not much of what you're describing involves moving large files to and fro. Processing many files you;re going to see some speed up but mostly it's the processing itself that takes the time.
Yes, it's faster to read and write with an SSD but you'd be shocked how often the actual speed of reading into memory and writing out to disk has to little to do with how fast something happens on your computer. I was.
One of the more odd design choices in MS Windows is a good demonstration of where you do not want the rendering to have priority. Click on "control panel" and it starts drawing a lot of little icons, then it finds a lot more things to add to the list and redraws with a lot more icons. If a user attempts to click on one of the icons in the several seconds (yes that long - how fucked is that?) when it's rendering stuff and reordering it then they are very likely to click on a icon that was not there when they decided to click and end up opening something different. A sane way to do it, as done in many other parts of the MS GUI, is to make a list AND THEN present it to the user instead of a slooooow interative process. The desktop starting up is another example like that where you can see controls but can't use them for up to tens of seconds depending on how much stuff is loading. A sane way, which as far as I know is used in every non-MS computing environment, is to have some sort of splash screen or indication that the environment is not ready, then it provides the controls at the point where you can actually use them. A marketing choice to have X seconds to the desktop and cheat by drawing controls before the user can actually use them means we have an interface that frustrates and confuses users and the public perception of the relaibility of computers has been going downhill over time.
So IMHO rendering should wait until the user can actually interact with the rendered thing. Putting it there early is frustrating for the user. Nobody wants to click six times on a thing before it's ready then eventually get six instances of it when all you wanted is one as soon as possible.
Bucketloads of memory reduce the pain of running a malware-prone system since those on-access scans can be on a cached copy of the file instead of having to hit the actual disk twice.
Now we have desktop motherboards that can take 32GB of RAM relatively cheaply so what would have seemed excessive in the past is now a viable workaround.
MOD PARENT UP
New files get added during the day and old ones get modified so if you want to protect a malware-prone environment effectively there is going to be a lot of scanning activity during working hours.
An after hours scan reporting that a lot of stuff got trashed by cryptolocker at 10am is of very limited usefulness.
Of course it does.
There's a thing called version numbers of libraries that predates MS but they didn't decide to go that way until relatively recently. It's a way of being able to retain old versions of system files for compatibility reasons without slowing down the system searching for stuff. That is why linux, solaris, oracle, mac, *bsd and everything else apart from MS can run old stuff without a great deal of mucking about.
As us old geeks well know, all Microsoft Operating Systems have been this way since the dawn of digital time and force the user to upgrade both Software and Hardware. And of coarse this will continue.
I know it's been mentioned elsewhere, but Disk Defragmentation of hard disk drives with Windows 7 installed can offer a significant boost in minimizing boot times. In addition to cleaning up cached and temporary files from applications and web browsers before defragmentation can help. You might also want to look into the contents of the \Windows\WinSxS directory for backup sets of previous OS files updated by the installation of Microsoft patches and updates as described in the posting at [Tip] Reclaim Free Space by Removing Old Windows Updates Files in Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 on AskVG.com.
No apps SHOULD NOT write to the registry ever with the exception of an installation.
Instead of the registry, where should an application write user preferences? I thought it was a requirement at one point that desktop applications with a Windows Logo certification shall save preferences to the registry instead of to INI, JSON, XML, or whatever files in %APPDATA%.
Its all those restore points. No one uses it, it isn't reliable, turn it off and watch Windows fly.
If you never defrag the MFT or shrink and defrag registry hives or clean up winsxs then it will inevitably slow down.
If you clean up old log and temp files, purge outdated/orphaned registry entries, use a registry hive optimizer and defragger, and defrag the MFT, any slowdown will be very slight. I have had Windows 7 installed on my Precision M6400 laptop for a lot of years now, cloned it from the original hard drives to newer hybrid hard drives, and have not experienced this slowdown.
Tools I use:
* ccleaner
* a batch file I wrote to clean up what ccleaner misses
* registry life
* ultradefrag
No problems at all.
I'm planning to upgrade both hard drives to SSDs in the next couple of months... I'm waiting to see if a new higher resolution 17" Precision Mobile Workstation will be announced in the wake of new video chipsets. If they can't do higher than WUXGA or support at least three screens, I'm upgrading the M6400 because it is still plenty fast for my work, and for photo editing on the go. I run a dual boot configuration, Linux for work (BYOD rocks!) and Windows for play and hobbies.
I'd love to just punt Windows... but Adobe CC, embroidery software for my embroidery machine, and some of the games I play are unavailable for Linux, and wine and derivatives (including crossover) is too incomplete to be an adequate substitute. Plus, Netflix: sure I can mess with Moonlight for hours, but why bother when I have the Windows license that came with the laptop and I can just reboot to Windows to watch streaming video?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
start disabling ALL windows services you don't *actually* use.
do that and windows remains fast for a year+ until you make a mess of the drivers and installed/uninstalled programs.
Upgrade your computer equipment, because like all companies it is long beyond projected end of service, defrag the hard drive or virtual machine monthly,
get rid of Norton, don't use I.E. Use chrome with script blocking and most companies would see a 500 % improvement in machine performance and then think about what tat means for work performance, security, and return on the investment and you get the idea.
> Even better has anybody identified any Windows update that put the slug into sluggish?
Windows must look easy and behave in a way that makes you want to buy it when you enter a store.
After you bring it home, it must look and behave in a way that makes you want to return to the store.
> Are they blowing smoke?
That is called specialization. Every concentrates in one part of the problem and tries to be perfect in his/her area: daily work, security (the scans), administrative CPU & memory usage etc.
This way it is possible to design things so that areas compete instead of collaborate, forcing the company to make more frequent computer purchases. Divide and conquer.
BTW, now that I think, this applies to everything. So, the next generation of nuclear reactors won't really be safe -- otherwise the next+1 generation wouldn't sell.
!
I lose track the number of IT security gurus I work with and the minute they go through a list of security apps that we need to install the more I lose confidence in them. Time and time again I can prove that Antivirus software doesn't work, none of their malware apps can blocks simple phishing and fresh email exploits that clueless users just love clicking on. The only thing security software does is make companies like Symantec steady cashflow. Other dumb policies like changing passwords every 30 days does nothing but give helpdesk daily password resets for users. A true password protection is one that uses multi-factor. A password phishing attack can get passwords well before the 30 day window. Which is why big banks and companies keeps getting hacked because they have clueless overpaid security guys working.
On an ancient Windows XP machine, as an experiment ,I switched it from give priority to foreground, to background processes and it actually became usable again. It seemed to back-up my suspicion that there are so many background processes like encryption and anti-viral ware, that foreground processing is minimal. Maybe with hardware encryption and server based key management, someday things might be reasonable again. Lastly, corporations can't always upgrade because software vendors haven't come-up with versions certified for new versions of windows or even IE.
At work we have AV software on our machines which is so broken that it actively interferes with development. We go through the usual dev workspace build / clean cycles but about 1 in 10,000 times the AV locks the file and we can't delete it. So builds break, and sometimes the file takes minutes to release. It's so annoying and the IT dept are so intransigent that it took a monumental effort to persuade them to exempt a single directory from the scanner so this wouldn't happen.
"Well shouldn't your company replace the broken AV software?" you may ask. Yes but that's rational thinking. You see, the company bought a site licence for this POS and therefore trying to get rid of it is virtually impossible. It follows the psychology of throwing good money after bad, the same way someone might keep driving a broken car to justify the thousands they've already spent instead of just buying a new one. It might also explain why the company uses Lotus Notes and other AWFUL pieces of enterprise software even though everyone hates them.
I just did an update to my Win7 machine at work that drastically slowed its performance. The problem I ran into is it is one of the "cannot be removed" updates that has absolutely no description of what it is really for. Tinfoil hat or not, the indicators are clear.
Hi,
Three 2.5 years ago we changed all the laptops in our company (insurance / banking sector). Typical business Lenovo Thinkpad T-Series laptop. Our company owns a bit more than 5'000 laptops.
The salesmen and, as the performance degraded, the whole IT got laptops with SSDs (~1000 laptops). The others employees went with HDDs (7'200 rpm).
I asked the project manager why they won't buy all laptops with SSDs, his response : 20% purchase budget increase (unit cost ~1000$ with a HDD, ~1200$ with a SSD)
We have inhouse software to monitor the performance of end computing devices like laptops. After 1 year of operations :
- HDD laptop average performance drop : ~14%
- SSD laptop average performance drop : ~3%
After 2 years of operations :
- HDD laptop average performance drop : ~23%
- SSD laptop average performance drop : ~5%
Needless to say that our managers today have KPIs showing that the TCO is lower with SSDs than HDDs : ;-)
- (re)boot time is much much lower
- programs are starting faster
- rebuild time is reduced
- upgrades, patches and software deployments are taking less time
- the SSD are slightly more reliable too
- users are more happy when the performance increases... hardly quantifiable, but our IT surveys show a correlation
We delayed the next renewal by one year in order to jump from Windows 7 to Windows 10 directly (or should I say to avoid Windows 8 / 8.1). In the pipe there is no more computers with HDDs.
I recently tried to "restore" the performance of an old Win7 laptop. As it seems, everyone agrees that the slow-down is caused by excessive HDD read/write operations. Sure enough, this was the case with the laptop, as indicated by a constantly glowing HDD light. I had a look at the files and processes involved, and identified Security Essentials and system restore points as culprits. I turned off system restore completely and un+reinstalled Security Essentials. It did the trick. Why these two guys suddently went on a rampage, I'll never know. Maybe some kind of "bug" that was triggered by recent updates and sure was totally unintentional.
When will people finally flush that steaming pile of crap that is Windows down the toilet, instead of trying to use it, wasting countless of hours of their employer's time, or worse, of their own spare time? Time = Your Own Life Time!
Actually having experience. Oh and the fact that I just set up a new windows 7 VM and from the fresh install on the DVD and how it ran, compared to after applying all updates it lost all of it's speed.
Nothing installed but windows updates. on the exact same hardware. Absolute solid proof to me.
I've seen this before. I do a fair bit of computer repair on the side, and just recently someone brought me a Windows 7 Home Premium install that was acting this way. I cleaned the computer of malware and junk programs, but it was still using 50%+ memory when idle. It turned out that the windows update service itself was causing the problem. The biggest ram hog was svchost running makecab.exe repeatedly, eating up nearly 1GB of memory all by itself.
.NET Framework 3.5.1 which was screwing up the installation of updates. Repairing it resolved the problem. Perhaps check your update history and see if you have any failed updates, especially relating to .NET 3.5.1. If you do, try going into Programs and Features, disabling .NET 3.5.1 under Windows Features, rebooting, and then re-enabling it.
It turned out the issue was actually a corrupted
It would likely take months to unravel all of this in a corporate environment. A few key points to focus on...
- SSD will help solve the slowness caused by drive encryption and high I/O absolutely
- A/V on the desktop shouldn't be that intrusive however. Your security dept is likely playing a CYA game instead of addressing the actual needs. Press for more protection before the desktop limiting desktop scans to weekly. Real time protection on the desktop is necessary and must be factored in when sizing a desktop platform.
- Updates are a necessity and must be taken into account when selecting a desktop platform. i3 procs have no place in corporate environments, i5 procs only belong on the lowest demand desktop
- Ensuring drives are not allowed to get "too full" is important to performance
- Adequate memory is necessary to reduce disk swapping which be an be a heavy I/O load
Windows requires frequent housekeeping. You have to clean up all of the following periodically: Temp files, temorary internet files, app caches, autoruns, autoloaded plugins in most programs you use, event logs, and registry orphans. Add to that keeping your system clear of bloatware and adware, unwanted Browser Helpers and plugins, scheduling antivirus scans out of normal working times, and Windows can continue to run fairly well.
Most Windows updates actually replace previous code, rather than adding new code. After updates have been applied for awhile, you can add removing update uninstall files to your housekeeping procedure.
Regular judicious use of a good housekeeping program like CCleaner will help keep your Windows system running well, but if you don't understand Autoruns and Registry entries you need to exercise some care. There are other so-called "cleaner" programs that are really junk, just vehicles for adware and spyware whose housekeeping is so poorly written they can break your OS hard. Stick with safe manual procedures and safe cleaners like CCleaner.
Full Disk encryption WILL slow your system down. Corporate security and management apps can cripple your system, since like the tax code, new things get added but nothing is ever removed. In a corporate environment you are prisoner to your desktop support group and corporate policies, which rarely include housekeeping or any effort to make systems run well, but this is really a management and policy issue, not a technical one.
been using windows since 3.11 /documents ...
what can i say? linux toke a long time to learn but i'm happy that i did because i now have a reference "north star" by which i can judge the "other" computer.
i does seem that windows can slow down over time, especially if you like to explorer / use the computer and the mirade programs that exist for it.
best way to use windows is to have one windows computer for one program ONLY : ) for me that is steam (if they can get the physX thingy running on linux i'm a 100% "north star" person).
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recommendations:
disable all network "services" except TCP/IP QOS and TCP/IP 4, if tcp/ip v6 isn't required.
disable all "services" that are not required. if not sure what they do just leave 'em at default.
put the pagefile.sys on a separate, possibility first partition.
make a system image after install (before installing anything else additionally) onto a external HDD and burn a "system restore" DVD/CD (backup/restore).
don't install malware / virus scanner *HAHAHA*
occasionally create a new (standard) user and deletethe old one (after moving) the files / pictures
defrag *yawn* disk-cleanup *yawn* once in a while.
happy baby-sitting : )
I love Windows 8.1's bi-polar dog's breakfast UI *SO* *MUCH* I just bought my first ever Apple Mac.
Only boring people are ever bored.
What's the first thing you use the computer for. I try running Internet Explorer first thing and it's slower than when things have been running for awhile.
My 2009 Windows Vista computer still runs like new, but I'm pretty vigilant about repeatedly removing anything I don't want from running at startup or as Explorer shell context plugins. I use CCleaner to help and there are other similar Registry cleaners for Windows. You can also Run... taskmgr.exe (and show all processes) or perfmon.msc to see what's taking up CPU/MEM that you don't recognize and you can cross check EXE names online.
In Windows, you need enough resources. If you only have 4GB RAM (and it is a laptop, sharing video memory), you can only open a few apps before you run out of memory. Windows allows any program to request how much memory they want. When they request more memory, and there is physically no more, you go to swap. Again, instead of stopping apps from asking more, they give it more and more. For example, my firefox right now is running at 19GB of memory. It just keeps asking for more memory (of course I have 1000+ tabs opened). So it just keeps moving memory to swap. Swap is SLOW as it is on disk.
Second, as you mentioned this is a work laptop, they have a HIDS/IPS/firewall software installed. Every time you access a file that is checked for viruses/etc. before it is opened. (Not to mention all the stuff is loaded into memory, giving you less space for apps). Also there are full anti virus scans on laptops that run weekly? Daily? depends on your company. This takes up I/O which slows things down, especially when you are swapping memory.
Hints to fix. Get enough RAM. I think 16GB is enough, 8 is a min now days. Make sure your HIDS/IPS/Firewall is not scanning your page file (very common mistake). Ask IT to move your virus scans to lunch time (ie. Noon, instead of 10am). There are other suggestions but they get into the pros/cons of security and expose your company to more risk.
Someone needs to go buy the SSDs already. Every computer user should have a SSD, 4G of ram (or more), and 2 monitors. This is such a small investment in an employee that greatly increases their productivity. It is a waste of company resources to not have these pieces in place.
I converted to Linux in 1999-2000. I bought a new computer with the "cutting edge" Windows ME... After the initial setup, it worked find until approximately 40 seconds into it... Lagging mouse and lock-ups caused me to smash my keyboard against the screen and blasted keys all over my office... Discovered Linux and dove in headfirst. Never looked back. Also swapped to Dvorak key map. Happiness.
Windows generates a lot of gunk that you can safely delete. That is all content in C:\Windows\Temp, C:\Windows\Prefetch (is empty on an SSD system), all .log files in C:\Windows except WindowsUpdate.log (can't delete that file), C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp, and C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files (including all cookies you no longer want to keep).
Prefetch content actually does serve a purpose, but especially after applying updates prefetch prefetches installer files that you will never ever use again. Prefetch will automatically fill up again with useful content.
Add disk cleanup and on HDD systems a real defrag to it (see http://www.mydefrag.com/ and you can keep your system running fine for a long time. Also, once a month weed through the installed programs list and uninstall everything that you haven't used in a while and are unlikely to use again. Make sure to clean up after the uninstallers who are notoriously bad in leaving abandoned files and folders behind. I also make decent experiences with CCleaner, but you want to pull at least a registry backup before running CCleaner.
I do all that on a regular basis on around 80 desktop systems that I manage and that for over a decade using the same process. Only once I ran into an issue where one Windows update insisted on having an old update package in the Temp folder in place.
Also, if you happen to play Roblox craft a scheduled task that deletes the files in the user's temp folder. Roblox as well as other apps are so badly designed that they leave gazillion of temp files behind without ever cleaning up.
Use ESET Smart Security. Heavy lifting programmed in assembly language. Banish Symantec.
How else are they going to convince you to buy a new computer if it doesn't perform slower 2 years after you buy it and nothing is wrong with the hardware?
This is not a Windows-specific issue, I've observed it on OS X and linux as well.
Item 1: I'd almost guarantee that Windows Defender or some other anti-virus solution is responsible. They quite literally suck the life out of your system by scanning each file on every open request.
Item 2: Assuming you're not on SSD have you defragmented the hard disks? Forget the Microsoft Defrag tool, it's fucking useless, I recommend JkDefrag (now known as MyDefrag). (And to all the defragmentation-isn't-needed whiners out there, yes linux and HFS+ file systems can still get fragmented. HFS+ even tries to combat it with live defragmentation.)
Item 3: If you haven't installed anti-virus and your hard disks are defragmented then a Windows Update or some other piece of software has altered the Power settings on you. Use the powercfg utility to dump your power settings to a text file after a fresh install, and again after you notice the system slowing, then use WinMerge, KDiff3 or your favourite diff tool to see what's changed. e.g.:
powercfg -GetActiveScheme
powercfg -Query 51e36149-f8c5-472b-ba61-7999bb607b77
Its always a good idea to try and figure out what is causing your computer to slow down rather than just randomly doing what your search engine finds when you look up various key words. The Sysinternals Process Monitor and even the built in tools like Resource Monitor and Performance Monitor can give you a lot of insight into what your computer is up to. Right now my computer is doing plenty of things which i feel are of little value to me.
SSDs do offer a pretty nice performance boost, although it may be more cost effective for your company to start buying new computers that come with SSDs and replace the old computers over time. Scan slowness can be mitigated in the mean time by changing the scan schedule to something like once every 24 hours at 3AM or 10 min after the first boot (if your AV software can do that). I used HD Tune a while back to test the performance difference between different full disk encryption programs we wanted to use. It seems to vary a bit from one program and platform to the next but we landed on Bitlocker because it had on average the lowest impact. There are always going to be tradeoffs of course but I wouldn't let a mobile computer out the door without encryption these days.
Yet a loser like you doesn't even have the guts to post under your account.
Why are you still trolling him APK?