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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?
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.
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I have 5 machines running Windows 7 and this is not a problem, but then again I am not using encryption, just standard antivirus software. The ones with SSD boot drives are faster, but none of them has issues with running slow. In fact, they are quite responsive. The oldest one has had Windows 7 running on it for over 5 years without slowdowns or problems and the control panel says that it has 163 programs installed.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
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.
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.
That tinfoil must make you see the past better. Back in the DOS days I would regularly see articles about how yet another researcher had decompiled DOS to uncover yet another instance of code in DOS that could only have been put there to slow down a competitor's product. In the early internet days, researchers would find instance after instance where Win95 was sending your personal data back to MS. They would deny it until it became undeniable, then say it was a bug (you know, a bug that accidentally searched for and collected your data, then accidentally waited till you were on-line, then accidentally opened a connection with MS owned servers, then accidentally transmitted your data, then accidentally covered it's tracks) and say they would issue a patch, which would then take forever.
It was common knowledge on Usenet that the mantra at MS before DOS 3.3 was released was "DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run."
Until recently, I used NetWare protocols over my home network but a Windows update (unrelated to networking) turned that off for no darn good reason.
So, I don't put ANYTHING past Microsoft. Of course, I wouldn't put anything past ANY of the big tech companies.
I have supported a LOT of PCs from DOS 6.2 up and I have noticed the same thing you speculated about. In addition to the slow, progressive slowdown that occurs over time, I have seen the "down-slowing" ramp up just as the next version is coming out. AND just after upgrades. Now this could just be all the cruft reaching critical mass, thus indicating the need for an upgrade. But I think there are plenty of valid reasons to be suspicious.
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.