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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?
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.
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.
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.
In my experience, Linux desktop response suffers way more heavily under high disk load then Windows desktop response. Something with the way Gnome and KDE are prioritized in the kernel loop I would expect. Run something in the background that is chewing up the disk and expect windows to draw very slowly.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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.
The linux laptop I use comes pre-built and unfortunately I don't have the flexibility to modify it in that way. I'm stuck with Gnome and whatever scheduler the OS comes with. If there are schedulers that are much better, I would question why the particular distro I am using wouldn't just pick the one that works better.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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).
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.
You can just remove the shutdown option on the start menu either locally with the windows registry or remotely using AD. We did this for a bunch of our key servers at work because a couple of people kept fat fingering the servers.
moox. for a new generation.
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...