Slashdot Mirror
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me, Linux, at least on the desktop, has had another problem entirely, namely that shit tends to break over time. Doesn't matter if its Ubuntu, Mint, SLES or some other distro, it almost invariably flakes out sooner or later. Usually sooner, The mouse pointer stops working, the screen dims, or the user interface just borks somehow. Happens more with Gnome, especially if you try to customize it any sort of way. Of course there is a solution. There is always a solution...
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.
And even in that case doing a reinstall is easier than on windows.
Define "worse." As someone who dual-boots Windows 7 Home and Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, I find Mint works much "better" in terms of responsiveness. It boots faster, shuts down faster, opens programs faster, runs quieter, etc. Sure, it requires more expertise, has less proprietary software options, and obtains the performance improvement, at least in part, by sacrificing certain bells and whistles, but I've gone from a 90-10 Windows-Linux time split to 10-90 as I've grown more comfortable with the latter.
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've noticed on my machine that applications take longer to open, and windows stay in the 'partially drawn' state for a longer time. Also, it takes windows 7 longer to navigate through contents of folders in explorer. That said, Windows is still my preferred OS to use personally and I don't find it all that inconvenient, but that is just what I have noticed.
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.
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)
Yep, that's true of course.
One way that windows 7 (in particular) slows down, comes from the use of the winSXS folder.
Basically, because the windows software ecosystem is so... Plagued.. with legacy software that expect older versions of system libraries, Microsoft invented a solution to detect those dependencies and satisfy them with those older libaries in a sandbox-- the WinSXS folder.
As time passes, and updates happen, system libraries get updated-- instead of being replaced, they get moved to the winsxs folder and archived. This is so when your bitchy internal-only legacy application that is oh-so-mission-critical that it simply cant be rewritten for a modern OS gets run, it can continue to run.
The downside is that as this treasure trove of old libraries grows, the penalty of the checking routine becomes more and more apparent. (also, it consumes more and more disk space.)
Other forms of slowdown are not specific to windows 7 and newer however.
The registry is a binary file that must be parsed to find entries inside it, and it too can become fragmented. As changes are CONSTANTLY happening to the registry, the (actual) structure of the registry can become more and more byzantine. Since such changes are completely unavoidable with daily use, the slow degradation of this system is also unavoidable unless you boot from a golden image each and every time. This has been a problem since at least the 9x days. Back then, you could automate registry defragmentation with a bootup script because of the complete lack of filesystem security on FAT-- (Tell regedit to dump the registry in its totality into an exported text file, then tell it to rebuild the registry from scratch using that text file dump, then cleanup the temporary files afterwards.) You cant do that with modern flavors of windows because 1) you cant invoke scripts that easily on bootup anymore 2) the registry files are protected with NTFS security descriptors, 3) the OS locks the registry basically as soon as NTLDR finishes, so you cant replace the registry files while live.
There are of course, the other causes of slowdown that come from cumulative misconfigurations that happen from automated updates, but meh.
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.
The install of windows itself is easy. The problem, is that afterwards you have to install 45 utilities, that you have to download from 27 different sites, and each one tries to install its one adware, or ask for a 86 digits activation key. On Linux (pretty much any modern distribution) it winds down to taking note of two or three additional repositories and a list of packages, you can restore everything with on command line
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
Most large shops, won't even let you run "Task Manager" with all applications visible. It requires local admin rights and that's locked down.
That's entirely possible. Windows 8/8.1 absolutely spends more priority on hiding hardware latency than my Windows 7 station, or my Ubuntu station.
If you run it on a slow laptop, the OS is ten times more responsive than a program on the same OS, like Chrome. You can be spending 100% CPU and Disk usage on a task, ALT-TAB, and it'll show you some sort of JPEG compressed cache of what the program used to look like before the program finished responding to the PAINT event. (To often hilarious results when the delay is in the order of seconds.) They implemented lots of priority across all aspects of the kernel, be it disk, network, or memory I/O.
I absolutely hate the broken UI (half the "metro" B.S. equivalents wouldn't be so bad if they didn't remove dozens of useful buttons.), but Windows 8/8.1/10 is definitely becoming more efficient, and stressing user experience in regards to perceived latency.
Hey AC, dont worry too much.
You can boot UEFI bios systems into legacy OSes pretty easily with a second stage loader scheme.
Such as GRUB2.
It works in the reverse too-- allowing UEFI expecting OSes to boot on BIOS systems. Since upgrading to a 4tb drive, I had to switch to GPT instead of MBR. I use GRUB2 on the "fake" MBR of the GPT table as the primary loader to satisfy my legacy BIOS's need for a primary boot sector and MBR partition table, and since GRUB2 is GPT aware, it can read the GPT partition table and then chainload the proper bootloader.
Works like a charm.
The real challenge would be getting UEFI expecting OSes that make use of UEFI features after bootup to run on legacy BIOS systems. For that, you need software implementations of UEFI, and those are a pain in the ass.
...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.
User error, really, though I'm puzzled as to how this is doable with an OS X installation, since the OS doesn't suffer many of the architectural flaws that puts Windows in these situations. I've been running (and maintaining for others) OS X for 10 years and Windows for 15 years, and with OS X installations I've never seen this occur. For what the anecdot is worth my own Windows installations have always stayed healthy (and just noticably sluggish) even after years of use.
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)
Well, it could be the scheduler you're using. If I'm not mistaken, the linux kernel by default uses CFQ. I use BFQ and from the benchmarks it pretty much beats CFQ hands down. I also use LXDE, which is more lightweight than KDE. To be honest I don't notice that much of a difference between Windows and Linux, but that may be because I use a SSD.
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!
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
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.
They're both pretty awful, I was updating a laptop I recently bought for travel (firesale before Win10, will update for free), 2GB to update on a 5400 rpm spinning rust disk. Oh. My. God. Fortunately it got 8GB of RAM, so most things run well once loaded into memory. I wanted some space for a media collection on the go, but boy will I miss an SSD as boot drive.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Agreed. The Component Based Servicing that Windows 7 uses kind of sucks, if you compare it to how XP worked. http://answers.microsoft.com/e...
Uhhh...why would you do that? Windows can take care of drivers through WU, if you just have to have the ones that came with the board? Most come with a CD that has a "1 click install" option. As for third party...Ninite. All automated, NO ADWARE, just pick what you want and run the installer...you're welcome :-)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The truth is you don't need a third party anti-virus program the MS security essentials works just as good
Sorry, but this has never been true. MSE is pretty much a bottom-rung AV solution with the absolute WORST detection and recovery rates.
There are far better solutions out there, even free ones.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
Also keep an eye on OneGet which is coming out with Windows 10. It will support Chocolatey, but also have official MS repos.
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.
They're both pretty awful, I was updating a laptop I recently bought for travel (firesale before Win10, will update for free), 2GB to update on a 5400 rpm spinning rust disk. Oh. My. God. Fortunately it got 8GB of RAM, so most things run well once loaded into memory. I wanted some space for a media collection on the go, but boy will I miss an SSD as boot drive.
You still cold boot? Just suspend to RAM/Disk (in that preference). No slow boots required.
My work laptop has 16GB RAM, but the usual dog slow HDD, but I don't notice any slowdown over my own laptops (which all have SSD but less RAM) because the entire working set of data fits in RAM with a couple of GB free. With suspend to RAM, I rarely have to go through the slowness of boot.
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.
What about your user data and profile? There is still no good way of doing it. With Linux and pretty much every other os, you back up the home directory and install over the top of the other partitions.
Installing the apps you had can even be automated.
With windows the profiles are much harder to work with.
But you do have to be smarter than the average corporate drone.
http://www.debian.org/
http://www.linux.org/
GUIs are also for old tired unix admins that grow weary of typing on the command line all day and just want to play a movie.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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 think most people here understand that. The thing is, ultimately any given distro makes the decision to bundle with a certain window manager and often people are stuck with that window manager. Using myself as an example, I am very knowledgeable but this is a system I have to use every day, day in and day out. I use software day in and day out that is tested to work with this window manager. If I attempt to migrate to 'window manager x', not only do I need to spend my own time doing it but I will be almost assured of running into issues here and there that may not be insurmountable but will take even more of my valuable time.
So that is why for all intents and purposes. here in the real world, an OS distro might as well be coupled with the kernel and the window manager.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You missed the point of cm and Linux. Vm are files Linux caches files, hence faster processing.
I have windows on drive and vm. Vm is about 50% faster. Makes game play better, but video conversion. A little slower.
If you can get your company to allow you to use a VM engine that is any good, and give you a machine with enough resources to run it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
User error, really
Is he holding the mouse wrong?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...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.
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.
Try a lightweight desktop. Mageia5 using the LXQT desktop zips along on my 12-yo hardware.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
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.
Probably you are short of memory if you are seeing worse performance under Linux than with windows, or have done something stupid. Linux I/O performance is normally significantly better than Windows given the same resources. If you want best performance on VMs, always host Windows VMs on Linux, never the other way around. I have found that by doing this on test clusters, I can make installers (bitrock, and installshield) outperform a native windows machine on the same hardware (underlying caching by Linux must help?). On Windows, your anti-virus checker may also be a serious killer, but NTFS performance is generally quite bad. If you have really large NTFS volumes, you need enough memory to keep NTFS data structures in RAM. Windows file servers with large disks MUST have huge amounts of RAM to perform adequately in production configurations. In my company, we have retired windows file servers since they are not really scalable enough for high performance computing needs, and don't offer viable distributed and parallel file system choices.
Gnome and KDE are actually not part of any kernel loop. They are not actually any single entity. In fact, they are a collection of programs that implement the various functionalities you see. These are preemptively scheduled like any other processes, and are not typically CPU bound.
The I/O scheduler you are using may have some bearing on performance, but I'm inclined to believe that changing it will not buy you any significant performance gains, since I don't believe that this is your problem.
If windows are drawing slowly during heavy I/O then that is an indication that your system is probably swapping.
If you could define exactly what causes your slowdown, then perhaps some advice could be offered. I have quite some experience in Linux I/O optimisation, having spent a significant amount of time profiling and speeding up both Linux and Windows builds on large clusters of pretty good hardware.
I develop and test retail software on Linux and Windows, doing most of my actual development on Linux, simply because I/O is much faster. In particular Linux performs much better with lots of small files, and has generally superior caching behaviour. I would load systems up with at least 16Gb of RAM if you want sensible performance. The kind of gains you can expect are huge, when comparing Linux to windows. A full build with dependency check on Linux (code base of about 16.5 million lines of C++) takes about 1-3 secs warm, and 15 secs cold, simply because VFS caches way better than Windows can ever manage (using ninja) and Linux file systems are faster. This same build takes about 7 mins on Windows with msbuild to do the dependency check, and about 4-5 mins with ninja on windows. This is with no anti-virus, and identical RAID-0 10k SAS disk configurations, and all objects already built. As you can imagine, developers on windows really have to build individual targets, since the dependency check is such a killer. Surprisingly, having SSDs in the build machines doesn't really impact these figures by more than about 10% on windows, and almost insignificantly on Linux, so I'm not sure that SSDs are really the answer to your troubles.
Don't go shopping until you have proven the case for doing so.
Of course, builds are not constrained by outright I/O bandwidth, except for the big and slow links - often it is more about opening or stat'ing lots of small files. For me, as a developer, given the excellent performance in other areas on Linux, optimising link times is my most significant interest. This is random I/O, and for this on developer desktops, SSDs and lots of memory really do offer some benefit, although less than you might expect. Again, linking on Linux is maybe faster by four to ten times, using the gold linker, and having a similar policy on external symbol visibility.
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.
Try changing interrupt frequency to 1000 Hz. It's the default in Ubuntu, but IIRC Debian at least still has a default of 100 or 250 Hz. Not sure about other distros.
.: Semper Absurda
I've noticed on my machine that applications take longer to open, and windows stay in the 'partially drawn' state for a longer time. Also, it takes windows 7 longer to navigate through contents of folders in explorer. That said, Windows is still my preferred OS to use personally and I don't find it all that inconvenient, but that is just what I have noticed.
So your computer is stealing moments from your life on a regular basis, interrupting your flow, disturbing your rhythm, and you "don't find it all that inconvenient"???
Have you ever used a computer that didn't do these things? Did you notice you were more productive and sharper because the computer can keep up with you?
Take a math break and total up all of those short breaks the computer is enforcing on you and realize that this is your life getting flushed down the toilet for nuthin
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.
We're not talking about drivers, with bare-bones windows you do not have a decent text editor, not a compiler, no office suite, no ssh client, no proper image editor (TBH, this one is lacking in linux too), not even a decent browser!
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
These are preemptively scheduled like any other processes, and are not typically CPU bound.
Then that is the problem. A window trying to draw should be the highest possible priority on desktop workstation and should not be treated like other processes. There is good reason to keep other processes waiting while I/O completes but window drawing operations should never be kept waiting. I suspect you have hit the nail on the head.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Lets see...don't care as I'm not a programmer,don't care as I'm not a programmer,Ninite has LO...yeah why don't you try a little harder to just list "shit nobody but Linux users gives two shits about" huh? Maybe you should add GIMP and those googly eyes or the rotating cube desktop crap?
NEWS FLASH less than 1% of the planet is fricking programmers, hence why Linux user base is so low its listed as "other". If this really bugs you so much may I suggest you try thinking different? And to suggest Windows should come with a fricking IDE and compiler...BWA HA HA HA, why should MSFT load up the OS with crap that won't be used just to please the 1% of the world that is programmers? Get your boss to spend a buck or quit whining and find a better boss, LOL!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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
Which is why I'm so surprised that people hated on Win8 as much as they did. It's not Vista bad....it's just different than what people are used to. And a few tweaks to make the Desktop the default and thinking of the Start Screen as a full-screen Start Menu and it really is better than Windows 7.
If it's slowing down after a couple of weeks, you're doing something wrong.
SSD masks the problem, but the problem still exists. Linux distributions assume you really want to give priority to server applications and it manifests in a crappy UI experience for Desktop users. Yes, you can tune the settings to your hearts content and hopefully find something you can live with, but not everyone will go to the trouble of doing so.
That being said, this is not an anti-linux on the desktop post. I use LXDE/Openbox every day as my default environment. Just saying, I wish it were easier to defend :).
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)
I'm assuming you're using Ubuntu, in which case it isn't too hard to add another desktop environment.
http://askubuntu.com/questions...
As for BFQ, you'd have to download the kernel source, patch it for BFQ, and configure it for your system, selecting the necessary drivers, then compile it, and then update the bootloader to load the new kernel. It's a lot of work that you probably don't want to go through.
Here's a link as to why Ubuntu doesn't support it. It's still young, and unlike CFQ the scalability is much lower. It's probably just easier for them to use CFQ and CFS.
http://askubuntu.com/questions...
I take disk images (OS and major apps) after every fresh install. Then I can periodically reapply the image, install latest patches, and install any additional apps I have decided are keepers. Over the decades I have become an expert at uninstalling bloatware and configuring Windows for maximum efficiency. However, I have STILL noticed a rapid increase in down-slowing as new versions approach.
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.
This is caused by the default "swappiness" value of 60. Try setting it to 1 or running without a swap partition if you have enough RAM.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind...
The default of 60 sacrifices UI responsiveness for program performance and having it continue to be the default setting even on every distro that is specifically aimed at desktop use is a bit baffling.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
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...
"A Virtual Machine is your friend, my friend."
VMWare running on OS X Yosemite with a Win 10 beta image reporting for duty. Also, several Linuxes.
..and? On my linux workstation at work rebuilding the environment takes all day due to all the things I need. This isn't a problem with the operating system, it's a problem with how much you're using on it.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
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.
Then if things go bad the system could halt to a crawl because all resources are spent drawing windows.
If I have audio or an important networked program going on, they should have bigger or equal priority than window draw.
Well, the nice thing about Linux is the ability to tune things to your heart's content, like adding BFQ and BFS to the kernel for a more responsive desktop experience.
I see your point though. Linux is used a lot for server applications so I can understand why it assumes that. And I can also understand Linus' point of view for only wanting one scheduler, since it's easier to maintain and there's no switching. CFQ and CFS need to work for all sorts of different systems.
I don't see any proof here, just your unsubstantiated conjecture.
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.
The point is that you cannot just stick to the desktop in Windows 8. Even if you hack the OS with third party tools in order to make some fake Start menu return from the afterlife, you just can't change the fact that some functionality remains into the Metro side (both OS functions and third-party applications, because Microsoft strongly pushed third-party developers to use Metro). And some of the broken UI design still bites even on the desktop side (invisible magic areas, undocumented destructive gestures that get activated by mistake if you happen to use a touchpad, the “charms”...).
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.
What in hell were you doing wrong to yield reinstalls twice a year? I've had my machine running for five now and no reinstalls.
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.
Vista was disliked because it performed poorly on mediocre hardware - which is, quite frankly, what most people have. The changed driver model meant poorer initial hardware support. Microsoft didn't help matters by grossly exaggerating the "minimum requirements", which were a joke, and even the "recommended requirements" probably should have been the "minimum".
Win8 was disliked because Microsoft removed a comfortable, familiar interface and replaced it with a UI that was optimized for a touch-screen, which again, most people don't actually have or use when they buy a *desktop* operating system. No one complained about the technical aspects of Windows 8, which were actually quite excellent. It's a shame MS hid it behind an abomination of a UI. It looks like they're correcting that in Windows 10, fortunately, even though they're keeping the ugly aesthetics.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
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.
Changing tick rate requires a kernel recompile. Certainly not entirely out of line, but not an option for everything.
Linux stops you from taking your meds?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Buy an SSD.
You hit the nail on the head, but I don't think you realize it. It is your experience,or more accurately lack thereof, that has you complaining about poor response rather than tweaking your system to perform properly.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
What distribution could you possibly be using that doesn't allow you the flexibility to modify it? Or do you not have root access?
That statement makes it seem pretty evident that you have but a vague understanding of Linux distributions, esp. wrt the one you are using.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'm confused. What makes your system so special? I mean every application I know runs fine with KDE, Gnome, LXDE, fvwm2, Fluxbox, Blackbox, etc. What makes yours so WM-Centric?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Clearly, you prefer your systems to crawl to a halt! Bravo sir!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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.
Good point - the failure mode of the VLC media player (and many others) when they can't keep up is to keep the audio running and give up on rendering frames.
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.
He's looking for an excuse after the fact since the time expenditure would be less than he spent on the posts complaining about the time expenditure.
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.
Have you done a Windows reinstall lately? It doesn't get any easier than a Windows 7 install.
Unless you have to pick up the phone when reactivation over the Internet fails and call a number that's probably forwarded to India.
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%.
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
ProTip: If you didn't spend so much time trying to show us what a small-minded jerk you're capable of being, and actually paid attention to what you're responding to, you'd look a lot less stupid.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It's a bug with the swap partition and/or the scheduler that's been there for years somehow. Disable swap and there is no responsiveness problem under heavy IO. Some people also say changing their scheduler to deadline solves the issue but I haven't tried it myself.
Have you ever installed libreoffice on windows with chocolatey? The windows native install is slooooooow but on linux its fast so if it can do it nearly as fast as linux then it wouldn't be a bad proposition.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Neither Gnome nor KDE are optimized for that kind of performance. They are instead separate approaches to making the user interface "nicer".
Xfce is a much lighter weight interface that is optimized for performance. It would work well in most business environments. The trade off is that there are more low level tasks that end users would have difficulty doing-- but those tasks should not be done by end users. If the disk needs repartitioning, or the menu structure needs tweaking, then one of the IT techs should be doing that anyway. Xfce's lower level of handholding is actually beneficial in that respect.
Studio Ubuntu is a Linux distro using the Xfce interface, and also a kernel that has been optimized for the low overhead and high throughput needed in recording studio work. It would be a good download to sample what an optimized Linux might do for your situation. If you don't have to worry about non-tech people getting lost under the hood-- and no business should allow that-- then Xfce and a couple of other Linux front-ends should be of interest. They will perform faster than Gnome or KDE, and definitely much faster than Windows with all its accrued overheads.
Once you move from the MS Windows highly limited mindset to Linux, there are many more ways of optimizing for performance in any given business environment. Not just in changing the user interface, but also in changing between file systems that have different strengths and weaknesses, setting up VMs and other sandbox arrangements, etc.
Will
There are loads of applications that don't have a Linux equivalent. Some organizations can't even upgrade from XP to 7 due to this never mind a fundamentally different platform.
It sounds like the slowdowns you describe are in the user interface-- KDE-- and not Linux. KDE is more fun-oriented than work-oriented. Changing to a less fancy user interface like Xfce would definitely improve your performance. But unless you are comfortable mechanicking under the hood, it would probably be better to change Linux distros from one that uses KDE to one that uses Xfce (or any of the other lightweight user interfaces).
Linux distros also provide a multitude of ways to configure different file systems in different ways. Some tweaks to journaling settings, etc, could vastly improve performance in some situations.
Will
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.
Firefox, Chrome, OpenOffice (or pirate MS Office), a torrent client, dropbox, google drive client, skype, flash plugin, vlc, something to unzip rar, proprietary client for netflix, some music streaming service, itunes to put a song on your mother's iphone (noticeable performance drop here), 4GB software suite from samsung to copy a pictures from you galaxy phone, a decent text editor a tetris clone.
In addition to these you'll get 8 toolbars (because you got some of the software from cnet or download.com instead of the official web site), 3 suspicious pieces of software that keep installing each other, one bitcoin farming worm
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
To be fair, over 200 tools if you include the stuff that comes with Cygwin.
45 is more than I install but it's not more than double. But it's no different than having to configure a Linux box with all the apps and libraries you want either.
and every 6 months or so I have to blank my Mac and reinstall.
What?
I have had half several Macs in the last ten years and have reinstalled OS X once. Even on the new machines I carried over everything via Migration Assistent. I don't know what it is, but you seem to be doing something wrong. Do you run some non-standard utility application(s)?
As for the iCloud keychain problem: Did you try disabling and reenabling iCloud keychain?
But pretty much everything on iOS/OSX is broken at the moment
Works fine for me. *shrug*
old tired unix admins that grow weary of typing on the command line all day.
You'd think old unix admins would have figured out at some point that they can automate things, no?
(Hint: it's the very point of the CLI and there's no equivalent meschanism in the GUI paradigm.)
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Linux !== (KDE || Gnome)
Your PHP is showing.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Let me put it in simple terms. If I do anything to fuck up my laptop, even for a couple hours, I'm totally screwed.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Issues I am having are with Gnome.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
How much CPU should it take to draw a window? Next to nothing, so the OS should be able to get it out of the way first. If it takes that much CPU to draw windows then there is a huge flaw in the window manager and that's not anyone else's fault.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Let me put it in simpler terms for you. You've made clear your level of skill in the last few posts. Rest assured. You're already totally screwed.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Just accept the fact that you are a clueless idiot with know idea what you are talking about and move on with your life. Thanks.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Listen, I'm not professing that I know how to design an OS. I'm just noticing that certain OSes do a better job than others of keeping the windows manager fluid and smooth. I don't know if you are a designer for Gnome and taking this personally or what, but it just seems to me that there are better ways of getting it done then what linux window managers are doing.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I was responding to the AC talking about having similar problems with KDE, but expressing them somewhat more clearly than your original post.
However the same is true for Gnome as for KDE wrt these problems: both are designed to enhance the user's experience-- for fun-- rather than optimized for performance. And anyone with a nodding acquaintance with Linux distros' history would be aware that Gnome sort of got lost in the woods a while back, and apparently has not yet fully recovered. I wish it would, there were features in early Gnome that had great promise....
In any case, many business users of Linux would do better with a workflow optimized user interface like Xfce than with a Gnome or KDE circus of fun effects. That means choosing Xbuntu, Studio Ubuntu, or any of a dozen or so other distros that are NOT intended to be the best possible interface for a family who does most of its computer activities on FaceBook and needs to keep the kids entertained.
One of the strengths of Linux is that the toolshed is bulging with all kinds of distros that are tailored to suit very different environments. Do the research on what you really need, then find the Linux distro that matches your real world criteria. There are distros explicitly tailored to the needs of recording studio engineers, others that are designed expressly for educators, etc. If your business is well defined, then there will be one or two distros that are far better than all the rest (and exceedingly better than Windows or Apple OSs, which have to try to be everything for everybody).
Will
You really couldn't understand what I wrote? Seriously? Now off you go ...
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
That sounds absurd, but okay. Can you run it in the background? Can you run two instances at once? Is the user free to use the machine while GUI automation is in progress?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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
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.
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.
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.
Uhhh...he asked for a bunch of shit to be integrated into the OS which just FYI but NOBODY integrates into their OS by default (even your mainstream Linux distros don't come with an IDE and compiler in the base install) which was obviously designed to either 1.- Make it so the only OS which could fit his :criteria" would be Lunix, or 2.- Appeal to programmers, which again less than 1% of the population is a fucking programmer.
So if you are one of the above? The world does not care about you, sorry and I ain't gonna sugercoat shit for your consumption, that is the job of your mommy not me sweetheart. As I told the other dumbass quit your damned whining, get your cheap ass employer to pony up for a decent IDE and compiler because the other 99.2% of the planet? Has ZERO fucks to give about your needs.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No, I'm really not doing it wrong. You just don't seem to understand that I require a lot more beyond a basic desktop, because you're an idiot that thinks everyone's setup is exactly like yours.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.