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Ask Slashdot: Are Post-Install Windows Slowdowns Inevitable?
blackest_k writes: I recently reinstalled Windows 7 Home on a laptop. A factory restore (minus the shovelware), all the Windows updates, and it was reasonably snappy. Four weeks later it's running like a slug, and now 34 more updates to install. The system is clear of malware (there are very few additional programs other than chrome browser). It appears that Windows slows down Windows! Has anyone benchmarked Windows 7 as installed and then again as updated? Even better has anybody identified any Windows update that put the slug into sluggish?
Related: an anonymous reader asks: Our organization's PCs are growing ever slower, with direct hard-drive encryption in place, and with anti-malware scans running ever more frequently. The security team says that SSDs are the only solution, but the org won't approve SSD purchases. It seems most disk scanning could take place after hours and/or under a lower CPU priority, but the security team doesn't care about optimization, summarily blaming sluggishness on lack of SSDs. Are they blowing smoke?
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
Part of the issue is also that newer versions of windows want to move away from just being an OS, and toward being an entertainment venue all of its own.
That's MS marketing and the UI graphic designers faults though.
Fun little thing to do:
Take a weak kneed intel Atom board, and do some simple office use tests with it with various older versions of windows. Start with NT4, then use Win2k, the XP, then 7, then 8.1. See how the ability to do simple things degrades as the OS expects more and more hardware just to draw the damned UI.
Now, realize that the biggest selling point for new windows versions is NOT a new shiny UI-- but continued security updates. Now you will understand why corporations get bitchy. They have something that works, on the hardware they already have-- but are going to be forced to buy a whole new iteration of hardware, to get updated software that gets updates against security threats-- because otherwise MS does not get money.
If it werent for the lack of security updates, win2k would be ideal for nearly all corporate drone installations.
(Note, there are other useful features that were added with each version of windows, and I am not discounting that. What I am saying is that even with those kernel space and user space feature enhancements, they could have been rolled into service packs for the older products, and you would have had more responsive product overall. The need to reinvent the OS constantly drives the need to constantly make it look different, (to set it apart from its predecessor), which constantly increases the HW requirements. It is pathological.)
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
Not my experience. It used to be the case in Windows 98 but I haven't found my systems to be slowing ever since I bought an SSD. SSDs solved all of my problems and they're rediculously affordable.
I also have a cluster of windows machines performing raytracing and other extremely performance driven tasks--I can't tell the age of an install based on performance.
This is all just superstition at this point without numbers. Yes if you install a third party anti-virus solution and you have a bunch of auto-installers running in the background your computer will run "Slower" than it did without anything running in the background but that's not Windows' fault and that's true of every operating system regardless if it's *nix or Win*.
things like this have been said about windows for decades. It's never been true. I know because I've had operational business machines at each version of windows running for over ten years each.
These types of problems happen *and are henced resolved with brand new way-more-powerful hardware) when multiple components aren't spec'd together.
Any given component has many bins. You can get any cpu at six levels of l3 cache, for example. Drives can be 5'400, 7'200, etc.
The trick is not to get the most possible performance (which is akin to buying a new machine a few years later). The trick is to match the performances across the various components, so a single component doesn't become the bottleneck.
Especially because some components, when acting as the bottleneck, can create serious slow-downs. Often actually making something else SLOWER will make the over-all machine much faster.
An over-simplified example is that a slow hard drive can create disk-thrashing scenarios -- one of the worst slow-downs common across the board. But a slow cpu will remain slow and steady, and never wind up thrashing the disk.
Learn to balance the vital components of a system, and it'll stay consistent for a decade.
(this was written on my 8-year-old vista machine, still working, still business, still gaming, still full-speed)
I have 5 machines running Windows 7 and this is not a problem, but then again I am not using encryption, just standard antivirus software. The ones with SSD boot drives are faster, but none of them has issues with running slow. In fact, they are quite responsive. The oldest one has had Windows 7 running on it for over 5 years without slowdowns or problems and the control panel says that it has 163 programs installed.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
The security team is right. SSDs are the single biggest performance improvement you can add to a computer (even an old computer). If your company is upgrading computers after they get 5-7 years old, but refusing to buy SSDs, they're wasting money. In particular, if they're upgrading management's high-end machines while the low-end machines are still being used by the rank and file, they're doing it completely backwards.
The problem is most people focus on the high-end numbers. How many GHz does the CPU run at? How many MHz does the DDR3 memory run at? Improving the high end doesn't help as much to improve productivity. It's already fast, meaning you're waiting a very small time for it to finish. Making it twice as fast just means the very small wait period shrank a tiny amount and is now twice as small.
If you're serious about improving performance, you get the biggest return by upgrading the slowest components. The slowest part of a modern PC is the HDD. When reading small files (not sequential reads, which really come into play only when copying large media files from one drive to another), they max out at about 1 MB/s. In contrast, the next slowest component - system RAM - is currently on the order of 10 GB/s. In other words, in terms of wait times a 1% improvement in HDD speed will have the same impact as a 100x increase in RAM speed. Now, consider than a SSD will get you at least a 30x improvement in read speeds for small files (about 30 MB/s seems to be average) and there is absolutely nothing you can do with the RAM or CPU which comes anywhere close to the amount of time you'll save by replacing the HDD with a SSD.
If you've got old computers, you should be upgrading them with a SSD instead of replacing them with new computers (with a HDD). Continue to use the old computers + SSD for a few more years, then upgrade them and transfer the SSDs to the new computers. The only exception is if the computer is so old you can't install enough RAM to run modern applications. (Another rare exception would be Northwood and Prescott-era P4 CPUs, which burn so much electricity you'll actually make back the cost of upgrading them via lower electricity bills in a couple years.)
On top of that, SSDs can actually look up small files faster than the computer can request them. So if you've got a virus scan running on a SSD, you can continue using the computer like normal with almost no impact on performance. In fact I usually run my weekly virus and two malware deep scans simultaneously on my SSD laptop, and I can still use it for web browsing or office tasks. When a virus scan runs on a HDD, the HDD has to spend all its time reading files the scan is requesting. As a result anything you try to do with the computer which requests data off the HDD will bog down.
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.
You know what I find even funnier? The answers I get when I ask what the value prop of windows 10 is over windows 7.
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).
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.
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.
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.