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Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

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Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#31
post #24

I can't remember the last time I used Windows search because it's worse than useless - there have been multiple occasions in the past where it can't even find a file in the current folder right in front of my eyes. Nowadays I just use Everything which I think is one of the best piece of software ever.

https://www.voidtools.com/

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#32
post #24

I can't remember the last time I used Windows search because it's worse than useless - there have been multiple occasions in the past where it can't even find a file in the current folder right in front of my eyes. Nowadays I just use Everything which I think is one of the best piece of software ever.

For me Windows Explorer search became useful when I learned about its syntax. I can't remember it exactly right now, but I think it's something like `name:*.jpg` for example (and worst thing is it's localized, so you have to use whatever Windows Language you use). This way it does not try to be smart and just searches for file names. I think that in default mode it searches inside an indexed files or something like that, which probably is useful for ordinary users trying to search inside theirs docs.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#33
post #5

Anyone finally willing to admit that w10 is unusable on Hard Drives while Linux and W7 work fine on them?

I could be completely wrong, but my guess at the cause would be the registry. Every functionality and feature in Windows has a flag somewhere in the registry. Every query is probably a disk read, and it's a blocking operation of course. Sure, there's probably a cache, but that cache is only so large. There's a program that I can't recall the name of that can trace registry queries in the program it's attached to. You…

A lot of critical system configuration is stored in the SYSTEM hive which isn't explicitly backed by a file mapping and is loaded at boot via firmware services so this will be fast as it is non-paged and mapped in kernel space for the entire boot session. On newer builds of Windows 10 other hives are memory mapped into the usermode address space of the minimal Registry process. Whenever you do a registry read the kernel will temporarily attach your thread to the Registry process' address space and the read to the UM mapped section will occur which will naturally fault in the data from disk. The requesting process' thread will then be unattached and the information will be returned. Since non-SYSTEM/ELAM hives are memory mapped the kernel's cache manager and memory manager subsystems are the ones that "own" and control the mapped memory. The file cache is tuned based on the particular system's hardware characteristics to be as performant as possible. There are registry-specific caches in between to reduce the need to attach to the Registry process but this isn't going to be a disk IO speed bottleneck.

The program you're thinking of is procmon which is a part of the Sysinternals suite of tools.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#34
post #24

I can't remember the last time I used Windows search because it's worse than useless - there have been multiple occasions in the past where it can't even find a file in the current folder right in front of my eyes. Nowadays I just use Everything which I think is one of the best piece of software ever.

Haven't used Everything but I am very happy with locate32 https://locate32.cogit.net/

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#35

One time Windows got a "feature update" that made it not boot. Apparently it was an issue with Lenovo motherboards that is still not fixed to this day (afaik). In any case, that was the kick in the pants I needed to switch to Linux. Everything has gone swimmingly since!

May I ask which distro?

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#36
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not counting BIOS time it is about 5 seconds to Windows login on my Windows with NVMe systems. It does take about 20 seconds after login for it to finish loading all of the tiny startup notification icons, but that's actually intentional by Windows so it does not overload and prevent you from launching the apps you want. After login I can click on the web browser or email and it will launch instantly for me. If you a…

The point is, why does OP need to spend money on an SSD (and create e-waste in the process) when an HDD used to be reasonably fast for the same task?

LOL! No, the HDD never was reasonably fast. Our expectations changed.

I booted up an old Windows XP box about two years ago before recycling it. It took almost TWO MINUTES to finish booting to the desktop. Some kind of fairly standard 500 GB Western Digital Blue drive. No, I don't know if it had ever been defragmented or had its TEMP files cleared or had old driver modules removed... It was just slow.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#37

One time Windows got a "feature update" that made it not boot. Apparently it was an issue with Lenovo motherboards that is still not fixed to this day (afaik). In any case, that was the kick in the pants I needed to switch to Linux. Everything has gone swimmingly since!

On my new laptop Windows drivers were unstable (I tried both default Windows drivers and manufacturer's drivers). My audio was working for few hours and then disappear until reboot. I tried latest Fedora Linux and it's stable so far, no driver issues at all. I was pleasantly surprised.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#38
post #9

On my current gaming PC (i7-7700) I have installed W10 in 2017 and... no problem whatsoever? SSD, 10s boot. idk how do people end up with all the problems. I'm really curious because there must be an underlying reason

I think people just don't know how to be good computer users.. they might be able to program their way out of a paper bag but systems admin is not their paper bag

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who manages a fleet of 30 windows machines that house PCI DAQ cards: Windows 10 runs on a Pentium 4, but I wouldn't call it fine. All of the machines run on SSDs, which is a godsend, but the older machines that run pentiums involve a lot of waiting around to do the most basic of things. It doesn't help that Windows refuses to us less than 1.5 GB of RAM. You can forget web browsing.

I gave them Lubuntu and their scanner app running in WINE. It worked fine but they refused to switch because "it's not muh windows". This is how Microsoft corrupts people for life...

The sad irony being that the Windows UI, starting from Win8, became a complete mess, far more different from say Win7 or even XP than any recent Linux desktop manager.

Most of my users, some even over 70 with little computer experience, are doing fine on Linux, but I "converted" them before they had to experience that awful mess, so it has been relatively easy: from XP or Win7 to a customized XFCE (its defaults are ugly and unpractical) has been a breeze.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#40

This exactly mirrors my experience. "Starting" is slow in Windows and just keeps getting slower. That could be booting, logging in, waiting for an application to start, waiting some more for an application to start, and then waiting even more, not being sure if it ever is going to start, waiting some more, and then it starts.

I have an old windows machine for playing WoW not happy with the Linux methods, but some day... and it does not have an SSD. I found one thing that helped was to disable a lot of the logging. In powershell on an administrator account:

  wevtutil el
then select some or all of the logs to disable with

  wevtutil sl {logname} /e:false
Another improvement since I only use it for WoW was to disable the spectre mitigations [1] remove some bloat with bleachbit [2] and then defragment the drive. Windows 10 specifically can be sped up a little bit by disabling some of the telemetry that is hidden away using O&O ShutUp10 [3] and improving network latency a little bit with the TCP/IP optimizer [4] as some startup applications rely on a response from servers. Now it starts up the same as when it was new. Maybe some day I will get a SSD. Another thing I found useful for Windows 10 was to disallow applications from running in the background which just "Suspends" applications rather than quitting. Suspending still takes up memory and pagefile. It's easier to see this in Process Explorer [5] I think they do this to mimic the behavior of a cell phone. Disabling suspending is less useful for startup time and more useful if you value your free memory.

One more thing I should add that helped was to cache DNS on my home network.

[1] - https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm

[2] - https://www.bleachbit.org/

[3] - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

[4] - https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

[5] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysi...

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