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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?

#81

Post by ergot_vacation »

Over the past decade, software updates in general have mostly become another form of malware, as software makers care more about extracting money from their users or adding pointless shiny features than actually making their software fast, stable, or better able to serve the user.

As a result, my default policy now is "If it ain't broke, NEVER fix it." Install, then disable all updates, forcibly if necessary. On Windows and your browser at a bare minimum, and probably on any other software you use often or rely on. Yes, there are risks and downsides to doing this: security holes won't be patched, bugs won't be fixed, and new features won't be present. But everything in life is a balance. And on balance, the bad of updating is almost always worse than the good is good. This article highlights that in brilliant neon letters. How on EARTH do you justify boot and reboot times doubling or tripling, and just about every metric getting worse over time? Why would I let Microsoft fuck with my system if they're going to make it shittier?

And of course, the article leaves out the worst part. Never mind gradual performance drops, there's a good chance that update you just downloaded just broke something. Entirely. Something you NEED to work. When is a fix coming? Anyone's guess.

Install Windows 10 LTSB. It's the only one worth using. And unless you NEED a new feature or bugfix, never EVER update.

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

#82

Post by metalforever »

dangus wrote: post #74
boba7 wrote: post #5

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

Windows 7 is 12 years old now. Spinning hard drives are 100% dead in the consumer market. Why in the world would a modern operating system not optimize for SSDs? I can’t think of a single reason to use a spinning drive on my computer. Almost every conceivable use case is better relegated to a separate NAS box. You can get a 1TB PCIe nvme SSD rated at 3100Mbps read speeds for $125. Why would I chip off an order of mag…

I still use them for NAS use because you get a bit of "notice" before the data goes down, and costs at this level makes spinning disks make sense.

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

#83

Post by smhenderson »

boba7 wrote: post #12
seniorThrowaway wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an older laptop with an hdd. It always was under powered but still usable for things like streaming to a tv every once in a while. The latest Win10 updates have it taking minutes to run a search or context switch. Feels like we are getting into phone territory of forced HW upgrades for everything now.

I'm upgrading computers in my University with 8GB of ram and ssd and poof, 2011 computers run W10 just fine once again.

This was my experience as well updating computers at a company I recently joined. Changing to an SSD had the most impact, although a lot of these machines already had 8GB of RAM. There are still a handful around that now have an SSD but still 4GB of RAM they came with; these are also better now, usable anyway.

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

#84

Post by PaulHoule »

LinuxBender wrote: post #40
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

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]…

... and you know I am always looking in the log and they are filled with stuff that seems irrelevant but never anything that explains why your computer crashed, why a service quit working, etc -- generally opening the event viewer seems to be a complete waste of time that I never get insights from.

Disabling the log completely doesn't seem like a loss at all.

As for the DNS I agree with that.

Years ago when I first got DSL (1Mbps) I noticed that the browsing the web on a DSL line was slower than the dialup because DNS lookups took forever.

Switching to a resolving DNS server was like taking a ton of bricks out of my car and installing a supercharger.

I wonder if ISPs are just indifferent to DNS speed or if they see it as a form of "traffic shaping" that lowers load on their network.

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

#85

Post by qalmakka »

swiley wrote: post #70
Ashanmaril wrote: post #54

I built my mom a moderate Windows PC for her accounting work a few years ago. Pretty standard Intel build, no graphics card cause it's not like she needs that. And for the most part it works fine, until every few months it'll slow down to an unusably slow crawl and I'll have to hop into task manager, see what rogue Windows service is bugging out this time, Google it, and find some forum post somewhere telling me what…

IME windows takes more work to administrate than many Linux distros at this point.

True that. On Linux _at least_ you almost always have a way out of issues, because you can pretty much forcefully change, update or modify everything. Windows has too much "magic" nobody outside of Redmond, WA truly understands, so when things go south you can only hope that it can fix itself, or it's a goner.

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

#86

Post by mszcz »

KineticLensman wrote: post #52
RandyRanderson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.voidtools.com/

Concur - 'Everything' is one of the first tools I install on a fresh PC. Blazingly fast file-system search with many useful options

Yep. One of very few pieces of software that when it runs I swear I can actually hear the zillions of transistors in the CPU doing their job. Unlike an Electron app that tasks 16 cores with endless fucking apologizing for their creator's love of layers upon fucking layers of abstraction...

Sorry, my PC's acting slow today, I'm tired and had a glass of wine already :P

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

#88

Post by ergot_vacation »

ncann wrote: 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.

Found Everything back in the Windows 7 days and have never used anything else. It still amazes me that a silly little freeware search outperforms what Windows has. Really goes to show Microsoft's utter contempt (or apathy) toward the user.

Technically though, there is still a use for Windows search on the start menu: pulling up Windows components like the Control Panel or Disk Manger quickly.

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

#89

Post by fredsted »

dangus wrote: post #74
boba7 wrote: post #5

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

Windows 7 is 12 years old now. Spinning hard drives are 100% dead in the consumer market. Why in the world would a modern operating system not optimize for SSDs? I can’t think of a single reason to use a spinning drive on my computer. Almost every conceivable use case is better relegated to a separate NAS box. You can get a 1TB PCIe nvme SSD rated at 3100Mbps read speeds for $125. Why would I chip off an order of mag…

The thing is, computers with SSDs feel about as fast as computers were with HDDs 12 years ago. Some apps still take 10 seconds or more to load on brand new hardware in 2021. There shouldn't be any random wait times in daily usage.

Sure, things have gotten more advanced, but it feels like the speed improvements of hardware are being used for bloat, rather than making computers even faster.

It seems computer performance stabilizes at a level that's acceptable to most people, I guess because beyond that there's no incentive to spend resources improving something that's acceptable.

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