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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?

#341

Post by formerly_proven »

yyyk wrote: post #314
boba7 wrote: post #5

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

I don't have experience with W10+HDD, but note that modern HDDs have started to adopt SMR which can lead to slower writes. It's possible slowness comes from that direction and not just W10.

I have several DM-SMR drives and their write cache (when not completely full) is like 50-100 GB large. As long as you don't write more than that in one go it performs exactly like a normal hard drive of their stature. When they're idle they'll merge the write cache into the main SMR region. Sequential writes mostly end up going straight to the SMR region (there is no idle-reorganization after them).

SMR is also only used in fairly high capacity drives. A 1/2/4 TB drive wouldn't be SMR.

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

#342

Post by noisy_boy »

samplatt wrote: post #336
mongol wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rating did you give it?

I gave it one star and left a scathing review. What are they going to do, not include a calculator in the next Windows?

They can not include it and instead provide a menu option that actually takes you to the store on first run :)

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

#343

Post by Delk »

memco wrote: post #320
Hammershaft wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do people still expect modern software to run at incredible speeds on hard disk drives? Modern software usually doesn't run at incredible speeds on an nvme drive with top of the line hardware. Modern software is often just slow. What can I do on a modern operating system today that I couldn't do on a predecessor released 20 years ago? What justifies that Windows 10 feels slower to use then Windows XP while Wind…

Am I the only person who has a laptop that boots as soon as I push the power button and also the only person who remembers when doing an OS update was an entire days work and involved babysitting the whole process to swap out disks and make sure nothing broke? My wife recently threw her hands up and said “Five minutes?” When I told her how long her over the air software update would take on her phone. There are plent…

I haven't had hardware with a spinning disk in active use in years, so my experience might be coloured by the improved performance from SSDs and may thus be irrelevant to whether things are too slow with a HDD, but that's how I also see it.

Even if you don't go so far back as to require swapping disks, dist-upgrading a desktop Ubuntu or Debian system still took several hours ~10 years ago. Booting the system (again Linux, because that's what I had) took at least a minute, probably more. My laptop that's not bleeding edge by any standard is not booting instantly to the desktop, but it's definitely faster than that.

It is in some sense eye-opening to think that pure desktop latency might not have improved over the years. It makes you wonder if things could be much faster still, and being limited to old enough hardware might also change one's perspective. But to me, having a reasonably snappy desktop experience on a laptop from ~7 years ago without having to resort to lightweight desktop environments or older software is something that would have been outlandish for most of the history of PCs.

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

#344

Post by ht_th »

samplatt wrote: post #336
mongol wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rating did you give it?

I gave it one star and left a scathing review. What are they going to do, not include a calculator in the next Windows?

They might. It would not surprise me if a lot of people just type their calculations into the browser address bar or in their Internet search engine's input box. Or search for a calculator web application, and use that as their calculator.

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

#345

Post by hellotomyrars »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #249
qzw wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An incredibly low probability multiplied by ~billion+ users means somebody is going to lose something valuable sooner or later. And then the odds of MS getting sued for “not even patching a well-known vulnerability” becomes 100%.

But that's also a billion+ users with much slower computers! So you need to compare the harm on both sides. And then MS could add a switch in Settings for anyone who is concerned. (I realize not many people would find it, but it seems important for the option to be accessible, without digging into the registry or some such.)

I’m not suggesting Microsoft does this intentionally to push consumers to buy new computers because that is obviously not the primary motivator for the mitigation patches, but I’m sure they don’t mind.

Also your average user isn’t going to know or understand even if you gave them the option somewhere. It just doesn’t make sense.

If you are knowledgeable enough to understand, then you can disable the mitigations. This seems like the best approach to me for everyone.

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

#346

Post by vladvasiliu »

sharms wrote: post #146

Disappointed I didn't see fairly reasonable explanations around processor security bugs which impact broad system performance such as Spectre and Meltdown. This has a significant impact on Linux and Microsoft has even outlined that these fixes impact their performance (there have been many more security bugs identified since): https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2018/01/09/understan...

It's very unclear to me how much of a performance hit there is for most desktop use-cases.

My most recent CPU I use is a desktop i5-8500 which doesn't feel faster than my older i7-3930k aside from disk access [0], both of which are impacted by the vulnerabilities. I practically never use the i5.

Until recently my daily driver was a MacBook Pro that came out in 2013, and I don't really remember a before / after change in perceived performance or responsiveness – I haven't done any scientific benchmarks, but that computer never felt slow, and still doesn't.

There's also this Phoronix benchmark [1] that compares performance with and without `mitigations=off` on linux. There are some tests where there's a very big difference, but mostly, to me, it doesn't look that crazy.

In the Firefox benchmarks they do say that there's a big hit, but then I probably don't read the graphs correctly, nothing looks particularly worrisome to me.

---

[0] The i5 has some NVME as opposed to an older, regular SATA drive in the i7. Still, I run a lightweight Linux install on both, so drive speed is never an issue for me, everything can fit in RAM.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=spectre-...

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

#347

Post by black_puppydog »

Not having a windows machine here to test this, I can't believe some of the results there. Specifically the "Win32 applications" ones. 7 seconds to open the file manager or text editor? Or MS Paint?! On my laptop here I can load gimp including plugins within ~1.5-2s, and I never even bothered to optimize anything about this. I wouldn't even be able to measure the opening time of e.g. gedit without some sort of scripting.

Are win32 apps really this slow to start up, or are the 7s "baseline" measurements in that experiment some cumulative value over all the applications?

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

#348

Post by paganel »

pope_meat wrote: post #333
toomanybeersies wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If GP searched for something along the lines of "Volvo emissions cheating", then I hardly think it's alarming that the VW scandal didn't come up.

Just searched "emissions cheating" and uh, is like, every auto maker cheating on emissions? I remember the VW scandal, but this quick search leaves me to conclude that VW is only the most memorable one that got mass media attention of late. But hey, we love our corporate overlords, they only want what's best for us, the shareholders. (Not actually a shareholder of anything)

> Just searched "emissions cheating" and uh, is like, every auto maker cheating on emissions?

More or less, yes, they all did.

As an European I'd say it's a shared blame, though, as in the officials around Europe (both at national and at the EU level) who had very strongly pushed for diesel for the previous two to three decades (mostly through taxation/pricing policies) also deserve a very big part of this blame.

The Americans got it right (especially states like California) when relegating diesel to mostly commercial/truck/public transport use, but the hybris and the "we know better than the silly Americans when it comes to the environment" prevailed in the end, that's why it took Dieselgate and at least a couple of decades for those officials to reverse their past mistakes.

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

#349

Post by tallanvor »

black_puppydog wrote: post #347

Not having a windows machine here to test this, I can't believe some of the results there. Specifically the "Win32 applications" ones. 7 seconds to open the file manager or text editor? Or MS Paint?! On my laptop here I can load gimp including plugins within ~1.5-2s, and I never even bothered to optimize anything about this. I wouldn't even be able to measure the opening time of e.g. gedit without some sort of script…

The benchmarks are hard to compare. He's using a VM and a fairly small amount of RAM (I don't know of many PCs only shipping with 4GB RAM these days).

I can say that Word takes about 2 seconds to open on my system, but I'm not running in a VM and I have 48GB RAM, so Windows can cache a lot to optimize opening times.

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

#350

Post by herbst »

haunter wrote: 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

How often do you use Linux to actually have a comparison? I have yet to see a Windows 10 pc that does not feel sluggish for me, even a fresh install has random waiting times I am simply not used to.
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