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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?

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Linux box runs totally find on spinning drives. I'd like to upgrade but SSDs have gotten very expensive lately. A 2TB SSD is like $300 now.

My 486 ran totally fine on 1.44MB floppy disks as well, what is your point? As I mentioned down thread, you can get 1TB Samsung SSDs right now for $80. Not the best one, still faster than a hard disk. NVMe are a little more expensive than that, and even faster. The price is not really a valid excuse. Yes, my 2TB NVMe is $300, and does sequential read/writes of 3,000 MB/s, which is close to 100x faster than an HDD. It…

> It's not space age technology, solid state storage has been consumer technology for 2 decades already.

You're exaggerating. The first really plausible SSDs to appear in consumer PCs appeared in around 2006 or 2007, so maybe 15 years tops. For instance, Dell offered a computer with 32 GB of SSD storage in mid-2007. This was already not much storage at the time, and the drive alone cost over $500. This was arguably not a consumer affordable product at that price, and the laptops involved were actually the Latitude series (targeted to businesses) anyway. Apple followed this up in 2008 with a 64 GB SSD, but this was a $1000 upgrade.

Suffice it to say that a vast majority of people were only buying (and could probably only afford to buy) computers with rotational drives well into the 2010s. Many of the computers they bought are still running today. Many affordable computers that shipped with Windows 10 still had rotational drives. It's absurd to overlook a whole class of people who can't, unlike the wealthy, upgrade their MacBooks every 2 or 3 years. They probably don't have MacBooks to begin with. Parents are passing old hardware between children like hand-me-downs. That's before you even leave the United States.

I think your comment misses the point at a deeper level, which is that most people in this thread already have SSDs (I certainly do), but are disappointed that performance matters so little to many developers that they are fine with seeing software run at the same speed on today's insanely fast hardware that its predecessor did 20 years ago. Software is much more powerful than it was in the days of floppy disks, but it's not much more powerful than it was 15 years ago. We've seen a generational increase in performance, but we've wasted it. I think that's worth some disappointment.

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

#372
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you do. In fact in Windows/NTFS you can lose gigs of space from disk fragmentation.

The system does it automatically and has since at least Vista, probably XP. Furthermore, there's no benefit (and in fact active harm) to defragging an SSD.

He talks about HD's, on Windows 10 you cant de-frag ssd's just optimize, aka trim. But de-frag HD's is often needed on windows in certain work scenarios.

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

#373
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…

> I use is a desktop i5-8500 which doesn't feel faster than my older i7-3930k

I mean, looking at the specs on Intel ark that's to be expected, a newer generation mid-range CPU is typically the same speed as a high tier CPU of old.

Faster bus speeds, higher turbo, some newer under the hood instruction sets for SIMD, and if the datasheet is correct, for roughly half the thermal output thanks to a process shrink.

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

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> modify Firefox so it doesn't eat memory like an addict on a bender Are these Windows-specific modifications, or tuning Firefox settings that might be beneficial on other platforms? (I'm not saying that I'm looking at the insane UI changes for the upcoming Safari release on the Mac and investigating other options, but I'm not not saying that.)

> I'm not saying that I'm looking at the insane UI changes for the upcoming Safari release on the Mac and investigating other options, but I'm not not saying that. You and everyone else. I'm just taking a wait-and-see approach, on the off chance the new tab categorization stuff makes the new design usable. Otherwise, I'll have to trade a couple hours of battery life and some overall system performance and switch to..…

I've found the add-on Panorama View a life saver: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...

I don't want to save tabs, I just need them to be separated in arbitrary and temporary visual groups. Makes management so much easier when i can just switch to another group and hide the 25 tabs i had open while researching a problem.

I can't even think to work without this thing.

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

#375
post #5

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

People must have very different performance requirements than me. I've run 10 on nothing but HDD for years now with no issues. Of course, I also avoid electron apps, modify Firefox so it doesn't eat memory like an addict on a bender, and generally keep bloat off my system. But Windows, basic Multimedia programs and games all seem to run fine. It's probably not cutting edge, but I don't feel like it's dragging.

What modifications you would suggest to increase Firefox memory usage?

EDIT: "increase" in the sense of "make better". Whoops.

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

#376
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resize and clone the install from the HDD to the SSD. I've had the same "install" of Windows since 2011, its gone through 3 different storage mediums, two different motherboards, and three different CPUs. My go-to for a low level copy between two different drives is Clonezilla. https://clonezilla.org/ GParted is also another live OS with good tools to manage partitions. https://gparted.org/

Does windows handle it alright when the hardware (motherboard/cpu) it's running on changes out from under it?

Yes, first "deinstall" HAL, then reboot.

Then deinstall all your cpu's (if the number of cores changed), thats no joke...deinstall your cpu's (all of them), then reboot.

Update all the drivers...that's it.

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

#377
post #5

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

Definitely. Booting up Win10 on an HDD can take up to 10 minutes if you have Discord/Steam installed.

What's the advantage of having Discord installed instead of using it via browser?

It seems so odd to me to install programs that still need an internet connection anyway to work.

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

#378
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...

You can disable the fixes: https://make-linux-fast-again.com/

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4GB is actually pretty common for "budget" laptops in india. Check out Amazon.in and search for laptops. Anything above 40,000 inr is in the higher than budget, cheap range. For the past few years, there has been a trend of buying refurbished devices. Laptops and desktops. I bought a Dell e7440 with I7 5th gen I think and 4GB RAM. For 22,000 bucks. I had to upgrade to 8 gigs myself but 4 is pretty standard here. Oh,…

Yeah. That's one reason I use linux. I am a student and I have this 4GB laptop I brought for less than INR 30,000, and linux is still super responsive on this. Windows lags for 5 seconds before pressing Windows key and search results showing up.

I used to have a cheap machine with 4GB of RAM and an HDD. When I got some money, I went for an SSD instead of buying more RAM. The difference was significant. I happily worked on that laptop (with 4GB) for another 6 months (thanks to the SSD for making it bearable) before upgrading RAM. When in doubt, buy more SSD, not RAM :)

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

#380
post #74
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…

You actually need 2x whatever you have if you want to still have it if the drive its in dies or the data is destroyed by malice or mischance. Say you have 3TB of data now and may acquire more later. Your cheapest SSD option I see for sale on newegg.com is 4TB for $322. Going all SSD all the time requires one to spend $644.

Storing the same data on a hard drive can be had for about $140. Now the SSD is much safer for your data, performs far better, and you absolutely ought to want the SSD but its not a small difference once you start talking about storing more than your OS. Spinning hard drives as OS drives ought to be completely dead by now but vendors are absolutely selling machines configured with them new in box all day every day. Seemingly more so on desktop or all in one models.

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