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‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

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Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#211

Post by Dylan16807 »

sjcoles wrote: post #98
praash wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not actually such "low end spec" that would cause logins and mails to take an hour to process. To me, the whole ordeal screams: software bloat, software misconfiguration, background service overload. You could snappily send mail 15 years ago, and the computational task itself hasn't grown much, besides bloated browser login windows. Try booting a 2 GB RAM machine to some RAM-preloading Linux thumbdrive and you…

Have you tried using Windows 10/11 with on-access and behavioral AV (not defender) on 4gb of RAM and a 5400rpm spinning disk? I find it entirely plausible that they have to wait an hour plus for the machine to become remotely responsive.

No one thinks the performance problems are implausible. But hardware can only do so much to make up for the worst excesses of antivirus. Behavioral scanning doesn't require huge amounts of memory and has negligible need to touch the hard drive. On-access scanning by definition barely needs to increase the number of I/O operations. It shouldn't bottleneck the machine if it's done competently. So then you're just loading outlook off a hard drive, which took several seconds the last time I tried it.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#212

Post by causality0 »

Government IT expenditures are insane. At work I have an i7 and 32GB of RAM with a spinning hard disk chaining the whole workstation to the ground. Booting up, logging in, and launching a browser takes over fifteen minutes at my last count, most of which is waiting for it to become responsive again after launching Edge.

Frankly I'd love an explanation as to why Windows 7 works just fine on a hard drive but Windows 10 staggers around like it's been shot.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#213

Post by toast0 »

causality0 wrote: post #212

Government IT expenditures are insane. At work I have an i7 and 32GB of RAM with a spinning hard disk chaining the whole workstation to the ground. Booting up, logging in, and launching a browser takes over fifteen minutes at my last count, most of which is waiting for it to become responsive again after launching Edge. Frankly I'd love an explanation as to why Windows 7 works just fine on a hard drive but Windows 10…

> Frankly I'd love an explanation as to why Windows 7 works just fine on a hard drive but Windows 10 staggers around like it's been shot.

Windows 7 had an independent QA team, and Windows 10 did not. I'd guess that some Microsoft developers and testers for 7 had SSDs, but most had spinning disks; but during the 10 development, most developers were using SSDs and neglected to test with spinning hard drives.

It's terrible, and doesn't make sense. When 7 booted, especially if you didn't have a lot of ram, it would thrash the hard drive for a while, but once the update service and windows defender got fully started and calmed down, you'd be good to go. From what I can tell, Windows 10 never stops thrashing the drive, and whatever it's up to ruins performance for anything else you want to do with the drive.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#214

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

gnu8 wrote: post #170
joshstrange wrote: post #72

I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…

> maxing out dev machines This is how we get software catastrophes like Teams. There is no earthly reason for it to suffer from the bugs and performance issues that it does and I have to believe the developers responsible for it are completely unaware of how much this software sucks to use because of their hot rod developer workstations. They still dog food at Microsoft don’t they?

> They still dog food at Microsoft don’t they?

Ha ha ha, no, probably not. A relatively recent post from an alleged ex-Microsoft employee said that all the designers use Macs, which might be the reason Windows keeps getting worse.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#217

Post by Uhhrrr »

> “USAF says we need top talent cyber warriors,” he continued, enumerating the many barriers to competing with the private sector for such individuals. “Let’s say we successfully do that, and let’s assume we can cut through the bureaucracy/policy and assign them meaningful work that keeps them engaged and allows them the autonomy to move fast. The hardware alone will cause them to leave.”

I'd imagine the kind of people who get Linux running on a toaster would be up for getting an Outlook-compatible email client running on a toaster-equivalent PC.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#218

Post by gopher_space »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #217

> “USAF says we need top talent cyber warriors,” he continued, enumerating the many barriers to competing with the private sector for such individuals. “Let’s say we successfully do that, and let’s assume we can cut through the bureaucracy/policy and assign them meaningful work that keeps them engaged and allows them the autonomy to move fast. The hardware alone will cause them to leave.” I'd imagine the kind of peop…

I'd also imagine the kind of people who get Linux running on a toaster aren't super interested in hardcore top-down power structures and shouty bosses.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#219

Post by bombcar »

SCHiM wrote: post #139
the_only_law wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to get my hands on some of this crap, just to watch what all it’s actually doing. God knows I can’t afford that bloatware though. I’ve got a hint that a lot of it is doing stuff that the OS might even consider malicious.

It's doing al sorts of interesting things. They subscribe to event feeds supplied by the operating system to keep track of security related events: modules that are loaded, processes that start, connections that open and close, users that log in and log off. Then they also inject themselves into processes and 'hook' into operating system routines to check things the feeds to not provide: which files are being accesse…

And they're rarely tested with other competing software, and once they start both hooking on the same thing (and each other) you can get a death spiral.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#220

Post by devwastaken »

yabones wrote: post #7

> Currently the service uses both McAfee and Tanium software packages to scan and protect service-issued endpoints like laptops. The problem isn't hardware, it's that they're using the worst antivirus known to mankind. It's not throwing money at the problem, it's about what can be removed.

Windows admins are some of the worst, especially in government. They don't understand how computers work, and so they pipe on anti-virus, anti this and that, hoping a product will magically solve the issue. But they won't move the default browser, or install an ad blocker. They won't put in policies preventing running the software in the first place or isolating its abilities.

After years of having terrible, exploitable software on windows, it's the natural result. Some manager gets a pdf exploit, and on windows there's simply nothing you can do about it. But IT has to do something, so to make them look good they throw another anti-virus on.

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