Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update? • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by II2II » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 11:09 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #71

boba7 wrote: post #5

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

Why do people still expect modern software to run at incredible speeds on hard disk drives? Run old technology with old software. It is ridiculous that consumer hardware is still being sold with crappy 5400 RPM disks in 2021. No, I have no interest in optimising my software for speeds that are 1/10th of my broadband. Unless we're talking archival or huge storage necessities, stop complaining about modern OS or games…

> Why do people still expect modern software to run at incredible speeds on hard disk drives?

> Run old technology with old software. It is ridiculous that consumer hardware is still being sold with crappy 5400 RPM disks in 2021.

You pretty much answered your own question. Whether you like it or not, people are still using hard drives because hard drives are still being sold. Just because those people prioritize capacity over performance, for a given price point, doesn't mean they want performance to be ignored altogether.

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

#202

Post by brundolf » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 11:11 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #200

brundolf wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important thing that it took me a long time to realize is it doesn't search file names by default, only file contents. To search by name you have to use the 'name:' prefix. This is nonsense, but it's also easy to overcome once you know about it.

I don’t think this is right. I just did a test with a text file and Windows not only found a word only in the title (not in the document text), but also highlighted the title match in the results.

Hmm. Maybe I'm thinking of macOS? This definitely happened on one of the two and I was pretty sure it was Windows

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

#203

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 11:13 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #128

ergot_vacation wrote: post #81

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 Wind…

I used to find new technology to be exciting. Now, new technology (speaking about more than just software here-- appliances, cars, etc) causes me to instinctively respond with "What features, capabilities, ownership models, etc, are being taken away from me with this new thing?" I assume it's a function of my getting older (44), to a large extent. It can't all be about me getting older, though. I can't be alone in th…

I don't remember your name popping up as my HN doppelganger the other day, but you could have been me writing that comment.

I don't think it's because we're getting older so much as because we can remember a time when new technology didn't suck like this and so we see straight through the rationalisations and marketing doublespeak.

We live in a time when a right to repair can be controversial, copyright is being distorted to limit what users can do with tech they have bought and paid for in ways that have nothing to do with giving copies to other people, and the working life of equipment is being dramatically shortened by software limitations or a lack of ongoing fixes for software defects from the manufacturer. There should have been laws protecting ordinary people against these kinds of dangers long ago.

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

#204

Post by vel0city » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 11:15 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #95

brudgers wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't disagree, or agree. If you are running spinning rust rather than an SSD, you are getting exactly what you chose. Just about any use case that justifies spinning rust can be solved with an external platter, thumbdrive, and/or SD card.

When I upgraded from 7 to 10 I had an SSD in my machine but was never given an option to install 10 to the SSD. It requires some contortions to get physical install media and then start over on a new install on the SSD instead of doing any kind of convenient system migration. The "choice" I made was back in 2009 when I installed 7 to an HDD, which seems like a reasonable choice.

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/

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

#205

Post by II2II » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 11:15 PM UTC

1_player wrote: post #107

jokoon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this argument, could you explain why modern software cannot run on old hardware? It sounds like it's justifying planned obsolescence.

Can you explain why you expect modern software to run on old hardware first? Should I be surprised that my turn of the millennium PC can't even run Slack? Yes, in absolute terms it's a bit ridiculous, but we're not talking philosophy here, Moore's law is a thing and software has been getting more complex as hardware got faster. Deal with it. How is this news?

> Can you explain why you expect modern software to run on old hardware first?

People are expected to run modern software for reasons of security, to retain interoperability with the latest standards, or to reduce support costs for the vendor. It is not very surprising that people don't want to upgrade their hardware for reasons that are outside of their control.

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

#206

Post by handrous » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 11:22 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #118

jokoon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Back in 2020, after one update, windows 10 was taking about 5min to boot on a thinkpad, if not more. Had to install a SSD, changed everything. Pretty curious to hear what kernel developer or filesystem developers have to say about this, because it doesn't really make sense to me. I can understand why something would stop working, but not to just become slow. In what world does a system change result in worse…

I've heard that modern Windows does some aggressive disk-caching of driver states or something (?) when you shut down, so that it can quickly load them when you boot again and skip a large part of the booting process. Obviously the intention is to make boot faster, but maybe on an HDD it has the opposite effect?

More than just on boot. For the brief time that I ran Win10 on an HDD, what it felt like was that the whole OS was almost constantly touching the disk, for whatever reason, often blocking. Open start menu? Better do a bunch of disk I/O. Moused over anything? Touch the disk. Pressed a key? Hit disk. Doing nothing? Disk time!

Whatever they're doing is probably fine, for very liberal values of "fine" (i.e. it's not actually fine and is probably harming system-wide performance and UX in more subtle ways, even on SSDs) for SSD-equipped systems, but made it practically unusable on an HDD.

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

#207

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 11:29 PM UTC

yabones wrote: post #115

ergot_vacation wrote: post #81

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 Wind…

In that case, install Debian Stable and stick to Firefox ESR. Nothing will ever change without warning, and you will have the most blissfully boring user experience.

You write as if that would be a bad thing. Debian is probably the gold standard for reliability, longevity and user control today. If all software was so well managed, most of us would be better off. If there was also a good process for updating application software to a new major version if you wanted it, that would be ideal.

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

#208

Post by II2II » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

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

I have an i5-3300 from 2012, 32 GB RAM, and a SSD. There are no performance issues to speak of. I have a Ryzen 3 3250U from 2020, 8 GB RAM, and NVME storage. The performance under Windows is lackluster, while there are no performance issues under Linux. I'm not sure what the problem is since the software configuration on both machines is quite similar and the performance issues still manifest themselves when there is free memory (i.e. the most obvious difference).

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

#209

Post by handrous » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 11:31 PM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #97

ergot_vacation wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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... something else. Probably FF or a light alternative Webkit browser. Hell, there's hardly a task I do that doesn't put me at at least 10 open tabs, which is already too many for the new design, then if someone comes along and says "hey can you take a look at X real quick", well, now I might be at or over 20 (I find multi-window browsing horribly obtuse unless I have 3+ monitors). And you know what? I'm not always great about closing all my tabs the second I finish a task, and I don't really want to have to do that.

We'll see how it works, but I'm not optimistic. It looks batshit crazy. I can imagine something involving a highly-capable quick-search-to-find-tab system making it better than what we have now, or at least not-worse, but dunno whether they'll be including anything like that.

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

#210

Post by nucleardog » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 11:37 PM UTC

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #117

ergot_vacation wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. And not even that since some times typing "Panel" will not find Control Panel or "Power" not find "Dell Power Manager". I am baffled as to what is the actual algorithm behind this "search". I am quite sure it is not an indexing problem as searching the same item…

And for extra fun, sometimes you'll start typing and get "Contro" in and it will pop up "Control Panel" at the top, but then by the time your fingers have caught up and stopped typing you've got "Control Pan" and you mash the enter key and... it suddenly replaced it with a bing search for "Control Pan".

I actually generally enjoy Windows 10 as an OS, but I actively dislike the start menu search. It's worse than useless.

I just went and punched "drive" in a few times. The first couple times it gave me "Computer Management" since it's related to drivers apparently. Then it decided to give me "Create and format hard partitions". Meanwhile, the several options that contain the literal "drive" in the name are all ignored as the "Best Match".

I too am completely baffled by what sort of algorithm it's using to find and select the most relevant search results.

I have PowerToys installed and have "PowerToys Run" bound to Win+R. I use that pretty much exclusively these days as an app launcher.