3 ms·

Apple doesn't do this imo. I remember when I used Windows I had to upgrade way more often or reinstall the OS just to speed it up every 12 months. My Macs last

Apple doesn't do this imo. I remember when I used Windows I had to upgrade way more often or reinstall the OS just to speed it up every 12 months. My Macs last 4-6 years and I know people happy with iPhone's that are 4 years old. I stil use a 7 year old iPod with no issues too.

smcl 11y ago
Has there ever been any in-depth analysis on the cause of this slowness in windows-based computers over time? I got my work laptop around the same time as my Macbook Air - 4 years ago. While the MBA is still lovely (only flaw is that the battery lasts only ~4 hours) and the Windows laptop is truly awful, takes forever to boot and chugs along on simple tasks. I cannot think of what could be causing this, there was very little difference in their performance when I first got them.
- Infinitesimus 11y ago
  ssd vs hdd perhaps?
  - smcl 11y ago
    That would explain an immediate difference in performance, but would an HDD degrade? Genuine question, as I do not know
    - davnicwil 11y ago
      For all practical purposes, no the parts of an HDD do not degrade physically in a way which causes performance to reduce noticeably on a continuous scale over time. The parts very definitely do degrade physically of course, but the effect on performance for practical purposes will be rather more binary, i.e. one day it just won't work any more ;-) What does cause the performance of the spinning disk to degrade noticeably over time is fragmentation of data. Especially in laptops, the increase of fragmentation and the correlated decrease in the performance of basically everything can be easily identified by the increased clicking and whirring noises coming from the disk (you may have noticed this on yours) - this is the heads thrashing around trying to read all that fragmented data spread around all over the disk. Especially on older laptops, if the HDD has never been de-fragmented, it's almost certain that this is your problem and is the performance bottleneck which has been getting tighter over time. In that sense yes, HDDs do degrade over time, but not in an irreversible manner, until of course they physically crash due to parts failure. Funnily enough SSDs are not affected by data fragmentation, because the speed with which the data is accessed is not affected by its physical location in nearly the same way (distances over the disk which are massive to motor-driver heads are irrelevant to electrons), but they do degrade physically with writes in a way which degrades performance continuously over time. The difference is though, you'd very likely never notice this on a home laptop with an SSD unless it was extremely old, generally with modern SSDs you'd have to be doing data-centre server levels of daily reads/writes to start to really worry about wearing the thing out in any noticeable way, over any sensible time period.
- k-mcgrady 11y ago
  I'd be very interested to know as well. I remember when using Windows a fresh install was at least a yearly occurrence. I've heard that it might be to do with hard drive fragmentation but I'm not sure of the details, I heard that years ago.

smcl 11y ago

Has there ever been any in-depth analysis on the cause of this slowness in windows-based computers over time? I got my work laptop around the same time as my Macbook Air - 4 years ago. While the MBA is still lovely (only flaw is that the battery lasts only ~4 hours) and the Windows laptop is truly awful, takes forever to boot and chugs along on simple tasks. I cannot think of what could be causing this, there was very little difference in their performance when I first got them.

Infinitesimus 11y ago
ssd vs hdd perhaps?
- smcl 11y ago
  That would explain an immediate difference in performance, but would an HDD degrade? Genuine question, as I do not know
  - davnicwil 11y ago
    For all practical purposes, no the parts of an HDD do not degrade physically in a way which causes performance to reduce noticeably on a continuous scale over time. The parts very definitely do degrade physically of course, but the effect on performance for practical purposes will be rather more binary, i.e. one day it just won't work any more ;-) What does cause the performance of the spinning disk to degrade noticeably over time is fragmentation of data. Especially in laptops, the increase of fragmentation and the correlated decrease in the performance of basically everything can be easily identified by the increased clicking and whirring noises coming from the disk (you may have noticed this on yours) - this is the heads thrashing around trying to read all that fragmented data spread around all over the disk. Especially on older laptops, if the HDD has never been de-fragmented, it's almost certain that this is your problem and is the performance bottleneck which has been getting tighter over time. In that sense yes, HDDs do degrade over time, but not in an irreversible manner, until of course they physically crash due to parts failure. Funnily enough SSDs are not affected by data fragmentation, because the speed with which the data is accessed is not affected by its physical location in nearly the same way (distances over the disk which are massive to motor-driver heads are irrelevant to electrons), but they do degrade physically with writes in a way which degrades performance continuously over time. The difference is though, you'd very likely never notice this on a home laptop with an SSD unless it was extremely old, generally with modern SSDs you'd have to be doing data-centre server levels of daily reads/writes to start to really worry about wearing the thing out in any noticeable way, over any sensible time period.
k-mcgrady 11y ago
I'd be very interested to know as well. I remember when using Windows a fresh install was at least a yearly occurrence. I've heard that it might be to do with hard drive fragmentation but I'm not sure of the details, I heard that years ago.