3 ms·

Some time ago, I had a desktop PC with a mechanical HDD (capacity reasons), and I made a mistake of installing W10 on it. Very quickly I noticed that even on a

Some time ago, I had a desktop PC with a mechanical HDD (capacity reasons), and I made a mistake of installing W10 on it. Very quickly I noticed that even on a fresh install, HDD was literally never idle, and that's after all updates. There's always some more crap MS wants to push out, or something wants to update, or reindex, and so on and on. Seriously, it interfered with my sleep in another room. Windows 10, never again.

72deluxe 10y ago
Did you ever run a profile to see what was going on? Or run ProcessMonitor to see what was using the disk etc.? It could be the indexing service for files. There is the NTFS MFT which is used by tools such as Everything by "void tools", but Windows also has its own Windows Search (WSearch) service which indexes files and contents. I believe this is similar to the Indexing Service found on Windows XP that would give you hopeless results (duplicates between its database and the actual file system). This is meant to make Cortana be able to give you helpful results when you search for things like files locally. I have found it to be slow to type something into the Start menu (just type), particularly compared to the results from Everything (mentioned above) or Apple's Spotlight. It is very odd because Microsoft has its own SQL Server division (and SQLite is free if they want to use that!) as well as embedded SQL Server for file-based database systems yet their start menu search is horribly slow so as to be useless (for me at least). I recommend buying Windows Internals 6 volumes 1 & 2 to understand what is going on, at least under Windows 7. There are not versions released for Windows 10 yet (and will there ever be? It's a constantly moving target).
- kofejnik 10y ago
  Yes, spent some time with Perfmon, as expected, it was due to various system components constantly finding some reason to update/install something I have no use for. Moving Chrome profile to a RAM disk helped somewhat, as did turning off some icon update stupidity or something like that in hidden Chrome settings. But as you mentioned, if even the Start menu is lagging, I have no patience and no desire to investigate further, this is it. So instead of buying some utilities to make windows less crappy, I've finally had enough and installed Ubuntu on that last PC. Just to think about it, I was an MCSE+I and MCDBA some time ago, now I only boot windows for games.
ashark 10y ago
Similar experience. Win10 was really, really sluggish on my spinning rust drive. Problem went away with an SSD. Must be tuned for use on a solid state drive.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I would guess that would be the case for the most part these days... I don't think I'd want to use a modern OS on a spinning drive, at least for the OS/swap. Of course, linux (ubuntu) has its' own issues, like the 80+gb ~/.cache/upstart/unity.7.log file filling up the ssd every couple days (still haven't caught it when not full to be able to dig into, annoying all the same). Though worst from MS on spinning drives has to be using Visual Studio on a web project (or node dev for that matter)... it's painful.

72deluxe 10y ago

Did you ever run a profile to see what was going on? Or run ProcessMonitor to see what was using the disk etc.? It could be the indexing service for files. There is the NTFS MFT which is used by tools such as Everything by "void tools", but Windows also has its own Windows Search (WSearch) service which indexes files and contents. I believe this is similar to the Indexing Service found on Windows XP that would give you hopeless results (duplicates between its database and the actual file system). This is meant to make Cortana be able to give you helpful results when you search for things like files locally. I have found it to be slow to type something into the Start menu (just type), particularly compared to the results from Everything (mentioned above) or Apple's Spotlight. It is very odd because Microsoft has its own SQL Server division (and SQLite is free if they want to use that!) as well as embedded SQL Server for file-based database systems yet their start menu search is horribly slow so as to be useless (for me at least). I recommend buying Windows Internals 6 volumes 1 & 2 to understand what is going on, at least under Windows 7. There are not versions released for Windows 10 yet (and will there ever be? It's a constantly moving target).

kofejnik 10y ago
Yes, spent some time with Perfmon, as expected, it was due to various system components constantly finding some reason to update/install something I have no use for. Moving Chrome profile to a RAM disk helped somewhat, as did turning off some icon update stupidity or something like that in hidden Chrome settings. But as you mentioned, if even the Start menu is lagging, I have no patience and no desire to investigate further, this is it. So instead of buying some utilities to make windows less crappy, I've finally had enough and installed Ubuntu on that last PC. Just to think about it, I was an MCSE+I and MCDBA some time ago, now I only boot windows for games.

ashark 10y ago

Similar experience. Win10 was really, really sluggish on my spinning rust drive. Problem went away with an SSD. Must be tuned for use on a solid state drive.

tracker1 10y ago
I would guess that would be the case for the most part these days... I don't think I'd want to use a modern OS on a spinning drive, at least for the OS/swap. Of course, linux (ubuntu) has its' own issues, like the 80+gb ~/.cache/upstart/unity.7.log file filling up the ssd every couple days (still haven't caught it when not full to be able to dig into, annoying all the same). Though worst from MS on spinning drives has to be using Visual Studio on a web project (or node dev for that matter)... it's painful.