It is stunning that the problem was in such a highly visible location, but the idea that your operating system becomes slow after years of use has always been a

It is stunning that the problem was in such a highly visible location, but the idea that your operating system becomes slow after years of use has always been a thing. Reinstalling Windows was something I would do every couple of years, I even made money in highschool doing house calls fixing people's computers. It was about an hour or two, most of which was spent drinking tea with a random family's dad. I'd back up their data, reinstall windows, replace IE with firefox and a decent free antivirus. The computer would go from being a nightmare to being a joy to use. In that time there were definitely more dangers looming, they would accumulate search bars and other adwares and trojans and such. There wasn't much value to be won from PC's then so having a virus would usually not affect their lives much. It would be common to get an email from your provider that they'd disable your connection if you didn't remove the DDoS bot from your machines.