4 ms·
Ask HN: Why does Windows slow down over time?
- transfire 4y agoEveryone I know believes M$ does it on purpose.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- WalterGR 4y agoBe aware that there may be a correlation between writing “M$” and believing that they do it on purpose.
- dkvc 4y agoWindows doesn't slow down by itself. It can be background processed, pending updates. It can also be scanning by Windows Defender on a large set of data.
- navjack27 4y agoMine hasn't and doesn't and I've tested it with benchmarks.
- scrapheap 4y agoHistorically windows used to slow down over time due its filesystems getting fragmented (where file contents is spread over many non sequential sectors of the disk, which would have a significant impact on how much time their hard disks were having to move their heads about the disk rather simply reading the next sector). When things were running slowly the first thing you'd try was defragging the drive and quite often the slowness went away. These days modern filesystems are less prone to fragment files and SSDs are much faster at pulling together the content of file even if it is fragmented, but the impression that a lot of us still have is that windows will slow down over time. So can Windows slow down over time these days? I'd say that it's less prone to just slowing down due to standard use than it used to be, but that we now have a far more complex environment which is constantly updating due to features like Windows Update. When combined with third-party applications also automatically updating themselves then there's a good chance that perceived performance of the machine will change overtime (I say perceived as sometimes it's just the one application that has slowed down and the rest of the processes running on the machine are performing fine).
- night-rider 4y agoSSDs do address the spinning rust fragmentation problem, but I don’t store anything important on an SSD, typically using an external spinning rust HD for photos, media etc I do this because I once had an OS SSD fail on me. I reinstalled Windows on the replacement SSD no problem, but some important stuff got lost. SSDs wear out if used heavily, and Windows makes a huge amount of writes, mostly for stuff that isn’t even necessary or used by the user.
- thanatos519 4y agoMaybe this is a relative perception, and instead we should be asking why Linux speeds up over time!
- wruza 4y agoIt doesn’t, until you install various auto update/preload agents, bloat your shell extensions (popup menus, preview, etc), install “antivirus”, browser plugins, ram eaters, iops eaters, and so on. Windows can work for years without slowing down, but sadly that requires expertise to maintain. All my relatives who ask to “fix” their laptop don’t have it. And all I do to make them happy is clearing hk{cu,lm}/…/run{,once}, uninstalling “additional useful” software, and that’s mostly it. No background activity - no slowdown. Sometimes very weak windows computers fall into an update loop when they can’t install updates in one session and are turned off before they have a chance to break out of it. In this case I recommend leaving it on for a day (night), for it to do everything it wants to.
- Grazester 4y agoDoes it? I haven't had a problem with this since Windows 2000 and it's NTFS I also don't install unnecessary crap that run in the background.
- r721 4y agoOne way to investigate slowdowns is to launch Sysinternals Process Monitor and to look at what exactly is Windows doing at the moment of slowdown.