Historically windows used to slow down over time due its filesystems getting fragmented (where file contents is spread over many non sequential sectors of the d

Historically 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).