3 ms·
Author here. I love how most of the comments here are saying something to the effect of "he's holding it wrong!" or "this is PEBKAC." And this especially when
by gavinhoward 4y ago
Author here.
I love how most of the comments here are saying something to the effect of "he's holding it wrong!" or "this is PEBKAC."
And this especially when people have to make a lot of assumptions about my setup, including if Windows ran an update or not! Because I never said it did in the post.
When I shut down, it did, but the first boot, it did not. The 15 minutes of hang there was not because of an update. (I had happened to boot into it recently enough.) That 15 movie hang is pure bad programming.
It also shouldn't matter if I use spinning rust. Sure it might be slower, but the actual time to login screen wasn't bad, so it is possible to still be usable. I'm not sure the 15 minute hang after boot was caused only by that. HDD may be slower than SSD, but it's not that much slower.
Also, if there are updates that install within 3 minutes, and Windows hangs on "Finishing Updates" for 45, there's still bad programming.
In addition, I have disabled Windows Defender permanently by the Windows Registry, so there should be far less thrashing of my HDD. For those people saying that I don't know what I'm doing in Windows, maybe I don't, but I know enough to do that.
(I don't visit any website in Windows that I don't trust. I usually only visit my self-hosted Gitea instance. I feel safe enough, especially since I could just reinstall and don't keep anything important on there.)
On top of that, none of you have explained why my typing speed is 50% of maximum, at least in Visual Studio.
As for why I don't use a VM: I don't fully trust emulation of Windows from experience, I need to do actual testing, and I used to have Steam on Windows for Kerbal Space Program. (I used to; I uninstalled it before the first boot talked about in the post.)
You're welcome to ask me more questions about my setup and criticize me without assumptions, but please don't assume things about my setup.
- rawgabbit 4y agoI had a Surface book die due to the battery swelling which warped the glued down display. This happened because stupid me left the machine on all the time because I got tired of all the windows updates. Little did I know that Windows had the habit of maxing out the CPU to 100% for some reason. The little fans in the Surface book couldn’t handle the heat. The only reason why people like the PC as far as I can tell is because of Steam.
- Dalewyn 4y ago>HDD may be slower than SSD, but it's not that much slower. It's at least something around 100~200x slower to do tons of random reads and writes on an HDD than an SSD. Updates and other background tasks that have been delayed and now going all at once are going to hammer the system drive in a random manner, so this difference in speed will have a massive effect.
- ghoward 4y agoThis doesn't explain why the slowdown is recent, though.
- mutantfloppy 4y agoYour description sounds like every Windows box I've ever fixed whose disk was going bad.
- ghoward 4y agoThe disk is about one year old and uses less than 5% of the space available.
- mutantfloppy 4y agoNeither fact establishes that the disk is working correctly now, and you have evidence to the contrary.
- ghoward 4y agoI have scanned the device. No errors. So now I have evidence contrary to the evidence you assume I have. Windows is still bad. It should work on HDD's.
- Dalewyn 4y agoUnlike SSDs, HDDs don't particularly benefit from leaving significant free space open. The fact you seemingly don't know this speaks volumes. The core issue is that Windows is thrashing your system drive, which is an HDD, with tons of random reads and writes stemming from built up updates and other tasks Windows wants to do. This thrashing pulls Windows and any other executing programs from that HDD to a screeching halt because the HDD simply can't keep up. One way to solve this is installing Windows onto an SSD, and in fact Windows nowadays is written with the assumption the system drive is an SSD. This will alleviate coming to a screeching halt when tons of random reads and writes are demanded. Even a simple SATA SSD is fine for this. Another is to disable Windows Update and other background maintenance tasks you don't find valuable. Your system drive won't get thrashed if there's nothing to thrash the system drive. If you really purport to be a programmer, please at least understand the environment you are working in and tune it to your needs and desires before going on a pointless rant that might make you look like a fool.