Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?
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This has a significant impact on Linux and Microsoft has even outlined that these fixes impact their performance (there have been many more security bugs identified since): https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2018/01/09/understan...
This issue is so fundamental to how CPU caches work, that there really is not a true performance-neutral fix.
The first (private) disclosure of the Spectre vulnerabilities was sometime in mid-late 2017. Partial hardware mitigations launched in 2019 for some Spectre variants, where the mitigations could be easily patched in to already taped-out designs.
Beyond those easy wins, even if foundries weren’t slammed by COVID delays, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that we’d be any further along? Most of these sidechannels require deep rethinks of the execution pipeline and speculation engines, and fundamentally redesigning those systems, taping out those designs, and finally manufacturing those chips was always going to be a process that was measured in the better part of a decade.
Edit: it was Volkswagen not Volvo.
why would cache performance be considered a cheat?
Alternatively: if you don't care about timing side-channels (which is true in a lot of applications where the only code being run is trusted, such as with HPC clusters and the like), you can run at full performance, and if you do, you can load the microcode to increase the security at the expense of performance.
Not my area of expertise, so no idea how promising it is.
We could enable the counters (and the mask bugs and reduce performance) by normally-off a BIOS flag. I for one would rather have the performance and don't need the counters for day-to-day ops.
The chances of Spectre or Meltdown actually managing to acquire sensitive data seems incredibly low. Is that worth the very large performance impact?
And then MS could add a switch in Settings for anyone who is concerned. (I realize not many people would find it, but it seems important for the option to be accessible, without digging into the registry or some such.)
And the attacks are really bad - they can read arbitrary memory. What are the chances another browser tab has a bank website open with active auth cookies, or a valuable email account? Really really high.
But—and please tell me if I’m just totally wrong about this—my understanding was they can read random memory, right? The attacker can’t control what they get.
Out of the gigabytes of memory on a system, I’d expect only a handful of bytes to be actually valuable, and only then if certain combinations can be retrieved together.
My most recent CPU I use is a desktop i5-8500 which doesn't feel faster than my older i7-3930k aside from disk access [0], both of which are impacted by the vulnerabilities. I practically never use the i5.
Until recently my daily driver was a MacBook Pro that came out in 2013, and I don't really remember a before / after change in perceived performance or responsiveness – I haven't done any scientific benchmarks, but that computer never felt slow, and still doesn't.
There's also this Phoronix benchmark [1] that compares performance with and without `mitigations=off` on linux. There are some tests where there's a very big difference, but mostly, to me, it doesn't look that crazy.
In the Firefox benchmarks they do say that there's a big hit, but then I probably don't read the graphs correctly, nothing looks particularly worrisome to me.
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[0] The i5 has some NVME as opposed to an older, regular SATA drive in the i7. Still, I run a lightweight Linux install on both, so drive speed is never an issue for me, everything can fit in RAM.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=spectre-...
I mean, looking at the specs on Intel ark that's to be expected, a newer generation mid-range CPU is typically the same speed as a high tier CPU of old.
Faster bus speeds, higher turbo, some newer under the hood instruction sets for SIMD, and if the datasheet is correct, for roughly half the thermal output thanks to a process shrink.
I have noticed that the latest update feels faster than all the other ones, but it's always hard to tell since that's the only time I really reboot the machine.
Not to mention the applications. A slow operating system that uses so much resources merely idling plus Applications-That-Are-Actually-Web-Browsers make day to day usage almost innavigable for someone with quick reflexes used to a Linux CLI.
My few short years with Windows 3.1+ spoiled me for all future versions of windows. Instant closing, instant alt-tabbing, double-clicking the top-left corner icon to close, (nearly) instant opening of simple apps like File Manager and Notepad... not to mention the instant crashes.
Linux got close but still always felt clunky, while future versions of Windows and MacOS just kept abstracting themselves from my tactile sensation farther and farther away...
Sometimes I look at macOS, Windows 10. Apart from some UI facelift I dont even remember a single user feature that was relevant or important in the past 5 years. Apart from latency added cause of feature bloat
The beauty of Gaming is that there are finally some incentives for people to work on the issue.
And a video from Microsoft Research on 1ms Latency
The user "feature" that comes quickest to mind for Windows 10 was the first run of calc.exe showing a popup notification begging for a 5-star rating in the Microsoft Store.
The fucking CALCULATOR. Literally the first and most basic function any computer ever had, which has had NO ui changes in the million software and hardware permutations for 70 years, because it's already perfect. Something has gone unfathomably, fundamentally wrong with how Microsoft works internally.
It used to be that GPU drivers would queue up to ~10 frames just to get slightly higher FPS in benchmarks (while adding basically a quarter of a second input lag)... naturally, this is an extremely bad trade-off for gaming, but made them look a few percent (at most) better on paper.
3.1 was before my time, but I can imagine.
This is faster than W10 on bare metal with SSD and the same physical amount of RAM.
Can one still benchmark Windows? Most proprietary software requires explicit authorization from the seller nowadays. (I'm quite certain those clauses are illegal here, it's not because of it that I didn't benchmark, but I expect to find none on the web because of it.)
Anyway, if you do that, you better keep those ~3GB free. If you don't have enough cache things break down really fast.
1 - It is for cortana, file indexing, telemetry, and etc. If you take the time to disable them, your computer will get much faster... for about a week, until it updates again.
Back in 2020, after one update, windows 10 was taking about 5min to boot on a thinkpad, if not more. Had to install a SSD, changed everything.
Pretty curious to hear what kernel developer or filesystem developers have to say about this, because it doesn't really make sense to me.
I can understand why something would stop working, but not to just become slow. In what world does a system change result in worse performance in certain cases?
Maybe deep inside, w10 stopped using any optimization that allowed it to be fast on HDD, considering SSD should be the norm, but I fail to understand if this is choice that implies a difficult compromise, or if it's just laziness and negligence.
Any linux dev could chime in?
Whatever they're doing is probably fine, for very liberal values of "fine" (i.e. it's not actually fine and is probably harming system-wide performance and UX in more subtle ways, even on SSDs) for SSD-equipped systems, but made it practically unusable on an HDD.
It's really odd, because the first couple releases of Windows 10 were fast enough on HDDs, but post 1703 is when I started to really notice it.
> We know when the underlying storage is solid state - there's a "non-rotational" field in the block device config that tells us the storage doesn't need physical seek optimisation. We should make use of that.
In other words, the changes under consideration should only apply when they know they're using solid state storage. Is there information elsewhere which contradicts that?
Indeed, it seems very surprising that XFS might consider removing optimizations for slower drives. It's a very popular file system in the enterprise, and anyone still storing large amounts of data is very likely to still be using rotational drives because of the massive cost difference.
Are these Windows-specific modifications, or tuning Firefox settings that might be beneficial on other platforms? (I'm not saying that I'm looking at the insane UI changes for the upcoming Safari release on the Mac and investigating other options, but I'm not not saying that.)
EDIT: "increase" in the sense of "make better". Whoops.
It seems so odd to me to install programs that still need an internet connection anyway to work.
There's a program that I can't recall the name of that can trace registry queries in the program it's attached to. You can attach to basically any process in Windows and see a monstrous number of registry queries.
The program you're thinking of is procmon which is a part of the Sysinternals suite of tools.
I know a lot of cheap machines have 5400rpm hard drives, I wonder if 7200rpm+ drives will offer a better experience. Also what role RAM plays in user experience.
SMR is also only used in fairly high capacity drives. A 1/2/4 TB drive wouldn't be SMR.
insanely fast NVMe M2 disks are cheap, let alone normal SSDs.
Besides, if everyone bought faster storage, would that get people to write more efficient software?
The "choice" I made was back in 2009 when I installed 7 to an HDD, which seems like a reasonable choice.
Run old technology with old software. It is ridiculous that consumer hardware is still being sold with crappy 5400 RPM disks in 2021. No, I have no interest in optimising my software for speeds that are 1/10th of my broadband.
Unless we're talking archival or huge storage necessities, stop complaining about modern OS or games running slow on a technology that hasn't realistically been updated in 20 years.
Do you expect Windows 10 to run on a Pentium II with 512MB RAM as well, because some version of Linux does?
Modern software usually doesn't run at incredible speeds on an nvme drive with top of the line hardware. Modern software is often just slow. What can I do on a modern operating system today that I couldn't do on a predecessor released 20 years ago? What justifies that Windows 10 feels slower to use then Windows XP while Windows 10 runs on hardware that is tens of thousands of times faster?
Under this lens, what really defines modern software is slowness. Take away the advantage of orders of magnitude of hardware improvements and you would be left with something unusably slow.
What the heck does it matter if 5400 RPM disks are old technology or not?? Do you have any actual reason that your program runs slowly on such hardware?
It's very arrogant to assume that since you can afford to upgrade to the latest technologies, then everyone who can't should be left behind. There are probably billions of people using spinning rust in their machines. If your software does not run with acceptable performance then that's a problem with your software, not their hardware.
It sounds like it's justifying planned obsolescence.
As a C & C++ dev that has always cared that my software works on machines and networks that are a fraction of what I use for testing, I get so tired of careless programs that have clearly been designed for the latest beefiest machines that the devs had at that time.
Same for the web. It should be mandatory by Law to verify websites with the baseline of a 2G connection. (just... half kidding)
...Yes? What is it doing that wouldn't fit in those constraints?
That argument would be more convincing if Microsoft hadn't systematically pushed the owners of older PCs to update them to run Windows 10. How many millions of PCs dating from the early to mid 2010s are now stuck with the results despite their hardware still working normally?
> Run old technology with old software. It is ridiculous that consumer hardware is still being sold with crappy 5400 RPM disks in 2021.
You pretty much answered your own question. Whether you like it or not, people are still using hard drives because hard drives are still being sold. Just because those people prioritize capacity over performance, for a given price point, doesn't mean they want performance to be ignored altogether.
Void Linux, Debian, Slackware... just fine. Maybe with 720p video with a good Radeon 9800 video card for the AGP bus. But a Pentium III with SSE would run much better.
One would associate modern to something that is improved, better, faster. But that’s not the case with current state of software.
Why in the world would a modern operating system not optimize for SSDs?
I can’t think of a single reason to use a spinning drive on my computer. Almost every conceivable use case is better relegated to a separate NAS box.
You can get a 1TB PCIe nvme SSD rated at 3100Mbps read speeds for $125. Why would I chip off an order of magnitude of performance to save $40?
Sure, things have gotten more advanced, but it feels like the speed improvements of hardware are being used for bloat, rather than making computers even faster.
It seems computer performance stabilizes at a level that's acceptable to most people, I guess because beyond that there's no incentive to spend resources improving something that's acceptable.
Storing the same data on a hard drive can be had for about $140. Now the SSD is much safer for your data, performs far better, and you absolutely ought to want the SSD but its not a small difference once you start talking about storing more than your OS. Spinning hard drives as OS drives ought to be completely dead by now but vendors are absolutely selling machines configured with them new in box all day every day. Seemingly more so on desktop or all in one models.
I used Hyper-V as the hypervisor of choice
That is not how most end user installations are configured (aka, not as a virtual machine).
32GB fixed disk for each build.
That is much much less than the typical Windows 10 hardware.
the fast boot feature has been disabled for the purposes of this measurement.
That is not the default and not reflective of most installations.
Source: junior enterprise machine on german multinational in a third world country.
It gets worse if you have a retail machine...
Though not the default, Microsoft is moving more and more towards hypervisor-based security, for both kernel stuff and for browser stuff. Right now you need to enable it, but I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 11 relies on it. The leaked installer already relies on having a TPM, after all.
Out of all virtual machine technologies, Hyper-V is probably the one that will give Microsoft the best chances at being near-metal without passing through hardware. Other hypervisors shouldn't pose a problem, but they're not under Microsoft's control.
If you have the time and hardware, you should feel free to test this on actual hardware instead; I doubt the results will differ much, though.
So what? That doesn't change the fact that running these tests in a VM isn't going to be the same as running them on bare metal.
IIRC if virtualization is turned on in BIOS, the host Windows itself effectively runs as a hypervisor-backed machine. I still think the tests aren't really representative, though.
My parents bought this rubish computer about 3 years ago it is easily 3-5 mins to startup. Which is due to a lack of RAM (3GB, which should be plenty) and windows swapping to startup. Plus a bunch of startup apps they 'just can not live without'. I remove them, and get 'wow the computer is so much faster'. Few months later and some update to that 'must have' app will put itself back into the startup (sigh).
1 - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/auto...
I'm not sure why that isn't shown by default anymore. But you can still add it to the menu and map it to the power button.
Power off closes all your apps, hibernate doesn't.
I'm generally using 15 or 20 apps. I only have to open those once a month after updates.
If someone uses power off, they have to open them daily (I know, because I have other computers in my house configured like that).
My work laptop runs W10. At some point in the last 3 months or so, an update came in and fucked up Windows Explorer. About 5 times in a work day I need to use Task Manager to reboot Windows Explorer because the following things stop working:
- Cannot type into the start menu (the entire menu goes black. If I backspace anything I typed -despite not being able to see it- it will work again) - I can do this once, and then typing doesn't work at all.
- Taskbar will not hide behind full screen apps, clicking on icons will not bring the app to the forefront, I need to minimize all screens in front of it until I can find it
- Cannot view/change my wifi. The list just sits there blank, refreshing infinitely.
Likely unrelated, but at the same time, Windows randomly stops being able to reach by Default Gateway. I can disable/re-enable wifi and it works, but it tends to happen over and over until i reboot once it starts happening. Usually good for a couple days after a reboot.
Lastly, on shutdown, the computer will bluescreen if I have had my external SSD plugged in at any point.
I haven't tweaked anything Windows Related anywhere. The only excuse I can come up with is one of the dozens of apps I use for my job conflicts with Windows somewhere. There's no useful log info during/after the points of issue. There's nothing in the scans for `sfc`, nothing comes up in the system troubleshooters. At this point I'm looking at doing a full re-install of Windows, but I have so much stuff to move across that I'm mostly dreading it.
My personal computer runs fine though...
- Applications do not gain focus. When a new application is launched, it starts at the bottom of the window stack. I can't even alt-tab to it easily because it's all the way at the end of the list.
- Start menu is a crapshoot. Sometimes it doesn't open when I press the start key (but always when I click).
- Once Start (eventually) opens, Search is a crapshoot. I'm not even talking about documents (although I'm usually better off using git-bash's `find` command despite the search indexer regularly using 30% of my CPU) -- I mean I can't even type half the time. Of which half of that time, the start menu turns white (but only most parts of it?).
So my workflow for using the Start menu is, I often have to mash the Start key 5 or so times just to start typing.
What do I use it for? Mostly launching programs. Eg. last night, I typed Half Life 2. When I type the first few letters of "Half", the correct result shows up. But if I type "Half Life" it goes away because I didn't use a hyphen (seriously).
- Explorer has 2-3 second lags. I don't just mean opening it, I mean every damn operation. The funniest part is, if you have Sublime text open at the same time, you can see that the changes to a folder actually take place INSTANTLY (and Sublime detects and displays them within a few milliseconds of your action in another program) but Explorer, in which you did the action will take another 2-3 seconds to display its own changes. (?????!!!)
If it did all of this on day one I probably would have thrown my computer down a long staircase, but it's been such a gradual deterioration that this is just my life now.
That said, I'm trying to be careful to my Windows setup, avoiding installing anything that could tinker with kernel or deep OS integration. Basically it's clean Windows with simple software, no antiviruses, firewalls, registry cleaners, etc. May be it's getting slower with time, but it's barely noticeable.
The desire to criticize Windows also helps…I mean the boot time for my iPhone is much much worse than anything the author measured. My upgrade times are probably at least as bad,too. And Siri search requires an internet connect.
Less than 1s boot time. To desktop.
Disable everything and see if it boots faster.
Handy hint, it has an option to hide all the default Microsoft stuff so you just see third party.
Are win32 apps really this slow to start up, or are the 7s "baseline" measurements in that experiment some cumulative value over all the applications?
I can say that Word takes about 2 seconds to open on my system, but I'm not running in a VM and I have 48GB RAM, so Windows can cache a lot to optimize opening times.
I bought a Dell e7440 with I7 5th gen I think and 4GB RAM. For 22,000 bucks. I had to upgrade to 8 gigs myself but 4 is pretty standard here.
Oh, and the "gaming" and productivity series of brands are usually upwards of 80,000 inr which is exortbitantly high for majority of Indians.
Just for some context, interns are paid 6-7000 bucks a month and a day labourer, unskilled earns a Max 700 bucks a day. So, a day labourer had to buy a cheap laptop for 30,000 bucks, have to work for 42 days.
Oh, and you have the last year rush for buying cheap devices for online classes, with people have 2-3 kids, buying a laptop for 50,000 times 3 is out of the question.
Again for context, cars in india start from 290,000 a maruti alto .
https://www.zigwheels.com/newcars/cars-under-5-lakhs
apple devices are rich mans luxury products here .
The reality is that any laptop with 4GB RAM and a 5400rpm hard drive and running a modern OS won't give a great user experience. ChromeOS on Chromebooks could be an exception, but even cheap Chromebooks have small EMM/eMMC cards instead of 5400rpm drives.
If you have such a system, a lightweight distro such as Lubuntu will probably give you a much better time.
For Windows 10, 8GB RAM + any SSD seems to be the minimum usable configuration.
I can't believe that over two decades after x64/64 bit was introduced that manufacturers still think it's 2001 and "4GB is just enough to qualify getting past the 4GB 32 bit limit"...
That's one reason I use linux. I am a student and I have this 4GB laptop I brought for less than INR 30,000, and linux is still super responsive on this. Windows lags for 5 seconds before pressing Windows key and search results showing up.
"Starting" is slow in Windows and just keeps getting slower. That could be booting, logging in, waiting for an application to start, waiting some more for an application to start, and then waiting even more, not being sure if it ever is going to start, waiting some more, and then it starts.
wevtutil el
wevtutil sl {logname} /e:false
One more thing I should add that helped was to cache DNS on my home network.
[1] - https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm
[2] - https://www.bleachbit.org/
[3] - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
[4] - https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php
[5] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysi...
Disabling the log completely doesn't seem like a loss at all.
As for the DNS I agree with that.
Years ago when I first got DSL (1Mbps) I noticed that the browsing the web on a DSL line was slower than the dialup because DNS lookups took forever.
Switching to a resolving DNS server was like taking a ton of bricks out of my car and installing a supercharger.
I wonder if ISPs are just indifferent to DNS speed or if they see it as a form of "traffic shaping" that lowers load on their network.
If you are doing a lot of waiting look into getting an SSD for your boot drive.
Or you're running some kind of corporate security product that is going to a remote server for "Mother, may I launch this?" on every EXE and DLL.
I booted up an old Windows XP box about two years ago before recycling it. It took almost TWO MINUTES to finish booting to the desktop. Some kind of fairly standard 500 GB Western Digital Blue drive. No, I don't know if it had ever been defragmented or had its TEMP files cleared or had old driver modules removed... It was just slow.
And more broadly... have you ever tried running Windows XP in a VM, on modern hardware? Even virtualized, if you feed it anything approaching the resources of a typical 2021 machine, it absolutely flies compared to Windows 10.
If the anecdotes of this thread are to be believed, it's not that our expectations changed but that the software has changed.
It might be me.
I know my reaction time is 35% faster than my teenage son. I am much more bothered by latency than other people, I'm starting to think that I experience more time than other people.
I can't stand playing single-player games on a Samsung TV that isn't in game mode. The sloppy response drains out all my fun.
When I was playing League of Legends on a "gaming" laptop I found I couldn't ever win (not feel like I was floundering, attacks hitting me and i couldn't do anything about, people avoiding my attacks 100% of the time) until I attached an external monitor. I took movies and could show the timer was 30 ms late on the internal monitor compared to the internal monitor.
Most people seem indifferent to this sort of thing, but not me.
The average person who walks into a museum will be able to tell you which paintings they like, and which they do not. An art historian, however, will be able to tell you why they like certain paintings, and discuss specific details in the composition.
You are like the art historian. When you play a game on a laggy TV, you can tell that the TV's latency is making the game worse. A layperson just finds the game less engaging, and doesn't know that it could be better, much less why.
Then you go use an HDD, and suddenly everything feels slow. The thing is, it's not actually slower than it was before, it's just slower than your most recent comparison point.
If only use an HDD, though, those boot time are just the way it is. I never actually found it to be a large difference between Windows and Linux. The difference that really bit me was startup apps on Windows, but fresh installs were plenty quick.
I think in a lot of ways it's like getting off a freeway after a while. On a regular in-city drive, the road speeds feel normal and reasonably quick (assuming no traffic). When you've just gotten off the freeway, though, you're at half the speed of what you've been driving at for the last hour or two, and it feels very slow.
A crappy SSD from a good brand is £70/TB (Samsung 860 QVO), and it is ORDERS (plural) of magnitude faster an a hard disk drive.
You can run whatever you want on antiquated hardware, but please people, stop complaining about it and get on with the times already.
I found a registry key that tells Windows to force stop apps that block shutdown. I may lose an unsaved document once in a while but I would have lost it anyway, and I am pretty good about saving things when necessary.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop AutoEndTasks REG_SZ 1
So I wonder how OP gets 34 seconds, and how he went from 13 to 34 seconds over a couple of updates. Mine definitely didn't get 21 seconds slower.
I do wonder how if they only did one run per test or multiple, since n=1 will mean noise can mess with your results.
There are differences, but I've read a lot of comments and a lot of people aren't specific. So it's difficult to judge.
Both Windows and Linux are not perfect. With windows it feels like you have to fight to keep control over your computer. With linux it feels like you have to fight virtual poltergeists.
Obviously this would be a lot more work, so I don’t want to detract from the work that’s already been done.
17134 = 2018 H1 (1803)
17763 = 2018 H2 (1809)
This has happened for the 2nd time in a year and I end up having to download an up to date iso to move past the dead end update
It seems the worst offender of "type in exactly what the link / window header is titled, does not show up in results."
I haven't figured out if this stuff just isn't indexed, is de-ranked below everything else (my guess), or is using some weird non-user-visible tags that aren't named identically.
Quite useful
Technically though, there is still a use for Windows search on the start menu: pulling up Windows components like the Control Panel or Disk Manger quickly.
And not even that since some times typing "Panel" will not find Control Panel or "Power" not find "Dell Power Manager". I am baffled as to what is the actual algorithm behind this "search". I am quite sure it is not an indexing problem as searching the same items by prefix usually works.
And as usual when it fails to find what you were looking for, you are just one Enter key away from being sent to a browser and Bing. Way to raise your ratings...
https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=590
This is closed source software (Freeware) as far as I can tell. I realize you're already on MS Windows, but downloading a binary blob from some third party that's reading all files on your system seems a little too trusting.
I've been using them for years now.
The other issue doesn't sit completely with Windows: in a corporate environment, there are numerous remote activities that get hooked up without much thought or care and it only takes an occasional slow response with one or two of them for Windows to become unusable.
anyway, linux is great now. clicking only selects or opens a file, to rename you have to open the right click menu or press F2
Overlaying SPECTRE etc. mitigations could also provide some insight.
I have no data or hard evidence to back any of this up so take it with a large grain of salt.
And for the most part it works fine, until every few months it'll slow down to an unusably slow crawl and I'll have to hop into task manager, see what rogue Windows service is bugging out this time, Google it, and find some forum post somewhere telling me what registry edit I have to do to disable some service that restores it to full speed.
I've killed as much telemetry as I can, but every time my PC loses a core or two to a random background service, it's that piece of shit.
No matter how much you purge it, it comes back. Removing execution permissions seems to work best, because Windows still realises that the file is there, but eventually it'll have its ACLs restored and the shitshow starts again.
The special effects slow it down, you can disable them: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/easy-ways-to-speed-up-windows-10...
As a result, my default policy now is "If it ain't broke, NEVER fix it." Install, then disable all updates, forcibly if necessary. On Windows and your browser at a bare minimum, and probably on any other software you use often or rely on. Yes, there are risks and downsides to doing this: security holes won't be patched, bugs won't be fixed, and new features won't be present. But everything in life is a balance. And on balance, the bad of updating is almost always worse than the good is good. This article highlights that in brilliant neon letters. How on EARTH do you justify boot and reboot times doubling or tripling, and just about every metric getting worse over time? Why would I let Microsoft fuck with my system if they're going to make it shittier?
And of course, the article leaves out the worst part. Never mind gradual performance drops, there's a good chance that update you just downloaded just broke something. Entirely. Something you NEED to work. When is a fix coming? Anyone's guess.
Install Windows 10 LTSB. It's the only one worth using. And unless you NEED a new feature or bugfix, never EVER update.
Maybe I'm not as quick to update as I think I am, giving vendors time to fix broken updates before I get them? I dunno. I'm also privileged in that I update my hardware quite often. Maybe that hides any worsened performance from my perception.
I'm not sure if I understand your strategy correctly, but disabling (security) updates on Windows and browsers sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster. To me that sounds waaay more risky than any risk taken when installing (potentially broken) updates from MS/Mozilla/Google
I can relate to them very well. I've wasted far too many hours cleaning up after one bad update or another. Windows and driver updates have been among the worst offenders. You could argue that the good updates might have protected me from malware that would have wasted even more, but I have no evidence to suggest this is the case.
As a result, I tend to be very binary about updates now. If it's something that involves direct contact with remote systems, it gets updated almost instantly, at least if the update is anything security related. Browsers, email clients, phones, publicly accessible servers, anything like that. The risk of not updating promptly in that situation is too high, even though I've seen many adverse changes when updating those kinds of products too. For most other things I use, if it's doing its job OK already, it probably gets updated if I have a specific reason to want a newer version and otherwise gets left alone.
I detest the modern trend for bundling essential updates like security patches together with other changes that users might not want, as the likes of Microsoft, Google and Apple all now do. Fixing a defective product is one thing. Changing it arbitrarily is something completely different.
Yet so many software devs take the approach of "Well, this version works, so why do the next?".
ive had the same happen with two android apps as well so i have auto-update turned off now and just go through the list a few times a years. if the changelog just says 'buxfixes' but im not noticing any bugs, then i don't bother updating
I assume it's a function of my getting older (44), to a large extent. It can't all be about me getting older, though. I can't be alone in thinking that a substantial portion of "advances" in existing technology have been for the benefit of manufacturers rather than owners. Surely "normal" people are starting to notice this too.
Edit:
I also think: "What capabilities that I already had are going to be sold as an add-on or, more likely, rented back to me on a recurring subscription?"
A close second is: "Will the thing be usable when the company goes bust and takes their 'cloud' infrastructure with them? Or how about when they decide not to update their thick-client mobile device app for new device OS's?"
A third is usually: "How will this new thing spy on me?"
At some point enterprise-grade companies that produce software get inefficient in terms of constant costs. They somehow need to make enough money for all the clutter on top that doesn't have anything to do with development/design of the product itself.
So, as long as a software producing company is a public company with shareholders and the market expansion isn't possible anymore...things necessarily _have_ to get crappier for the end users so that the company can keep producing more money out of nothing.
You can see that everywhere in enterprise level software companies. Microsoft, SAP, DATEV, just to name a few where they incrementally didn't make the software better - but instead artificially created lock-ins for their endusers so they aren't able to switch in future. Even when you argue that those companies have many market segments they deliver to, I'd go as far as adding all custom OEM Android apps to that list, as well as smart cameras, smart TVs, everything related to IoT etc.
Most of the smart devices are about removing control from the users and forcing them to pay more money for the same featureset later, gradually, without them noticing in the beginning.
Now with Google FLoC we basically will have the same thing applied to the web, and it won't turn back to the good old "just block cookies" ways. Google will persist in tracking everybody, and they got the leverage to do so.
Internet feels slower each year and the screen space dedicated to content and not ads or popups shrinks every day.
It's like in Idiocracy where the guy has a huge screen but maybe a tenth of is for the content.
(Then again, sadly, a lot of that movie seems prescient...)
I don't think it's because we're getting older so much as because we can remember a time when new technology didn't suck like this and so we see straight through the rationalisations and marketing doublespeak.
We live in a time when a right to repair can be controversial, copyright is being distorted to limit what users can do with tech they have bought and paid for in ways that have nothing to do with giving copies to other people, and the working life of equipment is being dramatically shortened by software limitations or a lack of ongoing fixes for software defects from the manufacturer. There should have been laws protecting ordinary people against these kinds of dangers long ago.
I would have perhaps recommended Ubuntu LTS to some folks previously because of the long release/support cycle (even if you only decide to install security updates), but i guess with software packages like snap infecting the OS i can no longer make that recommendation.
Previously i would have suggested that some folks also look at CentOS because it's wonderfully stable and releases are supported for ~10 years, but i guess all of that was ended by Red Hat with CentOS 8. Maybe Rocky Linux will once again provide a stable RPM distro for free, without resorting to using Oracle Linux, but only time will show that.
Is it just me, or have many once stable OS releases have been killed off in one way or another in the past decade, either forcing people to migrate to paid projects, forcing automatically updated software that cannot really be controlled easily (snaps) upon them, or doing other shady practices for no discernible reason?
That said, i personally also only update software (like Nextcloud, GitLab, OpenProject etc.) manually between larger releases when i have made and re-checked backups of all of the data, before archiving the old versions and then migrating over a copy. I'm not sure whether i could live that way with OS updates or versions, though, without absolutely minimizing the attack surface - maybe with something like a locked down Alpine Linux.
Either way, it feels like perhaps automatic updates that can't even be controlled being forced upon users are the inevitable future. It's nice that there's Debian, but my question would be: "How long before it goes the path of Ubuntu?"
Security is extremely important and in some cases can save your personal information and money from being needlessly stolen.
I can empathize with the slow downs, bugs and deprecation that may occur, but I can never agree that to never update is a good alternative.
I always like to remind folks that it takes longer to open calculator - or windows terminal - than to open excel.
All other UWP apps that do not get GitHub attention are 100x worse. Microsoft Photos, for instance...
Your statement was:
> I always like to remind folks that it takes longer to open calculator - or windows terminal - than to open excel.
but anecdotally this does not hold out for me. Not even close.
Yep, it's a lot of tabs. But not as many as you think, and often without warning, as certain ad-heavy sites, especially forum sites (flyertalk, rennlist), can sometimes require 1gb RAM alone.
64bit apps shouldn't have such a limit under Windows, and can definitely use more memory. Perhaps you're seeing a case of RAM gone bad (where the large apps are much more likely to trip over the bad location)? Consider running memtest.
Windows has gone to shit, I have visual glitches in the UI using dark mode (even the search box on bottom left doesn't render correctly in dark mode until I hover it). They preinstall some shitty "news" bar right there on the task bar and hide disabling it behind a submenu of a right click on taskbar. Start menu search goes online by default and misdirects me because of it (I disabled it quickly).
Using a 5k monitor and display scaling is very iffy as well compared to MacOS.
I'm waiting on next get M1 and then I'm using the Windows box as a docker server I'll SSH into and maybe play some games. But using it as a daily driver is really underwhelming. I would use Linux desktop but from what I've heard HDPI scaling is even worse.
I feel the same way and it makes me sad.
I've kept a death-grip on Windows 7 in hopes there would be a Windows 11 one day despite all the naive "last version ever" messaging. Now it's been announced, and I pray it's more than just a paint job. My asks are simple: more stability, better performance, and axed telemetry.
This might have been hard to recreate but I feel like some of the association with updates making things slower is the updating process itself. I was always told when a new Windows version came out that the advice was to back up files manually and clean install every time. I’d love to see a comparison between the statistics you have for clean installs and those done through the Windows Installer “Upgrade” path.
I find upgraded to be the #1 cause for issues with windows. A clean install (using iso downloaded from MS) normally resolves pretty much all problems and upgrade be the one that creates them.
Fast boot from powerdown is the reason why I stop using other power down states. Just shut system down, and boot it up in 10-15 seconds.
It feels like all the speed we got from SSDs, and to some extent faster CPUs are quickly being consumed by Window, leaving us at the same speeds we had in 2010.
It's a conspiracy.