Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's a bit of a stretch to call Windows 10 an "absolute dog", but I have experienced a noticeable performance issue myself: low-end power consumption.

I have a new-ish ultrabook laptop with a mobile Intel processor that dual-boots Windows 10 and Linux with the Openbox desktop environment. On Linux, doing Lisp development with Emacs and SLIME hovers around 3-5% CPU usage. Windows 10, with no applications open, idles between 8% and 15%. As a result, I get significantly worse battery life in Windows than in Linux (despite the opposite situation usually being true due to better power-management (drivers) in Windows) - 7 hours vs 10.

(Windows 10 also uses more RAM doing nothing than Linux+Openbox does, but that's not as much of an issue for me - RAM does nothing if it's not being used, while a CPU not in use directly translates to longer battery life)

What is using those CPU cycles? Also, how frequently are you booting into that Windows environment?

There's a number of background tasks that Windows will run periodically (update checks, search reindex, etc) so if you don't regularly boot into Windows it'll end up running those soon after you boot up. Those should really only take a few minutes to complete so it should drop back down to a normal idle level within a short period even if you don't boot into Windows often. But if you're checking CPU load only a few minutes after boot when you haven't booted in a while, its not surprising to have some amount of CPU activity in Windows.

Its really strange you experience that much CPU load idle. I have an i5 3350P running Windows 10. I use it for Steam Home Streaming, Emby, and a few other tasks. Normally its CPU load is <5%. Having your machine use 15% CPU at idle is definitely not normal, I imagine there's something other than just Windows churning away.

The CPU cycles are being used mostly by the Synaptics touchpad driver, Microsoft Telemetry, and Microsoft Defender. However, I will say that I was mostly looking at my CPU usage right after starting up Windows - after I gave it some time to settle down, it did indeed drop to 3%-5% CPU used - so, I was mistaken!

Apps feel snappier on Linux probably because I'm hitting at least similar to you.

I've always attributed it to Windows Defender and all it's subcomponentes or sister components (Credential Guard, ...)

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