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Comment by vladvasiliu | Hacker News Reader

I'm even more amazed at my IT colleagues (so "tech" people) putting up with windows' doing god knows what constantly. We have the exact same machines, yet mine somehow basically never has its fan on running Linux and compiling Rust, whereas theirs is often audible while running Windows with a couple of chrome tabs open and outlook.

They also don't bat an eye when lazy devs recommend we should reboot the servers daily. They put up with laggy VNC when they have a perfectly good remote desktop solution set up.

I guess, if it sorta kinda works, people just get used to it. The fans blowing like a jet engine. Apps taking forever to load. Windows getting stuck for no discernible reason.

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> We have the exact same machines, yet mine somehow basically never has its fan on running Linux and compiling Rust, whereas theirs is often audible while running Windows with a couple of chrome tabs open and outlook.

I think some of this is just poor defaults. Every windows laptop I've had in the last 10 years has defaulted to a thermal management profile that ran the fans aggressively. Usually you have to install some crapware from the manufacturer (it's "Dell Optimizer" on my current machine) that allows you to change the thermal profile to quiet mode, and it's totally fine after that.

I can buy that, but, anecdotally, my machine is noticeably warmer when I'm under Windows [0], and it does blow its fan too, just like my colleagues'.

So, I don't think it's just a question of fan profiles. Plus, on Linux, I can't control the fan. I can't even read its speed. On Windows, they have all the "recommended" HP crap, but it's true that I didn't fiddle with those, and I doubt my colleagues did, either.

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[0] I do use Windows rarely, but when I do, it's for fairly long stretches (multiple days on end) so it has the time to do its scanning, updating and whatever elsing.

The terrible thing about modern macOS and Windows is that they keep indexing your files in the background. Microsoft and Apple somehow consider that index-based "instant" file search better, yet it's actually extremely terrible and mostly useless. The file search in XP, that traversed the file system every time you searched something, worked so much better than anything modern. Right now I use a Mac app called "Find Any File" that does the same thing.

On other stuff Windows does in the background, I managed to disable Defender and the updater on my VM by deleting their files via the recovery mode command prompt. That seems to be the only reliable way to do that.

One of my favorite ways to 'fix' vista era machines was to turn off the indexer. That bad boy would take over the machine randomly then rescan the files over and over. They fixed a lot of it in sp1 and win7. But it is still terrible.

On Windows with NTFS drives (networked or local), I use VoidTools Everything for instant as-you-type search results. It doesn't index contents of files, and for networked drives must periodic'ly re-index them, at moderate cost (compared to the heavier cost Windows Search when indexing /local/ drives).

Also unlike Windows Search, it doesn't default to "search a few of the most common locations and either take a random number of seconds to realise at least one of the search targets was already displayed in the current folder where you started your search or claim that nothing was found (when one or more actually matches exist)".

I have to put up with laggy VNC sadly, but not by choice.

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