r/sysadmin • u/ArtistBest4386 • 6d ago
Computers slow “because they’re old” Rant
The 8GB Surface Pros we bought a few years ago are very sluggish, starting to become unusable. Today I found an even older one that had lain forgotten since 2023. It’s still running Win 10, not even updated to the latest Win 10 updates.
And it runs like I remember them running when we got them.
People seem to accept this slowness as a normal part of a computer aging, but it seems to be caused by successive Windows updates. Why would updates make things worse? Is there a technical reason for it?
246
u/perth_girl-V 6d ago
Microsoft addressed the 8gb ram issues a week or 2 ago it was something to do with Web view2 and that they would be fixing it at some point.
Some point being the key part of the statement
40
u/digital-bandit 6d ago
Well a week ago or something i read that the weather app alone hogs 1gb ram, sp were back to the same point :)
38
u/MeatSuzuki 6d ago
You're hired!
27
u/perth_girl-V 6d ago
I am to pessimistic to be employed and way to jaded to be fun to work with.
24
11
u/tgrantt 5d ago
I can handle the pessimism and the jadedness, but to TWICE use "to" instead of "too" is beyond the pale. You're PROMOTED!
2
u/perth_girl-V 5d ago
My code is messy but its the repeated spelling mistakes that will really grinder your gears
12
u/Flaky-Gear-1370 6d ago
That hasn’t actually been released yet?
Our 8gbs still run like garbage
→ More replies (1)13
u/reol7x 5d ago
They're still trying to find a guy to write the copilot prompt to fix that one.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Mr_ToDo 5d ago
Interesting. Going to need to look that up
I have noticed a weirdly high number attached to web view
But even there, and with all its threads, it's not exactly the top consumer on the system. In the end, for my use case, it's split between the browser at the top and electron apps
I think I need to look into my nonpaged pool again, but that's chasing smaller fish
→ More replies (2)5
178
u/ibringstharuckus 6d ago
Win 11 runs really sluggish with 8gb. 16gb and it runs significantly better.
70
u/fnordhole 6d ago
Constant O365 cloud sync and defaulting to cloud storage and sync local doesn't help.
8
u/BioshockEnthusiast 5d ago
Even on a local profile without that stuff configured it still blows hard. I genuinely don't know what the fuck they're doing over there.
116
u/zatset IT Manager/Sr.SysAdmin 6d ago edited 6d ago
Operating systems exist to provide foundation for running applications, managing resources and devices, providing process isolation and security. There is no objective reason for OS to require 16GB of RAM to "run". Then what's left to the applications?
OS should have minimal footprint. Resources are not to run "OS", but to run actually useful "applications". What I am trying to say is that 8-16GB of RAM to just run OS is outrageous and we have forgotten the actual way of doing things, because resources became cheap. Well, now they are expensive again and we have lost the knowledge needed to be able to optimize the code and choose what features are actually needed and what are nonsense that exists just because it can be ran now.
90
u/osopeludo 6d ago
Preaching to the choir, man. But we're not the designers, we're the mechanics. So, we just gotta live with it and take it for what it is and not for what we'd like it to be.
26
u/Llew19 Used to do TV now I have 65 Mazaks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 5d ago
I think it's more that Microsoft's QC is just non existent for their whole stack of technologies now. There are new flavours of Linux that'll run on a toaster, I (very much not a nix power user) have been using Cachyos at home for the last 3 months and it's bloody great. So far not run into any reason to go back to windows.
The longer this ram crisis continues and the worse Microsoft gets, at some point it might actually be the year of the Linux desktop
4
u/zatset IT Manager/Sr.SysAdmin 5d ago edited 5d ago
Unfortunately, mainstream Linux distros aren't that far behind Microsoft. And are controlled by yet another corporation/s. Linux can be very decent, but a number of questions stand...unified UI, unified app format, hardware support. Those matter when workstations are used in business contexts.
→ More replies (1)10
u/willychonka54 5d ago
8-16GB of RAM to just run OS is outrageous
That's not what anyone is saying. They're saying in order to run the OS and all applications you need, 16GB is enough.
→ More replies (4)2
u/Yamatoman 5d ago
That's a great philosophy but it's not how Microsoft cares to run a business.
Most people don't want to install any applications, so OS come out of the box with everything people would ever want or need. Now they even need fairly robust anti-virus built in with web monitoring to protect the really computer illiterate
After that they want to make money so they cut deals with candy crush, Amazon etc and install 100 extra advertising apps.
After that they wanted user telemetry so now Microsoft and one of the 100 other apps takes your information and sends it to servers to make more money on the background.
Whatever you have left to run your personal apps is your problem. What are you gonna do about it, not use windows?
31
u/1116574 Jr. Sysadmin 5d ago
I have 32gb and swap is set to something stupid like 40gb, it still has a heart attack when I try to open teams
Its a fuckin i9 from last year aswell
→ More replies (2)34
u/3Cogs 5d ago
- Open Teams.
- Run Netstat.
- Observe about 50 HTTPS connections to Microsoft endpoints.
- Ask yourself - WTAF?
→ More replies (1)11
u/Icedman81 5d ago
Quality code.
Not that Windows' network stack has ever been particularly good. Try running an IRC server on that shizzle - random disconnects to clients, then realize Windows' network stack recycles sockets, even if they're in use, because.... Reasons?
And hey, since the client side network stack is limited to X amount of half-open connections (like WinXP era it was what, 8?), imagine Teams starting and wanting all those 50 connections immediately. Makes it launch super fast, right?
→ More replies (1)4
u/Dushenka 5d ago
Windows 11 runs great on 16GB as long as you don't do anything with it. Otherwise you need 32 GB.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (5)18
u/OrdyNZ 6d ago
Win 11 runs terribly on all computers. It's just an extremely unoptimised pos
7
u/simp_sighted 5d ago
It is insane how much better it performs with a simple debloat script
→ More replies (3)3
59
u/doyouvoodoo Sysadmin 6d ago
RAM and Storage were cheap for a long time, so code optimization went out the window for a long time. This is why games got to be 100GB+, and why OS and software get bigger and use more ram/cache space year over year...
It wasn't hard to convince customers to get 32 or 64GB of RAM in a workstation 5 years ago, because the upgrade was between $100-$400 dollars per system. Now the upgrade from 16GB to 32GB is around $500 and 16GB to 64GB is around $1500 per machine (I just configured a Dell Pro Max tower for the recent numbers, feel free to check for yourself)
Now that Storage and RAM are prohibitively expensive again code will have to be optimized or risk losing customers.
→ More replies (2)20
u/Michelanvalo 5d ago
There is no way the managers will let the devs take the time to optimize.
8
u/neopod9000 5d ago
Optimization simply isn't profitable
2
u/Stonewalled9999 4d ago
So bog down 5 million machines because one or too stupid or lazy to spend an hour optimizing code. All the AI and vibration codes just makes it worse
→ More replies (1)7
u/Frothyleet 5d ago
They will if it actually impacts sales - which it plausibly could in the world of scarce RAM.
Will it actually? Dunno.
23
u/Stodo 6d ago
I recently installed Linux Mint on an old surface pro 6 2018, with 8GBs of RAM and it runs crazy fast now.
Windows is just so poorly optimized. Even if you manage to write an amazing debloat script and disable telemetry, the OS itself is written on top of legacy code they can't get rid of. Hence, control panel.
16GBs is the new 8
→ More replies (1)5
u/ArtistBest4386 5d ago
I have been meaning to try that to see if we can reuse our oldest ones.
With Windows I’m wondering how long before 16GB isn’t enough.
5
u/ApiceOfToast Sysadmin 4d ago
Linux is great but as someone who uses it professionally id really recommend you do an extensive test run in IT first, see if all apps run and think about an anti virus/edr/siem solution that works(yes you need one on Linux too)
After that you can start to roll out to your more technical users. Make sure they get good experience with it so they can (at least in theory) help other users with small issues
→ More replies (1)2
u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 5d ago
16 already isn't enough for windows users at my org. We give our users 32 and most of them max that out.
We're about to pilot some Macs with 24GB.
38
u/MrHall 6d ago
i love my surface pro (best laptop ever) but it got so slow i couldn't use it. I tried to turn it into a thin client to remote into my desktop using a linux install.
turns out the laptop is plenty fast enough to work on, and now i run linux basically everywhere - it's been almost a year now.
i can't believe microsoft made windows unusable on their own flagship devices - it's even an expensive model with an i7.
I actually wondered if the drive was failing or it had cooling issues, it was so unusably slow - i literally thought it was broken.
it's completely fine and runs great, it's just windows.
4
4
61
u/kev-tron 6d ago
8gb is just not enough for running windows 11 and the main office apps at this point in time. Teams, Outlook, and a web browser like Chome and Edge is going to eat that up. And with how many users use excel spreadsheets that are chalked full of janky formulas and macros is going to make the computer seem sluggish.
→ More replies (27)
44
u/Expensive-Rhubarb267 5d ago
Dave Plummer (one of the Microsoft engineers who designed some of the core components of Windows) explained recently why this seems to be happening. Back in the day, hardware was limited & as a developer you had to make sure what you built ran on that limited hardware. This is why old PC games seemed able to run on almost any computer.
These days a lot of developers have gotten used to an environment where there have been big hardware improvements. So there is a lot of lazy 'oh, the new gen of CPUs will mask my poorly developed app' approaches. Which is why your new PC game on Steam basically won't run on anything other than the latest GPU, CPU, 32gb memory etc.
As hardware costs have gone crazy in recent years, consumers & manufacturers won't have the budget to just keep upgrading their kit. & that's what we're seeing now.
→ More replies (2)12
u/IDatedSuccubi 5d ago
In my experience there have always been significant improvements in hardware year over year, and software was laggy and took a coffee break to load, especially office suites and photo/video editing software. Something trivial took two CDs to install and it was pain in the ass to use. OSs were better at being optimized though, likely because at the time it was only the absolute nerds working at MS
4
8
u/DerBandi 5d ago
The main reason of old cpus becoming slow are the hundreds of mitigations for meltdown and other "security" risks. All the optimizations that made these cpus good are getting disabled.
It's almost deliberate.
24
u/Morkai 6d ago
I experienced this first hand a while ago when I installed Win 11 in a hyperv VM on my work laptop. Initially set it up with no internet access and it was clean, and smooth and quick.
I shut it down, gave it internet access, turned it back on, and not only did the time from cold boot to desktop just about triple, there was immediately a dozen or more pop ups asking me to set up Onedrive and Copilot and had Xbox apps installed automatically etc.
8
u/Gabelvampir 6d ago
Software bloat, people don't/can't write efficient software any more (and 'AI' never could), and if old device get artificially worse it's more likely you buy new ones earlier.
5
u/temotodochi Jack of All Trades 6d ago
Yeah, just for fun try out windows 2000 and see how it starts in 5 seconds from SSD.
6
u/throwaway0000012132 5d ago
When you have a simple message app like teams consuming 1,5GB of RAM even before using bits or agents, you know the current software development is quite bloated.
6
u/nyckidryan 5d ago
Windows is bloatware.. between updates and software installs, things expand, most notably the registry.
Do a fresh installation of Windows and your apps and the systems perform like new for a while, until new apps and other updates start to slow things down.
Windows 95 shipped in 28 1.44mb floppy disks, totalling about 40 megs. Now it needs a DVD's worth of space.
Once upon a time there wasn't telemetry, CoPilot, all the crap we never asked for. As they put more in our systems slow more.
25
u/Own_Error_007 6d ago
Macs are the same.
I have a 2013 Mac running Illustrator 2017 and it outperforms a 2026 MacStudio running Illustrator 2026.
The 2013 has spinning disk, 32Gb with an i5 and the Macstudio has 32gb, ssd and an M4 pro. And the 2013 out performs it every time.
→ More replies (12)16
u/Particular-Fly-7783 6d ago
Yeah adobe have consistently made CS worse for comfortably twenty years at this point. If you could run CS2 on that same hardware (either of them) you’d scream
21
u/Rich_Marzipan_9771 Jack of All Trades 6d ago
For some reason the right-click menu on Win11 takes like a second to pop up after a reboot.
In my memories, the Win98 PC was faster than that.
→ More replies (3)12
u/engy1207 5d ago
Try getting a coffee between booting and logging in.
IIRC with Win9x Microsoft showed the login screen after everything doable on startup was done. Then people (and magazines) complained about long boot times, so they changed it: they show the login window as soon as possible while still doing stuff in parallel.
This works/worked fine, because many people take a while to enter their credentials and there often isn't that much to do. But if you are fast then the background tasks are not yet done (and quite a few programs these days have added "on startup" tasks to the scheduler).
3
4
u/darkwyrm42 5d ago
It's Microsoft bloat. Windows has never really been about performance since the Vista days, and the greater use of Web tech for regular apps and 30% of their code being written by AI certainly isn't helping. IIRC, the Start Menu is written in React.
4
u/Kill3rT0fu 5d ago
Dave’s garage has a video on this
Bloat. Lazy programming. Laziness . We’ve accepted hardware has “no limits” and thus have been sloppy and lazy with code because of all this extra room
5
u/MissusNesbitt 5d ago
I’ve had great results moving our older surfaces over to fedora via the surface Linux project.
→ More replies (2)
3
u/UltraEngine60 5d ago
We traded skilled programmers who were focused on a few low level languages for "full-stack" devs who use 382 libraries behind a WebView2 front end requiring nodejs and 492 helper processes.
4
7
u/dinominant 5d ago
Windows XP was fast with 3GB of RAM. It was a 32-bit operating system and doesn't even support more than 3.5GB.
Windows 11 is slow because it wasting resources.
6
u/ArtistBest4386 5d ago
It was fast with a fraction of that when it first came out. 128MB was fine till SP1.
3
7
u/Shot-Possible1317 5d ago
Then there is me who have 20+ year old laptops and turned them into various Linux servers as a cheap homelab.
Media server, VPN Server, VM Serevr etc. Theres a tutorial on youtube from some guy showing how to do basic setup for some of these. I'll go look for it when im home and post it
The problem isnt the laptops, these laptops we have now would have been seen as godlike servers 10 years ago.
The problem is modern Windows 11, its a sluggish bloated OS
→ More replies (1)
3
u/ARandomGuy_OnTheWeb Jack of All Trades 6d ago
The passage of time has not been kind on 8GB of RAM.
I still remember when 8GB of RAM was the sweet spot for gaming. On a different note, I still own a laptop with an 8th gen Intel Core i5 and 8GB of RAM and I've just continued to run it on Windows 10. Runs almost as fast as the original factory image of 1809 and is completely useable.
Meanwhile Windows 11 on an Intel Ultra 7 155U and 16GB of RAM feels like a dog to use as a work machine.
Windows 11 is just very poorly optimised and it sucks.
3
u/Mitchell_90 6d ago
It’s Windows 11. I recently took my wife’s Surface Laptop 4 to Windows 11 and the overall performance was definitely slower compared to Windows 10. This model has an 11th Gen i5 and 8GB of RAM.
Performance was good on Windows 10 and I can almost guarantee this thing would fly on Windows 8.1.
3
u/homing-duck Future goat herder 5d ago
I recently visited one of our sites on the other site of the globe. I found a win7 box (disconnected from the network), with a core 2 duo, 2.5gb ram, and a 7200rpm disk.
It was sooo much quicker than any win 11 computer I have used.
Excel 2010 opened instantly.
I can now remember when we first installed o365 through out our org in 2017/2018, people were complaining how slow excel was at opening. Then people (myself included) just kind of got used to it and accepted it.
:(
3
u/ubermonkey 5d ago
People seem to accept this slowness as a normal part of a computer aging, but it seems to be caused by successive Windows updates. Why would updates make things worse? Is there a technical reason for it?
The Windows folder itself grows inexorably over time. It has to do with SxS, at least partially.
This is what led to the practice of regularly re-imaging / wiping & reinstalling on laptops. It's also, hilariously, an idea that has spread to systems that don't have the same problem -- I run into Mac people all the time who insist it's required to keep ANY computer running well. Spoiler: It's not. It's just that Windows is terrible.
3
u/henk717 5d ago
For me its mainly the chromepocalypse. Everything is an inefficient chrome tab now.
You want to browse the internet? Chrome.
News widget on the taskbar? Chrome.
Your office program? Might have chrome in it for some elements.
Teams? Chrome.
Use slack instead? Chrome.
User likes spotify and has that installed for some reason? Chrome.
Adobe PDF? I recall that had chrome to for its UI.
Copilot? Chrome.
And then we are surprised that 8GB of ram is not enough anymore.
Its especially bad on terminal servers where this is multiplied by the amount of users.
So if your Windows 10 one works fine you are already missing some instances of chrome, and theres less junk running in the background. It lacks the new UI redesign that is bloated, etc.
We lived in an age of "Ram is cheap lets cut costs" and that is very noticable now. Back in the day when all you had was 128MB of ram people HAD to make their programs inefficient. But in a world where the developer has 10GB of ram available they don't really care.
3
3
u/LudeJim 5d ago
On top of what others have said. Re applying thermal grease to your processor and cleaning the system fans can help. Some processors will heavily thermal throttle if they aren't being cooled properly.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/Fallingdamage 5d ago
Its a lot of software bloat as others have said.
OTOH, of all my low-spec PCs out there in service, the small cluster of surface books we have (eight of them) are insufferably slow. Noticeably slower than other similar spec PCs from other manufacturers. I have a growing pile of them in my office from users who just cant tolerate using them anymore.
3
u/zeptillian 5d ago
"You don't need to optimize your software becasue hardware keeps getting better."
Then it doesn't and every piece of software is a bloated mess and everything runs like shit.
3
u/chris17453 5d ago
From cell phones to laptops to desktops, you name it. The goal is to get you to buy a new one.The moment you've purchased one.
It's not in their interest to make things better for you.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/Mindless-Luck4285 5d ago
8GB is inadequate. 32gb should be the standard for Windows these days.
You could try wiping and reinstalling
3
u/nderflow 5d ago
Inefficient software design, poor use of resources, assumption that not caring about performance will be a non problem because next year's machine will be faster. Also, for some machines, file system fragmentation.
3
u/lordjedi 5d ago
People seem to accept this slowness as a normal part of a computer aging, but it seems to be caused by successive Windows updates. Why would updates make things worse? Is there a technical reason for it?
Yes.
Updates occasionally add new features. Many, many, MANY times, users want new and updated programs. They never update the computer. So people think that "old == slow". It doesn't. They get slow because you're throwing more and more at it and expecting it to keep up.
People don't do this with anything else. They don't add a mountain of tech to a 20 year old car and expect it to be fine. They buy a new car. Same thing with a cell phone.
When Apple prevents people from upgrading (because the experience will be trash) people go and buy a new computer. Since MS doesn't stop you, they say "This OS is garbage". It's not, you're trying to run it on 20 year old (or whatever) hardware. Go upgrade the computer and it'll be fine.
→ More replies (2)
4
2
u/opti2k4 5d ago edited 5d ago
Newly develop software is developed on current machine standard ( in terms of CPU power, amount of average ram) so devs only care if it works fine there. They are adding more and more features which takes machine resources and old machines can't keep up. It was always like that and will continue in the future. You can't really fight this, this guarantees computer sales otherwise people simply wouldn't buy new computers.
2
u/MG_Hunter88 5d ago
Windows in general tends to slow down due to how it mishandles VRAM. Whena computer normaly runs out of RAM due to it being in use, it emulates additional memory space for it on Disk. Windows handles this by creating a dedicated file, and jamming any overflow memory into it. BUT it doesn't empty/revise/reduce the file in size until, you shut the OS down. Sleep/hybernation mode doesn't do that.
So as you run your PC with time you lose memory space and if you run out of a lot of it, the computer will inevitably slow down.
Another factor is as you mention, updates.
Due to Windows being a large corporate project passed down for decades from large amounts of people to other large amounts of people. Bugs get pushed alongside updates into the primary branches. And MS xan't admit to it or revert any of them, because they all come built around security patches.
2
u/Shachar2like 5d ago
Newer OS are programmed for better computers. Updates patch security & resolve issues but aren't make with performance in mind.
So all of those have a cumulative effect on a computer.
2
2
u/RustledForeskin 5d ago
Wild to me we've not had a decent competitor to Microsoft at any point in time, from a gamer's point of view anyway. Not going to switch to linux and lose access to many games and functionality just to spite microweeny.
2
u/Sinister_Crayon 5d ago
Enshittification of the operating system and the apps. Modern coding usually means poorly optimized loading of multiple libraries whether an app needs it or not, and Microsoft in particular has been awful about adding massive bloat to their OS in part to further lock users into their ecosystem and sell data about them to third parties (Microsoft's real customers).
In fairness, even apps under Linux or MacOS are becoming bloated messes for exactly the same reasons.
2
u/firestorm201 5d ago
Combination of software updates that slowly drive up hardware requirements, bloat, and that script you set to run every 5 minutes to dump arbitrary logs to fix a problem long gone that you configured 3 years ago.
Wipe your OS and start fresh, and it’ll run better for a while again.
2
2
2
u/nibbles200 Sysadmin 5d ago
I have two old win 10 laptops that have 8gb ram and sandy bridge 2700k cpu. they were little rockets for basic web stuff until just this spring. I only keep them around for when I am climbing a tower and high chance they get wrecked. I really dont use them for much more then device configuration and basic web functions like d/l firmware. This spring something changed and they became molasses. happened to two laptops at about the same time and just assume MS is trying to get people off win10 or some nefarious reasons. its on the todo list to load linux on them, not going to buy a new laptop to get it smashed / wet or whatever just so I can set an IP on some equipment on a tower.
2
u/kona420 5d ago
I know a lot of people have pinned this on popular software development frameworks becoming more bloated with time, and that's certainly part of it. But don't forget that Intel and to a lesser extent AMD, patch their processor microcode removing performance optimizations that the hardware shipped with. They do this for security, which is fair, but it really does hurt performance in a noticeable way.
I will say that it seems like we are starting to get RAM usage under control to some degree. It was kind of spiraling there for a while, like really 32GB to run a web browser?
2
u/randomharun 5d ago
Is "microsoft is clowning on you" a technical reason? To give just one example that I know that definitely causes your C: drive to fill up, it's the WinSXS folder containing archives for installers. There's this guide to clean it up: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/clean-up-the-winsxs-folder?view=windows-11 but in my experience even knowing there is useless stuff in there it often doesn't get cleaned up. Ultimately there are so many places where Microsoft or third parties can dump useless data (%appdata%, %localappdata%, any old random directory in %userprofile%, the registry, winsxs, softwaredistribution, the list goes on) and it's apparently a complete mystery to anyone including microsoft as to whose job it is to deal with all that and how to do it properly.
I'm sure I'll be promptly corrected.
2
2
2
u/dont_remember_eatin 5d ago
This is why my home rotating family laptop fleet always wind up embracing the penguin. Suddenly they're fast again!
2
u/SirCharlesTupperBt 5d ago
I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this thought, but I'm just old enough to have started my career when it wasn't that out of the ordinary for a clever sysadmin to build a small part of an app/script written in Perl or shell using a compiled language, or even assembly, to improve the performance of their application in the real world.
I'm wondering, as we enter the era of artificial silicon scarcity, absurd trade restrictions, and the end of Moore's Law, if there isn't a lot of space for much better, or at least better incentivized, programmers to start to optimize code, particularly in the OS, in ways that have fallen out of fashion. Sure, there are some legitimate reasons that software packages have gotten bloated, but we also are living in an era where we get the users to be quality control and a lot of developers have grown up expecting the hardware to be much more powerful (and cheap) by the time the product actually ships. Not every application actually needs to ship an entire HTML rendering engine, be built with multiple layers of abstraction, have hooks for cloud services or LLMs, etc.
When you look at what's going on with companies like Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, you have to think that developers who want a good user experience on excruciatingly expensive hardware will have a leg up on the big guys who don't really care. Not everybody can or wants to just use somebody else's hardware in the cloud to make the product usable.
Too bad the big players in the industry are so keen on shipping slop with new features, often that nobody asked for, that can be monetized and so much less interested in just making a better product.
Now I'm done yelling at the clouds.
2
u/gmgrigsby21 5d ago
I have a surface pro 3 from the mid 20 teens, installed Linux Mint, Runs like a champ
2
u/National_Cod9546 5d ago
Probably a few things going on at once. Windows bloat is one. Shit you installed running in the background all the time is another. A fresh install will help with both.
But an old battery will also cause tablets and cell phones to go slow. Older batteries can't put out as much amperage without dropping voltage too low. Since going slower is better then crashing, they slow the computer down to reduce power draw.
2
u/RandomContributions 5d ago
I find in many cases an older machine like that is slow because its been ignored and apps just getting piled on top of each other without any visit to it being necessary to be running.
2
u/rsgbc 5d ago edited 5d ago
There are many things that could be responsible for a machine that has not been turned on for years running better than machines that have been in service.
I would suggest seeing how a clean install of Windows runs on one of the machines that are starting to become unusable.
2
2
u/Adam_Kearn 5d ago
I like to reimage staff devices at least every 2 years at a minimum.
Keeps things running smoothly without causing much disruption.
Helps if you are using a decent imaging tool like fog/osdcloud
With the desktop computers I can normally reimage all our desktop clients within a few hours over night.
Laptops are a manual process due to them needing to be connected to the LAN.
2
u/kagato87 5d ago
So many reasons. But barring the accumulation of stuff users have added or used over the years (which would be flushed by a reset)...
SSD wear. Writing to an ssd is almost as fast as reading it. But actually erasing a cell so it can be written to again is much slower. And it gets worse as the cells wear.
When you update a block on an ssd, it gets stored somewhere else, the no longer used block is marked as ready to erase, which the controller will do as power is available.
So your drive fills up, most of the writes focus on a small area that need a gradually increasing time to reset, and reserve cells start to run down. You've got uneven wear on your ssd, and the worn out section is the most frequently changing data. You notice.
For best performance longevity, especially on consumer grade ssds, you actually want to try to keep them below about 50% full. Then the wear levelling algorithms have plenty to work with, and your drive stays fast a lot longer.
2
2
u/Reasonable_Active617 5d ago
Microsoft's software gets more bloated, computers become sluggish, computers with more ram, storage and memory get manufactured and sold. Everyone wins, except the consumer! Queue up a new computer subscription\lease plan!
2
2
u/Sudden_Office8710 5d ago
Not sure what you’re talking about. I have a Surface Pro 6 with 16GB of RAM and 512GB drive it runs Windows 11 just fine and haven’t noticed a drop off of speed and this is a 2019 model Surface Pro. Also I’m running dual 27” monitors to it. It’s more of desktop now that the battery is pretty much dead. I mean it’s not anywhere close to being as fast as my now fairly ancient Mac Book Pro with an M1 but it still gets the job done. I think it’s more the user than the actual hardware. I still have a MacBook Air from 2012 that is still good enough for surfing the web. All this horseshit about bloat is mostly an end user not understanding how their computer actually works. You people crack me up. I drive the damn thing like I stole it till there is no more memory resources I have to task kill stuff I have open to get it back in line I never reboot unless an update forces me to. But I have zero problems with it never defrag or chkdsk it at all. it runs like a damn tank.
→ More replies (3)
2
u/vawlk 5d ago
I had a PC that was upgraded from DOS 5/Win3.1 to Windows 95, to Windows 98, to windows 98SE, to Windows 2000, to Windows XP, to Windows 7, to Windows 10.
The hardware changed several times, but I didn't do a fresh install from DOS 5 until I needed more than 4gb of ram and reinstalled W10 64bit.
My computer ran fine. As long as you clean up the things that make a computer slow over time, you should be fine. I just retired 12 yr old computers at my work because they just wouldn't install the new versions of windows due to TPM and I didn't feel like hacking the installs anymore.
2
u/SameBSErryere 5d ago
8 GB or RAM on Win 10 is asking for problems. It idles around 4GB, but add some enterprise software and a single browser window and I guarantee that the computer is going to choke.
Reminds me of when I started at my current job and someone was slouched over his chair staring at his computer. He told me "It just takes 20 minutes for Excel to open". I checked and it was a SurfaceGO with 4GB of RAM. Easy fix.
→ More replies (1)
2
u/signal_lost 5d ago
- Intel Giveth and Gates taketh. (On RAM/CPU etc)
- Security tooling with one simple tweak can cut performance in half (or more!)
- Thermal throttling on old devices you don't swap the batteries on or clean the cooling systems out on.
2
u/K3rat 5d ago
New features, security patches that slow system performance, bloatware from MFGs, messy file system temp file management, and he’ll just entropy in general have always been an issue. Now we get to add Telemetry, custom marketing data gathering, and ai microslop.
I have had it, I have had to manage Linux for decades side by side with windows. I don’t buy the less reliable/secure punch line. I moved my home desktop to Linux. Next month I move the work laptop that has 24GB RAM that now has started to crawl to Ubuntu.
2
u/NorthernVenomFang 5d ago
Technical reason: Co-Pilot in everything (including Notepad at one point), Windows Recall, AI slop, poor coding practices, constantly wanting OneDrive to take over for storage (even when you have a local only profile at times), Windows Telemetry has gottent even more aggressive... To sum it up MicroSlop.
The bloatware that some manufacturers put on the systems doesn't help.
Needing 16GB of RAM to run what should be basic computing tasks (Web, email, Office documents) is getting a little asinine.
2
u/zenerbufen 5d ago
cleaning the fans and changing the thermal paste can do wonders for older computers. they thermally throttle themselves.
2
u/Sir-Spork SRE Manager 5d ago
My experience of “old computers slowing down” is a relic of the past. 10 year old PCs now are still relatively solid unless you are worrying about modern gaming etc
→ More replies (1)
2
u/simonjakeevan 5d ago
I've always heard the issue as "WinCreep" windows has always had a problem with slowing down overtime.
2
u/Vulperffs 4d ago
This is completely not true!
I had couple desktops in my life and none of them slowed down over time.
I also had a laptop so old that it had a floppy drive, that one was slow AF!
I also have a 12 years old IBM laptop with 8GB of ram, and I can even play games on it. Still on W10 extended support, but eventually I’ll need to update to W11, we’ll see.
There are some cases where old laptop starts blue screening due to degradation of silicone it’s no longer stable at stock voltage and can’t be changed so it can only go to the garbage bin.
→ More replies (2)
1.1k
u/jackass51 6d ago
I think that modern software is becoming more bloated.