Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Flying Fox, Ryu Connor
Hance wrote:I will eat my hat if they solved win rot.
ronch wrote:Anyway, I reformat my PC every 1 to 3 months on average. Usually something breaks and I just do a clean reinstall.
Chrispy_ wrote:ronch wrote:Anyway, I reformat my PC every 1 to 3 months on average. Usually something breaks and I just do a clean reinstall.
I still don't get why you should need to rebuild that often
but do you at least just restore a good image with the software and tweaks you want already configured? Restoring, say,a 100GB fresh windows install from mechanical to SSD would probably take around 10 minutes total with Clonezilla.
bthylafh wrote:If you had to reinstall Win9x monthly you had a PEBKAC problem, not a Windows problem. I used my copies of Win95 and Win98 heavily for years and never once had to reinstall them.
tanker27 wrote:bthylafh wrote:If you had to reinstall Win9x monthly you had a PEBKAC problem, not a Windows problem. I used my copies of Win95 and Win98 heavily for years and never once had to reinstall them.
Nope, I was a heavy enthusiast back then and was always tinkering. You know I had to squeeze out the Highest FPS during quake II timedemo as possible. Even so win 9x had the worst rot known to man. If you used it heavily as you say you did I would hate to see how it ran at the end.
just brew it! wrote:TBH most cases of "Windows Rot" these days boil down to accumulating crapware. If you are vigilant about opting out of (or at least nuking on sight) all the useless toolbars and tray icons that try to install themselves, chances are good that the system will remain responsive for a very long time.
just brew it! wrote:TBH most cases of "Windows Rot" these days boil down to accumulating crapware. If you are vigilant about opting out of (or at least nuking on sight) all the useless toolbars and tray icons that try to install themselves, chances are good that the system will remain responsive for a very long time.
puppetworx wrote:anything else gets vetted in a VM first
Arclight wrote:I consider myself as a person that agressively maintains the OS and i still experience a sort of loss in performance. For instance, there are only a few processes that run when the system is not doing anything and yet RAM use is at 1.2+ GBs in use. When i first installed the OS the RAM usage was considerably lower.
http://imgur.com/a/Fiqlh
bthylafh wrote:Arclight wrote:I consider myself as a person that agressively maintains the OS and i still experience a sort of loss in performance. For instance, there are only a few processes that run when the system is not doing anything and yet RAM use is at 1.2+ GBs in use. When i first installed the OS the RAM usage was considerably lower.
http://imgur.com/a/Fiqlh
It's well known that starting with Vista Windows will aggressively use RAM for disk cache. That's your "problem", not random crapware. The disk cache usage is a good thing and increases disk access speed; further, Windows will reduce cache usage if you start running out of RAM.
bthylafh wrote:If you had to reinstall Win9x monthly you had a PEBKAC problem, not a Windows problem. I used my copies of Win95 and Win98 heavily for years and never once had to reinstall them.
just brew it! wrote:TBH most cases of "Windows Rot" these days boil down to accumulating crapware. If you are vigilant about opting out of (or at least nuking on sight) all the useless toolbars and tray icons that try to install themselves, chances are good that the system will remain responsive for a very long time.
bthylafh wrote:Just between you and me, I think Windows accesses the hard drive a lot during the bootup process.
SuperFetch' second goal is to make applications launch faster. SuperFetch does this by pre-loading your most often used applications in your main memory, based on not only usage patterns, but also on when you use them. For instance, if you have the same routine every morning (Chrome - Mail - Miranda - blu), SuperFetch will pre-load these into memory in the morning. If your evening routine is different (for instance, it includes Word, Excel, and Super Awesome Garden Designer), SuperFetch will adapt, and load those in memory instead during the evening.
SuperFetch for applications basically operates in the same way as the boot variant; it traces what files are accessed by an application during the first ten seconds of said application's startup, which can then be used to load the proper data in memory at appropriate times. SuperFetch data for applications is stored in /Windows/Prefetch (the various .pf files).
As you add and remove apps, as Windows writes more and more temporary and junk files, over time, a system just slows down.
I'm sure many of you have had the experience of taking a five-year-old PC, wiping it clean, putting the exact same OS on as it had before, and the PC is reborn, running several times faster than it did before the wipe. It's the same hardware, same OS, but yet it's so fast.
This slow degeneration is caused by daily use, apps, device drive congestion (one of the tell-tale signs of a device driver problem is a PC that takes forever to shut down) and also hardware failure.
If a disk develops bad sectors, it has to work around them.
Even if you try aggressively to maintain your system, eventually it will slow, and very few people aggressively maintain their system.
Flying Fox wrote:Unless you are running out of RAM, what kind of performance drop (I am more talking about speed) have you noticed? Everything else being equal, 1 gig being used vs 2 gigs being used should not affect speed if you have say, more than a gig or two still unused. Are you just equating "RAM use" with "performance"?
bthylafh wrote:If you had to reinstall Win9x monthly you had a PEBKAC problem, not a Windows problem. I used my copies of Win95 and Win98 heavily for years and never once had to reinstall them.
ludi wrote:bthylafh wrote:If you had to reinstall Win9x monthly you had a PEBKAC problem, not a Windows problem. I used my copies of Win95 and Win98 heavily for years and never once had to reinstall them.
Let me guess: all-Intel hardware and Nvidia graphics?
I got to the point of being able to re-install Windows 95 in my sleep, particularly before I got my first copy of OSR2. The usual path to failure was trying to run it with any combination of hardware other than the very-best-supported Intel, Nvidia, 3Com, etc. stuff. Under the right usage conditions you could get BSODs so spectacular that the system would not come up properly afterward. Sometimes driver re-installations from Safe Mode would fix it, sometimes an OS over-install would begin to fix it (followed by going back through a slog of broken DLLs, corrupted drivers, and service patches that needed to be applied), and sometimes you were just hosed. Ditto if poorly-written program software decided to chew on the file system or Windows folder in some unseemly way. Regular DirectX updates in order to run the newest games; service patches that broke other service patches; yadda yadda. Windows 98 vastly improved on the stability and service update methodology, but it wasn't perfect, particularly if (again) you didn't have the very-best-supported hardware.
Windows NT didn't have anywhere near such problems because (a) it wasn't trying to support every little consumer doo-dad with badly written drivers, (b) it had a better file system, and (c) the OS was truly 32-bit, abstracted from the hardware base, and sandboxed from the software base.