I'm using windows 10 (my bad) and a few years ago while going back and forth with 7 it was not so bad when running on a old pc (E8400 core 2 duo), except for the telemetry, the auto-rebooting and a few other things that made me cringe which I'm forgetting ^^;; But now in the recent months, I don't know if it's because of the latest patch (spectre, meltdown, swiss cheese whatever) it seems to be getting slower and slower by the day. I forgot why I went to 10, must have been an issue I had with 7 or something.
I could go back to windows 7 (which I still prefer) but that would be quite time consuming because of all the windows update issues from a fresh sp3 and in less than 2 years the update will be over anyway.
What I would like to know if people are seeing slow down these days, either with windows 7/10 or maybe some of my computer parts may be dying on me. I starting to prefer linux than windows (use it at work everyday) but the kids have games and we like to play together on that old rig. The other reason to maybe go back to 7 is the driver for the gamepads for ps3 (scptoolkit) is not working any more and it seems to be caused by the latest update (driver signing issue or something, didn't find the cause yet).
Am I the only one to see those slowdown or it now a common thing?
I haven't noticed anything wrong, and I run Windows 10 on a 2012 laptop (Core i5 with 4GB of RAM). I moved away from Windows 7 because I was running into a lot of problems involving VC++ runtimes and .NET Frameworks, which were refusing to install because of missing updates I also couldn't install and were preventing me from running software I needed.
I used to have a LOT of slowdown on my desktop PC (which I built in 2017) after installing Windows 10, but it turned out to be my Hard Drives that were dying (ended up losing 2 of them!) due to a bad PSU. Once I replaced the bad Hard Disks and switched to a much better PSU, everything was fine.
Except for a glitching game, I don't remember why I updated to 10 (maybe something with regarding vs too).
The video card and dvd drive died but the rest "seems" fine but I think I need to take into consideration that a 10 years old computer will start to break down bits by bits sooner or later. Is there a good way to test the health of hdd? I know that an sdd would help a lot, especially with such an old computer but it's not something I can update yet (budget doesn't allow it).
Calling koitsu to explain what SMART (hard drive diagnostics) can and can't do.
I never update Windows to a newer version though, I always do a clean install of the specific version I want.
@tepples
I remember a little bit those thread, Koitsu was talking about data recovery and smart related information. I will check them to refresh my memory. Thanks!
@tokumaru
I guess my message was misleading ^^;; I just meant I changed OS. I never upgrade an OS, always do a clean install when changing OS because of all the leftovers that could causes issues. I would consider windows 10 a "downgrade" but I guess this is my personal opinion only
With windows 10, every quarter they have a new upgrade that reinstall everything and breaks X app along the way so I'm getting tired of that cycle. Another thing is the superfetch,telemetry service, nvidia telemetry (and I guess other ones that I don't remember) that seems to like to grin my hdd to their hearts content every time I reboot it. If it wasn't for games, old apps and just habit to always have windows installed, I don't see why I need to use it.
An SSD can make a world of difference. I updated an old laptop of mine by replacing the HDD with a small SSD, and it felt like a new computer. Other than that, you could see if those games you and your kids play would run under Wine (Windows compatibility layer for Linux).
There's
Crystal Disk Info a small software that gives you a quick overview about your hard drive's health using smart.
I'm not sure how good it is, but in all the cases it gave an orange or red "light" exchanging the HDD solved the problem.
I usually prefer gnome-disks as a GUI to take a look on the SMART status, but this program makes the things more convenient when all I want is to do a quick check.
If you have an SSD, make sure you turn off Link Power Management. Yes, really. Otherwise you will randomly get 30 second freezes when it tries to access the disk.
Zutano wrote:
An SSD can make a world of difference. I updated an old laptop of mine by replacing the HDD with a small SSD, and it felt like a new computer.
Agreed; when the hinge broke on my two year old HP laptop, I just put the SSD in my grandmother's ten year old (originally) Vista HP laptop, and despite probably having a quarter the processing power, it runs just as fast (although I won't dare with Sony Vegas). The only reason to even buy a new computer (laptop, anyway) at this point in time is because they're built so shotty that they'll fall apart.
I haven't noticed any performance loss since it came out, but it's far from the most efficient OS ever, from the Photos App always catching photos in the background, to Cortana always listening for your voice, to Windows Defender scanning your computer for the nteenth time to tell you "no threat was detected" to all the uneccesary graphics filtration, to "Disney Magic Kingdoms" installing in the background... What's insulting is that Microsoft made it to where you can't (easily) get rid of most of this stuff, and in the case of all the advertisements, they get turned back on everytime you update anyway!
Computers are powerful enough now to handle all these services, I guess, but even a Mack truck hauling just 1,000 pounds extra will be slower than one not.
Drew Sebastino wrote:
The only reason to even buy a new computer (laptop, anyway) at this point in time is because they're built so shotty that they'll fall apart.
Or because the laptop's third battery pack stopped holding a charge and manufacturers stopped making high-quality replacement battery packs for it. Or is it practical for every laptop owner to learn to replace the individual lithium cells in a battery pack?
@Zutano
Yes, I would love to have an SDD for this machine. The board is only SATA2 but it should be fast enough. Hopefully I can get one someday.
@Fisher
I will give it a try, thanks! Today it seems normal so my guess is it may not be the HDD but Windows background threads mentioned above (telemetry, superfetch) that seems to start at the most inappropriate moment
@Dwedit
I'm still using the HDD that I bought with the machine and I'm surprised they are still working. Even the IDE one from 2005 (that I'm not using rarely) is still spinning, somehow ^^;; I will keep what you mentioned once I install an SDD if I see any similar slowdowns.
@Drew Sebastino
My retired 4 years old work computer is light and day for I/O so I hope to upgrade one of my old HDD so I can compile a lot faster.
tepples wrote:
Drew Sebastino wrote:
The only reason to even buy a new computer (laptop, anyway) at this point in time is because they're built so shotty that they'll fall apart.
Or because the laptop's third battery pack stopped holding a charge and manufacturers stopped making high-quality replacement battery packs for it. Or is it practical for every laptop owner to learn to replace the individual lithium cells in a battery pack?
Oh, yeah, I didn't think of this; I've had batteries degrade pretty bad overtime, but never to the point I couldn't use it when going between outlets. And yeah, I don't think that's reasonable to expect people to do...
Banshaku wrote:
My retired 4 years old work computer is light and day for I/O so I hope to upgrade one of my old HDD so I can compile a lot faster.
What do you mean by I/O in this context?
Drew Sebastino wrote:
I've had batteries degrade pretty bad overtime, but never to the point I couldn't use it when going between outlets.
I've had a battery hold 4 hours when I bought it and 1 hour years later. One hour of wake time is not long enough to get me from home to home if I'm a passenger in my roommate's car on a long shopping trip comprising a half dozen stores in one afternoon. Eventually the laptop wouldn't even boot with that battery connected.
Drew Sebastino wrote:
Banshaku wrote:
My retired 4 years old work computer is light and day for I/O so I hope to upgrade one of my old HDD so I can compile a lot faster.
What do you mean by I/O in this context?
Input and output. A conventional hard disk drive (HDD) beats a solid state drive (SSD) in capacity per dollar, but SSD wins in input and output operations per second (IOPS), as its seek time for reads is near zero.
My battery lasts about 20 seconds on a full charge. I'm rather annoyed, because I paid extra for a high-capacity battery pack back in 2008, and then just kept the computer plugged in; the first time I needed it, the battery was good for maybe half an hour.
I know the batteries will degrade no matter if they are used or not, but that seems rediculous. I wonder if it would have made a difference as to whether or not you had it attached to the computer when plugged in.
Maybe. Seems stupid not to have charge protection on a laptop battery, but no, I did not remove it while the computer was plugged in. I had no idea this level of degradation was possible.
Drew Sebastino wrote:
I wonder if it would have made a difference as to whether or not you had it attached to the computer when plugged in.
That was definitely a known problem for some devices/batteries for a while, though I believe that tends not to matter in most devices nowadays?
Batteries are definitely one of the laptop components that will inevitably wear out. Most other parts will last a long time under normal use but the batteries will have a continual decline in capacity over use.
rainwarrior wrote:
Batteries are definitely one of the laptop components that will inevitably wear out. Most other parts will last a long time under normal use
Maybe all the electrical components, but everything surrounding them is so chintzy. Frail plastic vent covers, thin aluminum hinge pieces, plastic tabs galore and plastic screw mounts where there are screws...
Oh, yeah hinges in particular fail a lot too. That's a big omission on my part ha ha.
2 computers with dead batteries (an old 2010 netbook and a computer I received from work for the kids) so this is something that is always an issue. I'm sure the mac battery will die soon too, which is a shame since it is in a not so bad shape for a computer used everyday at work and changing batteries on mac is becoming more and more expensive (maybe not so bad for a 2013 but still). I had so many issues with that model that I'm not much interested to put more money on it. I'm just happy that it was mostly paid by the office since I would have been quite mad with all the issues I had.
Something I had been thinking about writing but wasn't sure it was worth another thread, is whether or not bare-metal programming is a thing for old PC hardware? There are several videos of people repurposing old computers to do simple home tasks, but they all run under an old version of Windows or Linux, which I don't see the point, although one could argue why not if it will run.
You only do bare metal on MS-DOS and only to talk to sound stuff, interrupt stuff, sometimes timer and keyboard and some aspects of video hardware (letting BIOS do most of the work).
What TmEE said.
On a x86, unless you want to build yourself an OS, you don't go bare metal. During the dos days it was more common to access the hardware directly. I liked that time. I liked making my own custom code to write colorful string at 0xB800 since it was too slow to use the BIOS call for these. And VGA 320x200 at 0xA000 was a plain 64k buffer. I did try to use the unchained mode but at that time I was still raw programming wise and didn't understand much. Now I would have no issue to write the code but we don't need to access theses anymore
There's lots of advantages to not going bare-metal on computers that can handle an OS. What happens when that old computer that's doing home automation tasks dies? If you wrote in a higher-level language in a Linux environment, you could safely move everything to another Linux environment without worrying about hardware changes.
I have also noticed it, but have ignored it. I have upgraded my PC OS from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. It is taking a bit time for it to open and shut down is longer compared before.
Since my computer is 10 years old it is easier to notice since the impact seems bigger
The older build were not that slow. I don't know what they did, more telemetry, superfetch or like I mentioned, a possibility about meltdown/spectre patch, but it became slower somehow and I don't know if it is something that I installed or the OS itself.
If it was something that I installed that is causing some process to run in the background all the time then it would happens all the time but this is not the case. I guess for now the only thing I can do is ignore it and that it doesn't get too bad. On my latest computer which I barely use windows at work (I'm using linux instead), when I'm using windows I don't see those slowdown but the performance of that computer is like night and day in specs so I guess even though it could be slow with the specs it has I do not see the slowdown at all.
What are the specs of your computer? My computer is also 10 years old, and it has a Pentium Dual Core (I don't remember the frequency) with 3GB of ram, and now, an SSD. I'm away from it, but I can give you better info if you need it.
It's a core 2 duro 3.giz (E8400) with 4 gigs of ram. For now it has only hdd (10 years old too) that I hope I can update someday. Before windows 10, especially the latest version, it was not so bad but it seems to be getting slower. Some time it starts "grinding" the hd and you see either telemetry, supefetch or other system process doing "something". Sometime killing the telemetry process speed it up.
For now I'm just using another computer for dev. I guess when I will be able to change the hd it will make a difference and hopefully stabilize it. I still like that computer, it's working well.
With light use (Firefox, cc65, GIMP, an NES emulator, devkitARM, and mGBA), a Windows 10 PC with 4 GB of RAM should run fine after telemetry, update, and SuperFetch have had a chance to run. SuperFetch is
supposed to read the most commonly used files into the disk cache. In fact, even on X11/Linux laptops, I have set up Xfce to run a login script in the background that runs a bunch of programs with
--help (niced to maximum) so that the executable at least gets loaded into RAM.
A few things might cause the problems you're having with Windows:
- Third-party updater contention (since Windows 2000)
Some third-party applications schedule a task every time the user logs in to connect to the Internet and check for released updates in the background. A lot of these running at once can cause a conventional HDD, with its low input and output operations per second (IOPS), to fall behind. The same problem comes with services to interact with third-party peripherals, such as an iPod media player or a Fitbit fitness watch, whose control sits in the taskbar's notification area (called the "tray" by some). - New PC growing pains (since introduction of SuperFetch in Windows Vista)
SuperFetch doesn't know what you regularly use until you've used your computer for a week. In addition, there tend to be a lot more updates on a freshly installed PC or for the preinstalled Windows on a new PC. And because many updates depend on another update having been applied and the computer having been restarted, getting a Windows PC fully up to date needs multiple restarts. Indexing all text documents on your HDD for full-text search is also not without cost, but at least the contention for this ends once Windows Search has completed its index in the background. - Live tiles contention (since introduction of live tiles in Windows 8)
When you first log in, the PC's RAM is empty, and SuperFetch starts filling it with cacheable items. But animated "live tiles" on the Start menu have to share the HDD's seeking with SuperFetch and update.
So if you can't increase the IOPS by migrating Windows to an SSD, and you can't decrease the overall I/O load by switching from Windows to X11/Linux, you'll want to do three things:
- Uninstall unused applications, especially those with live tiles on the Start menu.
- Use your computer for a week or two so that SuperFetch knows what to fetch and what not to fetch.
- After you log in, go do something else until the HDD settles.
I see what you mean by superfetch. I guess our current use case was that I'm using it lightly during the week for browsing and code and the weekend was used mostly for game that were heavy on ram use so that must have had an impact on the algorithm.
But now that we had to stop playing games since the driver for using ps3 controllers doesn't work anymore (maybe since 1803), it did improve a little bit so it could be related to superfetch after all.
Quote:
Live tiles contention (since introduction of live tiles in Windows 8)
When you first log in, the PC's RAM is empty, and SuperFetch starts filling it with cacheable items. But animated "live tiles" on the Start menu have to share the HDD's seeking with SuperFetch and update.
Which is why I removed all of them from the Start menu, although I'm not sure it actually does anything... I'd think turning off all the Windows 10 advertisements with regedit would speed it up too, but Windows updates always revert the setting.