Why do computers running Windows get progressively slower over time?
I promise this is a genuine question and not a Windows hit piece.
Every Windows computer I've ever had has slowly gotten laggier over time until my impatience has forced me to reinstall the OS to get the speed boost that comes with a fresh copy. In the schools I've worked in, computer labs and carts full of Windows machines have slowly sunsetted, becoming wholly unusable over time. I think Chromebooks have taken over education in part because they have a snappiness to them that sticks around for a long time, unlike the decay demonstrated by Windows computers.
In my current job, I was issued a Windows computer and a Chromebook at the same time, when I was hired. The Chromebook is still chugging along just fine, but the once fresh and quick Windows computer is now ramping down. I know it's not because of startup or background programs latching on over time because I don't have admin rights and thus can't install anything! I'm not a power user either. I really only ever run a browser with minimal tabs, along with the very occasional instance of office software and/or PDF reader. That's it. And what used to be instant and quick is now like... trudging... through... sludge...
Is there some fundamental design flaw in Windows? Am I finding a pattern where none exists? Do I not have enough experience with other OSes to know that this is true for them too? I'd love someone's insight on this topic.
Honestly, I don't think the blame lies with Windows these days. It does a pretty good job of managing all the old, cliche issues that used to cause slowdowns of the actual OS itself over time (registry bloat, HDD fragmentation, cache/temp file cleanup, page file management, etc).
IMO the biggest reason older installs feel slower is because everything they're running now, even webpages, are simply more demanding (on the CPU and RAM) than what they were when you first installed the OS. That and, whether you know it or not, over time you have likely accumulated a ton of crap (update services, dependencies, startup apps, etc) that are now running constantly in the background, that weren't there when you had your fresh install.
You can mitigate the above issues somewhat by uninstalling the software you don't need/use, disabling unnecessary startup apps, and fiddling with the services... but unless you know what you're doing I wouldn't recommend messing with the services, since you can really fuck your system up if you disable the wrong ones. Or you could simply take the easiest route and just refresh your install to get some of that performance back.
p.s. Another simple/safe/effective way to improve your performance is often just to buy more RAM and upgrade you hard drive.
Even if that were true, IMO Windows is still to blame because this doesn't happens on Linux (at least in my experience). At one point I had a machine running Fedora from 17 to 28 (5 years if I'm not mistaken) without a single OS reinstall (only upgrades), and I used it to study and practice for sysadmin stuff (so a lot of programs and different configurations) and never felt slow, or see any performance penalty.
And I tried to manage my Windows 7 and Windows 10 installations with even more care than my Linux one (just installing what was necessary, paying attention to updates and upgrades, etc) and after 12 months it started to feel sluggish again.
But I have to recognize that since the last upgrade (I think it was version 1909) this started to get better and this year I'm not seeing this "performance impact" that match. So I still blame Windows because to me there is/was something wrong in the way they manage the system maintenance.
I suspect that what you experienced in terms of long term performance has less to do with Linux itself being somehow magically better than Windows at resource management and resource loss mitigation (and so Linux deserving praise and Microsoft deserving scorn), and more to do with Linux developers tending to be a lot more respectful of users resources than Windows ones.
When you install something on Linux, there doesn't tend to be a ton of unnecessary and ancillary crap attached to it and also installed along with it, without your knowledge or consent. However that definitely isn't the case when it comes to Windows apps. See: sneaky "trial" software, PUP/grayware, adware, etc. And heck, even the actually required dependencies on Windows are often riddled with bloat.
I would go one step further and say that it's also because proprietary software tends to be really poorly made. Most of the time you wouldn't really notice it since you can't see their source code, but it's really visible whenever they decide to switch their model to open source, when there is a really long wait while the developers try to clean up all the less desirable parts of their codebase.
The perfect example is always Adobe. They have the software that professionals depend on and yet they find themselves constantly refactoring or altogether rewriting large sections of code, to the point that they are attempting to find new ways to accomplish these technical debt tasks. Worse, you can't just download and run photoshop; you need a whole entire ecosystem of programs to support it; your arbitrary launcher, a licensing server to enforce DRM, a helper to sync files from their stupid cloud storage service, an updater, and of course a diagnostic tool in case something goes wrong.
Yeah, that's a good point as well. A lot of closed source software is just an unmitigated disaster, and Adobe is definitely the perfect example. They are the worst in almost every respect; resource hogging, unnecessary bloat, stealthily installed auto-running services (bordering on malware, IMO), etc.
IMO I don't think this is exactly right, given that sometimes there are programs that are ancient and are not distributed by distros' repos and you have to compile them yourself, and when you do you end up with config files everywhere because they dev didn't follow the "filesystem hierarchy standard" or any other standard (I worked a lot with software for biologists and physicist... it's a real mess) and nevertheless when you are not using those programs the system responds without any trace of slugginess.
Linus distros are definitely better in the way they handle the resources than Windows, even when you compile crap that has been unmaintained since last decade and doesn't adhere to any standard besides the "ok-it-compiles-done-don't-touch-it-anymore".
But, this is not about Linux vs Windows. I was just giving an example by comparison from personal experience on why I still believe that Windows is to blame for being (or feeling) sluggish after a few months.
Config files ending up in weird locations due to something not adhering to spec doesn't really effect anything performance-wise so long as the program itself can find them and your drive isn't fragmented. It's the stuff that is constantly running in the background that does effect performance. And Linux devs, as a whole, tend to avoid adding unnecessary background process to their programs, whereas Windows apps automatically add themselves to startup, and add auto-running services (for updates/auth/etc) all the damn time... hence the slowdown over time experienced on Windows and not so much on Linux.
You can certainly blame Microsoft for Windows not having better permission structures and user consent policies/systems in place, but I'd say 99% of this is on the devs, not Microsoft. However TBH, I suspect that if Windows were to suddenly disappear and Linux became the worlds preeminent home PC OS, you would slowly see the same performance degradation issues on it as well.
This is our point of disagreement. I do think the blame is on Microsoft. It's their OS after all. And look how it is getting better and better with every upgrade; it definitely seems to me that they have a saying on this matter and can manage it better.
But yeah, this is the point where we have a fundamentally different opinion.
What does that reflect in?
Not quite sure what you're asking for.. but I gave some examples later in the comment:
And a few more in my next reply, if that's what you mean:
While there have been improvements, it still suffers from degradation. It's a lot less noticable for power users who never use anything other than SSD drives, but if you format a Windows drive from scratch after 4 years, it will be noticably less sluggish.The effects of which are most dramatic on spinning disks, especially the terrible 5400 RPM ones you still find in some laptops today. Here's some stuff I've noticed on even recent versions of Windows (including software):
Those are the biggest ones off the top of my head. There's a million other reasons Windows is sluggish fresh out of the box, but that's a separate discussion.
It doesn't hold up so much today, but the biggest problem in the past used to be hard disk defragmentation. By default, there's a scheduled task in Windows to defrag your HDDs every Wednesday at 3am (local time), but lots of people shut their computers off overnight when not in use, or have this task disabled (my uni's lab computers for example). Over the years, as you download more and more things, this leads to the disk becoming increasingly fragmented, and on an HDD where the biggest weakness is already slow access times, it makes just about any task using IO experience significant bottlenecks. Just compare a completely fresh, never before been defragmented install of Windows on an HDD, to right after you run the defragmenter, on the same setup. It'll be night and day, 100%.
This slowdown doesn't appear if you use an SSD though, as SSDs have the same access time regardless, and I haven't seen the same degradation in performance. If it still persists on your setup, it's likely because one of the programs you've installed is chewing up a bunch of resources in the background. Try sorting your running programs by RAM, IO, or CPU usage, and see if there's something that's using a lot. Windows Defender is a common one, it has a nasty habit of getting stuck and continuously rescanning a single folder, as does the Indexing service.
Two services installed and continuously running by the OS. There's definitely third party bloat, but not any more so than Microsoft's own.
Man, defragmentation... I just realized I haven't dealt with this in about a decade. Is it still as slow as it used to be? How long would it take to defragment a 1TB HDD that's only roughly 10% full? I might try and talk my girlfriend into running this on hers.
I haven't dealt with it since Windows 7 in 2014, but I think it's as slow as ever, defragging is unfortunately not very fast haha. The amount of fragmentation does have a great influence on the time, but a 1TB HDD with only 10% capacity can probably be finished in under an hour, I'd guess. If you're concerned about it, just have it run for a night while you sleep - if she usually shuts her computer off, just make sure it's turned on and working away. You probably don't have too much fragmentation at 10% usage unless it's very old, as NTFS like to keep some space between files when it's available, so the performance gains may not be a lot, but they're free with minimal risks.
I'll at least do a scan. My suspicion is that it shouldn't be that fragmented, either. It's just really, really slow and getting seemingly slower every month so I'm starting to look for solutions.
Is this a Windows exclusive problem? I don't think so.
I've used Windows and MacOS for decades and they both suffer from this problem to some extent. Especially when you migrate your installation from computer to computer via the Mac's built-in Migration Assistant. I know tons of people who have been running the same "install" for a decade or more. Every time one of them does a fresh install, they talk about how much snappier it feels.
I think it's just a function of people loading up more and more stuff on their computers over time. So much stuff nowadays has always running daemons that check for updates, send telemetry back to developers, etc.
While this isn’t specific to Windows, one major thing I see people missing is spec bloat. Basically every version of Windows from at least XP onwards has gradually increased the system requirements as they go through major updates.
I remember XP specifically was bad about this, but people are saying the same thing about Windows 10. A fresh install may no longer work on a computer that met the minimum requirements in 2015.
Windows decay syndrome. cfabbro's comment nailed the common causes (plus fragmentation).
Windows 7 had the least of it, it's the most polished/stable release they ever managed. I honestly thought they had this problem beat, but then Vista, 8, and 10 proved they don't care. Windows just continues to bloat with every release, adding more garbage to the base OS which no one asked for and no one wants. Hell, with Windows 10 they aren't even testing patches and updates properly anymore, laid off huge portions of those teams to save money.
Have a defragger running on a schedule if you have classic hard drives for your OS, that helps a lot (and having it run every week keeps it from taking half a day to finish). You can also use tools like ccleaner to purge a lot of registry cruft. If you're on 10, there's rather a lot of garbage services that can be disabled - including everything related to microsoft's cloud services.
Those who don't understand unix are doomed to reinvent it, and badly. ;)