Windows decay
It is a phenomenon well known to many Windows users- over time a system becomes slower and less responsive. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes talks about the phenomenon and its causes at ZDNet. As to the question of how serious Windows decay is (or “code rot” as he puts it), he says:
My take on things is that code rot is indeed real and that a system that was once working fine can be rendered almost unusable in a matter of months or a year. In fact, I’m certain that this factor actually encourages people to trash their old systems and go out and buy new ones.
Many experienced computer users make it a matter of routine to reformat and reinstall the whole system once a year or so. Of course, these are typically people who try out a lot of new stuff and install and uninstall a lot of things. They are also people who back up properly and have system images or other ways to quickly reinstall the entire system.
How about other operating systems? Do they decay like Windows does? Kingsley-Hughes observes:
I have years of experience with Windows. I’ve had my Mac mini for over a year now and installed quite a bit of stuff on it and yet it feels as fresh as it did on day one. I’ve got machines running Linux distros too that still feel fresh. I’m tempted to say that code rot is more noticeable on the Windows platform, but without a lot more investigation, I can’t say for sure.
My own experience is that I have seen a lot of home PCs that had become slow. Here are some causes:
- Spyware
- Anti-virus programs from Norton or McAfee
- Too many programs running in the background
- An almost full hard drive
- Failure to do routine maintenance like disk cleanup and defragging
Note that only the last item in the list above is specific to Windows. I have had several personal XP systems that ran for four or five years without a noticeable deterioration in performance. However, I kept things cleaned up, defragged, and prevented unnecessary background activity. On one occasion, I found that cleaning up the Registry helped but I don’t recommend that as a regular procedure for home PC users.
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Larry D. sent me an email and says:
“Re: Anti Virus (crap) Software. You can add Trend Micro to your list of evil doers for it’s PCillan (home user) product. Under the hood you will find that this product consumes about half of all the kernel’s virtual memory and never releases it. Once this memory has been allocated to them, your machine will grind to a crawl caused by excessive thrashing due to a shortage of kernel resources. This claim can be verified by using PoolMon to watch kernel allocations.”