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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

I run - using the word very loosely - Win 10 on a mid-spec 8GB Dell Laptop. It's literally unusably slow. Opening File Manager takes many minutes.

This is practically a fresh install. I have Office 365 installed, but very little else. I don't even have a mail client set up.

I dual-boot to Ubuntu on the same machine, and the latter is perfectly usable.

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Conversely, I have Windows 10 running quite well on low-spec (for the time, not just for now) 6GB Acer laptop that I got when Windows 8 (not 8.1) was current, that went through in-place upgrades to 8.1 and then 10, and it's got a ludicrous amount of cruft that I keep meaning to clean up.

So, while I don't doubt your story, I can't help thinking that it may not represent the general experience.(Maybe I'm just lucky, though.)

You either have a hardware problem (mechanical disk?) or a problem with some preinstalled software running in the background.

8GB with even a several years old CPU should be perfectly usable. SSD is absolutely required though. No number of cores and gigs will compensate for the lack of ssd.

I have similar problems, the amount of uncoordinated disk accesses that seem to happen constantly are murder for older spinning disks. After a while it levels out but that's usually after the first hour of usage- resource monitor clearly indicates what sent my disk queues up as Microsoft code that's recommended to be on such as defender. An SSD is absolutely required, or at least a modern hard drive with SATA 3.0 instead of SATA 2.0 for the extra iops.

> or at least a modern hard drive with SATA 3.0 instead of SATA 2.0 for the extra iops.

The interface is unrelated to the IOPS you get out of a hard drive. 3Gbps SATA II has no trouble delivering far more than the ~200 IOPS a 7200RPM hard drive is capable of.

I'm running Windows 10 on a machine that's about five years old. No SSD. It's quite snappy. The only issue with speed is startup times are long if you force it to do a full restart.

Not a fan of the UI changes, or the advertising. If I didn't buy Office 365 every other day for the last year, what are the odds your popup will get me to buy today?

Right click on the tile and "Remove". There's also a setting which blocks reinstalling those preloaded crap "apps" with updates. O&O Shutup 10 can help with that.

> You either have a hardware problem (mechanical disk?)

Windows 10 cannot work on a hard drive?

In a way, it makes sense: when my father upgraded from Seven to W10, W10 never worked properly and killed the hard drive in a matter of 3 days.

Sure it can, but mechanical drives are just comparitively glacially slow agianst SSDs and 'general OS snappiness' is one of the major real-world examples of where you feel it.

Yet windows 7 ran fine with them, performing the same functions.

What a day we live in when having a mechanical disk for a primary OS drive is straight up considered a hardware problem.

I fully agree with you, though. An SSD this day and age is mandatory.

Something might be up with your hardware. I run Win10 on a Surface Pro 4 that has a 900Mhz (yes, Mhz) processor and 4GB ram and it's really snappy. Even heavier type apps like Word and Excel have 1 second load times.

5400 RPM HDD ? Also what's the amount of pre-installed crapware running in the background ? Because these don't have anything to do with Windows.

I think Windows 10 can be a really nice OS, considering MS would stop with the telemetry/ads BS and make it more accessible to opt out. Until then O&O Shutup 10 tool is indispensible in that matter.

I second your OOSU10 recommendation. In fact, it's the only icon other than the Recycle Bin on my desktop, and I must have a clean desktop!

Windows 10 file explorer has a weird, terrible, default that causes it to be painfully slow.

Try right clicking a slow folder, selecting properties, select the customize tab, then change "optimise this folder for:" from whatever it is to "general". Apply that to all sub-folders.

Please let me know if it works, because I have a bit of a rant for MS if it does.

I've had fresh Windows 10 (no crapware) installs on two different development machines at two different companies. Both times it was slower than hell, and I immediately asked for a Linux install.

Perhaps this is me finally getting old and curmedgeony at the ripe old age of twenty-three, but I'll be damned if I'm switching my personal computer away from Windows 7 anytime soon.

Company supplied image? There's your problem. :-D

If you were able to move to Linux - more power to you. Some of us are stuck with mighty machines and horrible system image with 10 kinds of disk/processor heavy background "management and security" apps running on boot.

My company's Windows 7 image craps up awesome hardware, and so did the XP image before it. Lenovo T450s with an SSD? Yeah, that'll take a solid 5 minutes to reboot.

It took some effort but I did make Win 10 reasonably snappy for me on a Lenovo Ideapad designed for Win 8 with a few tricks: Using a script to disable all the tracking(the only thing I haven't disabled, but probably should, is the SmartScreen protection, which kicks in obnoxiously frequently and wrecks the drive), going to 16GB of RAM so that it stops swapping, disabling all the graphics features except for font smoothing, and switching to NexusFile for day-to-day file operations. There are still instances where I click on something that uses Explorer and it sits there uselessly for a few seconds, and the initial boot or recovery from sleep mode can sometimes be a doozy, but this is now more exceptional than not.

I run Windows 10 on a 4GB netbook with a 4-core Atom-derived Celeron and a spinning hard drive. Performance-wise, it's been working well for several months at this point. Something's up with your laptop.

Then something is wrong with your hardware. My brother runs it on a 10 year old (!) laptop with 2GB RAM and an Intel Dual Core CPU (these were before Core 2 Duos)

Windows runs okay, but scrolling lags like hell on more complex sites and you cant play more than 720p videos.

It's either malware or bloatware. A healthy, stable system with Windows 10 and 8 GB of RAM shouldn't have performance issues granted it doesn't have malware and you aren't overloading the 8GB RAM.

I have an 8GB 5 year old laptop running it smoothly - and its quite usable on a Core 2 Duo / 2GB ram 8 year old HTPC (yes a PC i built 8 years ago).

p.s. the laptop has an SSD installed.

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