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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

This is great work. I hope MS can improve Windows 10 by fixing this. I just added a new Win10 laptop with much better specs than my 3 year old rMBP, and I'm shocked by how much apparently random latency I experience with the UI in Windows 10 compared to the Mac. That's not to mention the issues of sloppier track pad (which constantly detects my left hand while I type) or the ungodly slow unzip (via 7z).

If only Apple would give us more than 16GB of RAM (in a laptop)... what a frustrating world for developers.

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I mean the trackpad issue is generally down to the manufacturer and the drivers they provide, but I take your point otherwise.

A pro tip with 7z is to use the two pane interface to extract and not dragging files to Explorer. The latter option extracts the files to a temp directory before copying them whereas the former extracts directly to the destination.

The Windows file systems are pretty cruddy in general though so decompressing tonnes of small files in general will take longer than on OS X or Linux.

> I mean the trackpad issue is generally down to the manufacturer and the drivers they provide...

Was just wondering this myself. I tried a Surface Laptop this week, and its trackpad has everything I love from the 2012-era Mac trackpads. A satisfyingly snappy physical mouse click, gestures & acceleration, and a perfect size. (I can't stand Force Touch on the new MacBook Pro, and I don't like their new giant trackpads.)

MS is trying to fix the driver situation with their "precision touchpad" initiative: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/pc-oems-ditch-the-cu...

No complaints on the sp4 trackpad here

> A pro tip with 7z is to use the two pane interface to extract and not dragging files to Explorer. The latter option extracts the files to a temp directory before copying them whereas the former extracts directly to the destination.

That's insane. I had no idea. Thanks for the tip!

It's because the 7-Zip file manager first extracts to %temp% and then copies (not moves) to the drop location. If you use the regular extract function it extracts to the destination directly. Using the Explorer context menu does the same thing, and thus is also fast.

I use the right click context menu on the archive file to 'Extract Here' which seems to accomplish the same thing.

  The Windows file systems are pretty cruddy in general though so decompressing tonnes of small files in general will take longer than on OS X or Linux.

I haven't checked this in a while, so it could be out of date... But what you claim is windows being cruddy, might be a symtom of a slightly different mindset in data protection. Here is a test, grab a big tar.gz/zip file and uncompress it in linux and in windows from the command prompt. As soon as you see it complete, pull the power plug/battery from the machine. Plug it back in, check the result.

In the past windows seemed to be more aggressive about flushing things to disk, and applications were far more generous with calls to FlushFileBuffers() on windows than similar apps on linux were about calling fsync(). Seemingly because fsync() is a machine deathblow on linux when under IO load. Where as windows did a slightly better job of only flushing the requested file. Also, i've seen a number of "streaming" apps on windows play nice and use FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH.. which makes them run slower, but doesn't trash the whole system.

Bottom line is that I wouldn't call NTFS cruddy, it does a lot of things that still aren't mainstream in linux filesystems. If your seeing some huge performance anomaly between windows & linux look closer. NTFS may not be sexy, but its a solid piece of engineering (ok some things are cool like VSS. TxF is also cool but might get deprecated because no one knows about it).

No, NTFS is cruddy. It is eager to flush metadata but not data, and there is no way to switch it to "journal data as well" mode (at least not as far as Win8.1, maybe 10 added this mode).

This is the default behavior on ext3 and ext4 as well, of course, and if you pull the plug on NTFS, ext3 or ext4, you WILL end up with files whose length reflects recent writes but whose contents do not (and I am saying this from analyzing hundreds of cases of file contents that are impossible given program flow -- about 10:1 on NTFS than on non-data-journalled ext4). But at least on linux you can tune2fs -o journal_data, still get very decent performance and much, much better integrity.

Also, I think you are conflating sync(), fsync(), fdatasync() and FlushFileBuffers. calling fsync() or fdatasync() on linux is no worse than FlushFileBuffers - the IO killing behaviour you describe is associated with sync(), which, when you need it, is perfectly justified in killing IO.

I have just bought a Windows 10 laptop for my wife.

I don't know if it is random updates or junkware or whatever, but sometimes the system will lock out for minutes - task manager shows <50% of load on any of disk, ram and cpu, but even waiting for task manager to launch can take a minute! I've witnessed a simple program (FAR manager) taking a minute to show its UI!

Yeah, I've been out of the Windows game for some years now, but my wife has a few (desktop and laptop), occasionally comes to me and says "it's slow. fix it." And indeed it is slow, even on moderate browser use -- things just hang. Specs are more than adequate.

I have to say (after halfheartedly looking into it a few times): "Um, sorry honey, I have no idea. Guess it's a Windows thing." She nods, and goes back to patiently waiting minutes for the browser to stop hanging! Seems that people using Windows just accept this kind of thing as a given, to the point they don't even notice it. (I've installed Linux for her a few times, but of course, it's too different, doesn't run Photoshop, etc...)

Try turning off all of the malware and search features. Windows defender will run on every file, folder, or executable you touch. Play a movie with VLC? Here let us scan VLC, every DLL it depends on, every file you have opened with it, and the entire file you are about to open. They also bundled Cortana and Bing with search, which means you can get ads in your search! But also means it makes like twenty web queries every time you search. Also search indexes like non-stop for no reason I can fathom, which is a shame because I actually liked the windows 7 search features (which are now bundled with this ad serving, resource hogging, shit).

Also, don't trust task manager, it lies about utilization if you aren't running as admin and don't have it configured correctly.

Windows defender is by far the "best" malware software when it comes to having a light footprint. Scanning every byte of IO for malware signatures, and the ton of other heavyweight operations are a sure way to eat a ton of processing power. I have a under powered win10 tablet, and I have to remind myself to "disable" windows defender every time it goes to install an update. Otherwise what should be a 2-3 minute operation can run for 10-15 mins.

Yea I don't have a problem with it per se, I just wish it implemented any sort of improvement to reduce the hard-drive usage. Say, integrating with the OS to read the same memory as the program will (rather than reading it 2+ times: this kills the drive). Or perhaps storing a list - with hashes - of already scanned files, so it doesn't scan the entire 30+ GB windows dev kit every time I open a large project in visual studio (especially egregious because it forgets it already scanned it when I open a different IDE or say... compiler). The thing is out of control.

"integrating with the OS to read the same memory as the program will (rather than reading it 2+ times: this kills the drive)."

Is it even possible to read a file twice while ignoring system buffers cache?

The latency and unzipping problems can be solved with linux. Though the trackpad could get worse. The random latency and unexplained HD activity always offended me in Windows - it is _my_ laptop after-all!

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