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Comment by vwuon | Hacker News Reader

Windows XP running on the hardware of the time was much more responsive[] than 10 running on modern hardware.

[] if we don't count accesses to the disk, of course

I didn't realize how broken Windows 10 is, until I tried it on someone else's computer... At this point, it's unsuitable for any computer without a SSD: M$ has made a huge amount of background system update & housekeeping activities as integral parts of the system and they will continuously SEEK your disk to death, it doesn't need to be 20 MB/s, just 2 MB/s random seeking will render it useless for doing any actual work at any time. It's laughable that high-end commercial laptops are still being sold with those 5,400 RPM, 1 TB HDDs, totally unusable.

You'll never see this kind of bullshit disk access on *nix (as long as you turned off your desktop search index service), or, for this matter, Windows XP...

When I didn't have an SSD, I spent a lot of time configuring the system so it wouldn't do as much IO in the background. Lots of services, as you say, do that by default, and it's unbearable. You'd be using the computer normally and all of a sudden it would start crawling for no apparent reason.

I try to do the same on a work desktop but it doesn't matter because xagt.exe

Who knows what it is reading and writing that can't wait while I do npm install

Well, it doesn't match my experience. I have 8 gb of ram and spinning rust disks and performance is bearable. For gaming even.

Gaming is generally not affected that much by SSD vs HDD performance, except for loading times.

General work tasks on the other hand is affected much more, especially when multi-tasking / often launching and switching between applications.

maybe it was defragging?

I guess it's the same with Mac OS. Some years back, migrating Mail data would always fail on my Mac Mini, but would succeed quite happily on my MacBook Air. I always suspected the HDDs. Moved to SSDs and everything was better.

Yeah, since the APFS transition in particular, macOS is unbearable on an HDD. And Apple still sells the base iMac with a 5400rpm drive. Ought to be criminal.

Well, HP at least used to sell their laptops with a powersupply that could not power the laptop enough to run at the speed it said in the specs. For getting full speed you had to buy a bigger powersupply from them. Saw this on a computer that someone donated to the sportsclub because they bought a new computer to replace the old slow thing. Turns out all that was needed was a bigger powersupply.

A lot of modern software is unfortunately following this trend. As companies outfit developers with higher end systems including NVME SSDs, performance issues from inefficient I/O patterns are hidden during development.

In the same vein, web developers testing their stuff on ultrafast 4G.

This! In my hobby projects I start the development usually with Raspberry Pi as backend, even for db, as it forces to use resources efficiently and reveals problems fast. Only building/compiling is good to be done on fast machine.

I like this idea, it makes sense to integrate a particularly low spec machine into the development process and I wish more developers would do it.

You can use the cpu cgroup controller to starve your program of CPU time. Use the cpu.cfs_quota_us and cpu.cfs_period_us knobs.

Now if only there was a way to use the blkio controller to emulate the performance characteristics of spinning rust (reasonable sequential IO performance but with a big penalty for random access...)

Remember that you aren't their focus group. Their focus group are people with little to no knowledge of computers, and these services actually help.

That being said, how often is system update happening for you that its really a problem? It's a point that I see being repeated over and over, but I don't think I've had any interruption at all from system updates, beyond windows doing the occasional update before power down.

And also about the housekeeping activities -- Why would it continuously seek? Beyond fragmenting, indexing or defender scanning your files that shouldn't be happening, and I don't think I've ever had that be a problem...

"People with little or no knowledge of computers" would actually benefit the most from a LTS-like version of the OS, with security updates _only_, and flexible feature upgrades every two years or so. That you can't get with Windows 10 (as an individual user), but can totally get with e.g. Debian Stable, and without paying a dime. Isn't that a bit ironic?

In my experience people annoyed by updates are mac users who are starting Windows VM once in a few months which will obviously download tons of updates and will ask to restart almost immediately. And, yes, as Windows did not have enough time to do its housekeeping, it'll do it, slowing down the whole experience.

I'm using only Windows in the last few years and it was never a problem for me. Windows asked me to reboot exactly once. Other times I just had "power off and install updates" menu item instead of "power off". That said, I'm powering off my PC every day, may be it matters.

I haven't been using Windows a lot in the last years (as you said, updates annoy me a few times a year, but I still take the time to do them), however, a lot of Windows users have told me and others in our hackerspace that the first thing they do is to disable Windows Update when they install Microsoft Windows, so I suppose that they are really annoyed by updates.

I think most of them cling to the idea of a computer that doesn't need any kind of maintenance (except on the hardware side), which is something I can totally understand, but is not currently doable, at least if you want to keep connected to the rest of the world.

(Of course, we do tell them that if they want their computer to be connected to the outside world in any way, updates should not be disabled, and that maintenance is necessary).

Which is exactly what I was trying to convey in my original comment. I feel like the base that has a problem with the updates are a small vocal minority, which seem to be present any time Windows is mentioned on any HN thread. I have met plenty of people who develop/work on windows every day and don't have that problem.

There is another, silent, group : the ones that don't have any problem with the updates, because they disabled them, or because the local computer expert who installed their computer disabled them. They are also not vocal at all, since they "don't have any problem". (And this is also not only a problem on Windows).

It's especially fun when you are just about to run out the door, trying to pack down your work laptop and all the options you get is "Update and shutdown". Perfect if the computer will be spending the next four hours in a closed backpack and the car/bus/train/boat/plane is leaving NOW. If the laptop is older than two years you can't trust the battery to keep long enough for the update to finish and besides, how hot will it get in the backpack?

A clean install of Windows 10 is close to literally unusable on my 11-inch Dell AMD A9-9420e laptop, with 16GB (lol) RAM and SATA SSD.

Basically, the "Windows Antimalware Executable" and various other Windows processes keep one of the two CPU cores more or less constantly pegged. Everything takes ages. The only way to really use this damn thing is to disable Windows' realtime virus protection, which, well.... ouch. And it's still barely tolerable just for playing music files and the most basic of web browsing.

Granted, that's a cheap and hugely underpowered laptop.

But this was disappointing to me because I had a 1.3GHZ Core Solo based machine with 4GB and a primitive SSD running Windows 7 circa 2009/2010 and it was plenty usable.

That's not normal behavior, per my experience.

Are you sure Dell didn't ship it with something that, f.ex. is constantly making privileged calls and thereby causing AV to be invoked?

Wouldn't be the first time.

Pretty sure. I physically removed the HDD that shipped with the laptop, put an SSD in, and did a fresh Windows 10 install. 16GB RAM, too.

(Yes, part of my reason for buying this refurb'd Dell is because I thought it would be hilarious to put 16GB of RAM and a huge SSD into a crap netbook hahaha)

I haven't dug too deeply into it, but in dozens of hours of use and casual observation... it seems to me that if Windows Defender's realtime protection is enabled, then any disk access causes Windows Defender AV to be invoked which in turn leads to high CPU usage.

Dropbox was an absolute killer while it did its initial several GB of file syncing over the LAN. Dropbox pegged one CPU core, while Windows' antimalware pegged another. Same with iTunes while I was downloading my music collection from iTunes in the Cloud.

Now, both of those examples involved network traffic as well as disk I/O. So, I'm not exactly sure what Windows' antimalware was fretting about.

(Also keep in mind that the CPU we're talking about here, is a very low power dual-core AMD A9 chip. I don't see this problem on my desktop machine. On that, the antimalware CPU usage is low enough that I just don't care)

Yeah, a lot of stuff should be more rigorously tested on single and dual-core environments.

Especially when it relates to OS-handling (specifically: Windows), I feel like we've papered over a huge number of poorly sequenced, blocking calls with "more cores!"

I guess that explains why Win10 runs like a dog on my partner's computer which, whilst not brilliantly-specced, isn't absolutely awful either, but is disc-based.

> Windows XP running on the hardware of the time was much more responsive[] than 10 running on modern hardware.

That very much depends on when in XP's time line you're commenting from.

When XP was first released it had literally double the hardware requirements as Windows 2000 and XP didn't really add much functionality despite that bump in requirements (to me, it felt mostly due to themes). Granted XP was quicker booting if you had a large font folder but it wasn't until SP2 when XP really became an obvious upgrade to 2000. By which point XP was 3 yeas old and even budget hardware was now higher than recommended specifications of XP.

Windows 10 is now 4 years old, so comparing XP on 2004 hardware to Windows 10 on current hardware does feel fair.

IIRC correctly, XP brought the 1-way firewall, native USB support and media codecs. Hence the doubling of requirements. The firewall may have come in SP2. Prior to SP2, XP was pretty buggy/useless.

Geeze, how time flies...

Multimedia codecs and USB were in Windows 2000. USB 2 support was in XP SP1 and the Firewall was in XP SP2.

To be specific, XP has had ingress firewall and SP2 adds the egress counterpart.

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