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Comment by omni | Hacker News Reader

The problem is definitely hardware. If you actually read the linked sources, it sounds like the Air Force bought a ton of spinning rust HDD machines in 2018 for the lowest possible price they could. They probably only have 4GB of RAM too, then, given what low end specs were like at the time. Good luck getting anything done today with those specs.

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That's not actually such "low end spec" that would cause logins and mails to take an hour to process.

To me, the whole ordeal screams: software bloat, software misconfiguration, background service overload. You could snappily send mail 15 years ago, and the computational task itself hasn't grown much, besides bloated browser login windows.

Try booting a 2 GB RAM machine to some RAM-preloading Linux thumbdrive and you'll see why the problem is not "spinning rust HDDs" and "only 4 GB RAM"

Have you tried using Windows 10/11 with on-access and behavioral AV (not defender) on 4gb of RAM and a 5400rpm spinning disk? I find it entirely plausible that they have to wait an hour plus for the machine to become remotely responsive.

I probably have experienced something close to this. You're right; it doesn't take many steps to make a modern machine slow.

Reading the article was indeed surprising and depressing - it certainly is a plausible scenario! The question is: is such a disfigured desktop experience an acceptable result, given that the physical hardware enables much, much more productivity?

When NASA switched from internal IT to a third-party contractor, their laptops and desktops got replaced with worse hardware that somehow cost more. This is the Republican way.

No one thinks the performance problems are implausible. But hardware can only do so much to make up for the worst excesses of antivirus. Behavioral scanning doesn't require huge amounts of memory and has negligible need to touch the hard drive. On-access scanning by definition barely needs to increase the number of I/O operations. It shouldn't bottleneck the machine if it's done competently. So then you're just loading outlook off a hard drive, which took several seconds the last time I tried it.

Why wouldn't it? That's how long it takes to swap memory on an HDD, it doesn't surprise me, especially with how many resources today's browsers and sites consume.

Websites are also bloated with massive Javascript - it's just another source of awfully bloated, inefficient, bloody useless software!

> Try booting a 2 GB RAM machine to some RAM-preloading Linux thumbdrive and you'll see why the problem is not "spinning rust HDDs" and "only 4 GB RAM"

They're absolutely running some sort of modern Windows so I don't see how this is relevant at all. MS-DOS2.0 would also work like a dream on those specs, who cares?

Yes, they're running Windows, and Windows is also software, contributing to the bloat. My point is that the resource overhead of just running an idle OS doesn't need to be humongous compared to the actual workload.

Seriously, they could be running on thin clients like a chromebook. No need to give everyone top-end machines to run MS Office and some webapps. It's mind boggling this is even a debate on HN.

But then they wouldn't be able to install the corporate spyware that keeps the evil hackers away.

Ha, you're blaming hardware yet the likely reason that those systems are slow isn't because the hardware can't do things quickly, but because the modern software they run on it is bloated and slow.

You both are correct. Its a combination of shit hardware, shit software, and poor timing on daily scans that should be run after hours instead of on login. I use AF computers on a daily basis and can attest to bringin in my own laptop and using alternatives to login on my personal.

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