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Guest19023892

I upgraded a desktop machine the last time I visited my family. It was a Windows 7 computer that was at least 10 years old with 4GB of ram. They wanted to use it online for basic web browsing, so I thought I'd install Windows 10 for security reasons and drop in a modern SSD to upgrade the old 7200rpm drive to make it more snappy.

Well, it felt slower after the "upgrade". Clicking the start menu and opening something like the Downloads or Documents folder was basically instant before. Now, with Windows 10 and the new SSD there was a noticeable delay when opening and browsing folders.

It really made me wonder how it would be running something like Windows 98 and websites of the past on modern hardware.

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I wonder if you'd have any more luck with that hardware putting Ubuntu Mate on it. For basic web browsing, it probably wouldn't matter much to your family whether it's running Windows or Linux.

I'm running Ubuntu Mate on a low-end brand-new laptop that couldn't handle the Windows OS it shipped with. Couldn't be happier.

Problem with Ubuntu is it doesn’t auto update and it’s very hard to get it to do that. Not sure it’s even possible to auto update major releases as well.

Every time I have installed Ubuntu for someone, I have come back years later and it’s still on the same version.

That is strange. Did you try any of these?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates

I am not sure about major release upgrades. But if you are on an LTS release, this should cover it for five years. And as much as I dislike snaps, they do auto updates too, so in 22.04 Firefox at least keeps up-to-date too.

Old windows run a bit slow on a web browser: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98 or https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...

Throw in more RAM and Windows 10 will likely feel snappier than Windows 7 did.

It's probable the old Windows 7 install was 32-bit while your fresh install of 10 would have defaulted to 64-bit. That combined with 10's naturally higher memory requirements means the system has less overhead to work with.

It’s all this, and I’m dealing with it today.

Mother I law bought a machine with 4GB of ram, which was fine before windows 10. Now it spends all day doing page/sysfile swap from its mechanical hard drive. Basically unusable.

So here in my pocket is an 8GB stick of DDR3 sodimm for later.

> Throw in more RAM and Windows 10 will likely feel snappier than Windows 7 did.

It doesn't and never will. I've used them side by side for a few years and went back to W7 for productivity.

Interestingly enough, Lubuntu LXQt feels snappier than either system.

recently I've seen new laptops being shipped with 4GB. possibly with a slightly lighter (but not fully debloated) version of 10 (Home? Starter? Edu?)

I'm not sure if this is because Windows memory usage is a lot more efficient now, or if the newer processors' performances can cancel out the RAM capacity bottleneck, or if PC4-25600 + NVMe pagefiles are simply fast enough, or if manufacturers are spreading thinly during the chip shortage. but it's certainly an ongoing trend

If it was 32-bit, then it's probable the windows 7 install wasn't using all the memory, so there shouldn't have been a big difference.

And 4GB is enough for a blank windows 10 install doing some OS things and browsing. I don't think more memory helps that scenario.

32bit PAE was supported since Windows XP and initially allowed for more than 4GB of RAM to be supported, but driver issues made Microsoft put a soft-cap in 4GB under this mode[0]. But Win7 32 bits with PAE would've surely been able to use all of those 4GB fine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Mic...

In my experience, also with some older hardware: Windows 10 is not happy with just 8 GB of RAM, much less 4 GB.

I mean, everyone uses a browser, even if they use nothing else, and browsers gobble up RAM like crazy.

Windows 10 or 11 with 4gb of RAM is a BAD idea. 8 gb is a minimum. Found that out several times.

Try Win-R and type "notepad", at a reasonably fast programmer's pace. It consistently loses "no" for me, sometimes more if it's feeling particularly slow.

This should involve absolutely zero disk reads or anything of the sort, it's a window that runs a command. And it used to work reliably in past years. It feels like keyboard input simply isn't buffered like it used to be. Calculator it even worse as it loses input if you start typing the formula too soon. It used to be very easy for casual calculations now I have to wait for the computer.

You'll want to stop using the new start menu. Use OpenShell. It's fast and even better than the old menus.

In a similar vein I installed Ubuntu on an older laptop that had been running Windows 10. I was shocked at how fast it was compared to Windows 10, it was night and day.

Let the caches warm up a little!

This is part of it - many things are "fast enough" that were you used to have caches that would display nearly instantly, now you don't have those - it reads from disk each time it needs to show the folder, etc.

This is very visible in any app that no longer maintains "local state" but instead is just a web browser to some online state (think: Electron, teams, etc). Disconnect the web or slow it down and it all goes to hell.

That's interesting, I cloned a Win10 installation on a HDD to a sata SSD a year or two back and the speed difference was considerable. Especially something like Atom that took minutes to open before was ready to go in like 10 seconds afterwards.

A lot of things remained slow though.

Yeah the change from a 7200 HDD to an SSD for those 10 year old machines provides a very considerable improvement. It goes from "unusable" to "moderate" performance for general web browsing and business duties.

I'm talking about Windows 10 on 4G C2Q or Phenom/Phenom II machines - they aren't fast but they're very usable with a SSD and GPU in place.

The bigger question is why does a glorified text editor take 10 seconds to open on any system?

Is it loading 2000 plugins?

Electron, that's why.

You're comparing 10 to 10, so of course an SSD will only help in that situation.

But if any parts of 10 are sufficiently badly coded compared to 7, that will overcome the drive. And some parts definitely are, especially in the start menu code.

Somewhere around IIRC Win8 Microsoft must have gotten really lax about minimizing disk access. Windows started being slow as molasses on an HDD, even for stuff like opening the start menu.

This hurts performance a ton on SSDs, too, it's just less noticeable. Something that should happen so fast you can hardly measure how long it takes, takes... just long enough to notice, which may amount to 100x as long as it should take, but 100x a small number is still pretty small.

10 years of malware definition updates. 10 years of countless security additions. Every operation needs to be checked for correction, memory safety etc.

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