I’ve been using Windows 7 since the RC was announced a few months ago and we’ve had quite a bit to say about it — mostly all good.
Over the last month I’ve noticed a trend in my Windows 7 install (that I use as my primary desktop and work machine) that was feeling all too familiar, and until today, I was trying to ignore: Windows Rot.
Windows Rot: The degradation in performance and stability that a Windows install experiences over time that is typically remedied by re-installation of the operating system.
At first I thought maybe I just had a bad app open — Firefox was hanging more frequently or using huge amounts of memory, Windows Media Player was becoming entirely unusable after my Windows instance had been up (and un-re-booted for more than 24hrs) and I noticed more and more often that Windows Explorer itself was beginning to act stranger and stranger.
The symptoms started off small — noticing things like my Windows Explorer settings for particular folders not saving or being random — I’d open a folder, it would display in preview mode, then I’d open it later that day and it would be in Detail mode.
Today I fired up Windows Explorer and simply got an empty white “body” portion of the screen, and on the left hand side of the screen two “Searching…” animated magnifying glass icons that just animated indefinitely. I checked disk and processor activity and nothing was going on… Windows Explorer was simply done working.
I’ve gotten into the habit of the last 2 weeks of rebooting every 2 days — when my Windows 7 install was new, my first reboot due to problems was 13 days after my initial install… I thought I finally had a rock-solid desktop.
I don’t expect everyone else to see this behavior — I full expect replies to this about how rock-solid their W7 desktops are and how they’ve never had a problem before… I’m just sharing with you the performance of my desktop 3 months after my initial clean install…
I finally understand the “it just works” mantra of the Mac OS X crowd… it’s not so much that Mac is magical with hardware or software — I think the point is that shit like this just doesn’t happen as often. So in an ironic way, they literally mean “It just works”… this is like US vs Japanese auto makers… “It just works…” not implying that the US cars don’t work, it’s just that when the door handle falls off, or your electronic starter no longer works after a few months, you aren’t that surprised where as your Japanese car is going to move along swimmingly for 200k miles.
Yes, I’m bitter and angry… I had a mac 2 years ago and didn’t like it at all, and now I’m looking at them again just so I don’t have to concern myself with stupid shit like operating-system-rot… ugggggggg
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8. August 2009 at 2:28 pm
I completely agree. I find it utterly hilarious that my HP Pavilion Elite, which is retailed as a “Vista Compatible System” runs a thousand times better as a HACKINTOSH system (Using iDeneb v5 with the latest 10.5.8 updates) and even scores almost TWICE as fast when benchmarking against my Vista partition (using Geekbench).
Microsoft really needs to get their shit together.
I thought I’d try out this “OEM” version I found of Windows 7 this past week (7600.16385) and, although I can say that I was impressed with it’s performance vs Vista when it first booted up (mind you it wouldn’t install properly using my RAID drivers; I had to first install Vista and then do a “custom” install/overwrite from within Vista using the Windows7 disk), it’s really quite a buggy OS still with half of my programs not working (even WinRAR has issues with shell integration).
It’s really sad, especially since I just updated my Mac OSX partition to 10.5.8 yesterday and it ran almost flawlessly after (although I did have to reinstall a few kexts and remove one to get the firewire working) but it now runs EVEN FASTER with this latest update.
I’m just so frustrated how a new MS product or OS means the reliance on having a NEW COMPUTER just to be able to handling running the fucking thing, when OSX can make something OLD run EVEN BETTER.
Stupid. Just my 2 cents.
10. August 2009 at 8:35 pm
As a new user of a MacBook Pro, I have to say after 2 weeks of use, I am really seeing what this “it just works” business is all about.
At the same time my Windows 7 RC desktop is starting to develop retarded behavior — like when I doc my iPhone now, the “Installing USB Device drivers…” and “New USB device attached” notifications cycle endlessly… not to mention that I’ve had this iPhone connected to this PC for months… what a piece of crap.
29. August 2009 at 6:31 pm
I’ve dabbled with Linux, I’ve never been entirely satisfied by Windows. But I’ve never really used Macs. Why did you leave them 2 years ago? I imagine you wrote an article on that?
2. September 2009 at 10:46 am
My primary reason for trying a mac out again is that I wanted to work with video and audio a bit more and knew there would be more software and support focused for Mac users in this realm. Also, after having used Windows 7 for as long as I have, and seeing it starting to do the same “rot” behavior that 2K, XP, 2k3 and Vista had done before it, I lost all hope that at any point in the future Microsoft would manufacturer an OS that wasn’t going to start fighting me in the long-run.
While my motivations were less than pure, I’m glad I did. I’m enjoying the Mac so far. It’s not eye-boggling wonderful, just stable, fast and easy to use.
1. October 2009 at 7:38 am
Completely true.
When I first installed Win 7 RC on my laptop back in August, I was impressed with the fast, polished and very responsive desktop. Had MS finally got it right?
No chance! After nearly 2 months of light usage (Firefox), things started to go wrong. Suddenly, and for no explained reason, Windows would take nearly 5 minutes to enable the network interfaces after booting or resuming from sleep – including Wi-fi, so rendered my laptop useless for it’s primary purpose – browsing the web.
This still continues and I cannot find any solution – despite following the mostly useless tips from those MSFT/MVP/MCSE (whatever they call themselves now!) forums.
It gets better. Now, my laptop will not resume from sleep *at all*. I need to hard reboot it. And that’s another thing, it now takes many moons to even boot the thing. Over all, the system is now slow, unresponsive and worse than it ever was under Vista (which takes some doing!)
I have installed no software on this laptop, other than Firefox and Open Office. It’s also virus/malware/spamware/etcware free ..
My main desktops at home and work both run Linux. Neither ever slow down, even after filling with truckloads of crap. My home Linux desktop is now at about 5 years without a reinstall (just updates) – still as snappy as ever with all it’s Compiz goodness!
1. October 2009 at 12:46 pm
Damn Si, that sounds maddening. Like “throw the laptop out the window” stuff.
I continue to see “rotting” behavior in my Windows install, I noticed I’m rebooting every 4 days or so, where as for the first month or two I don’t think I rebooted once things got stable. Around month 5 I started to notice crap behavior and now more and more.
It’s really subtle stuff, stuff you know that only a reinstall or new profile would fix — but both are so damn inconvenient I don’t know how those are actually valid solutions.
Anyway, if it helps, I’m enjoying my MacBook Pro. It’s not amazing or anything, just a solid/consistent experience.
11. December 2009 at 9:46 pm
I’ve experienced the same problems, have been running the Windows Ultimate RC and was running wonderfully for about a month and a half. Then the system started to bog down lately. I just wrote it off as the programs propagated, but, recently I went through and updated drivers, now it not just a little slow it’s glacial – AFTER UPDATING! Rolled back the drivers one by one to no effect. What the crap!!