PC slowing down

Sometimes with a slower machine you just shift the slowdown to the next bottleneck...

I've always preferred to back up the data files and do a fresh install to get rid of the redundant crap that has built up.

SteveW

I've not got much in the way of data files on that HD. Most are on a separate one. And most of the apps on it are used at one time or another. I'd simply just have to add them one by one to a fresh install. Exactly why I didn't want to do one. (I bought my own Win7 - it didn't come as a package.)

With Windows, it is not just the apps, but redundant registry entries and God knows what else. The fresh install is a way to get rid of all these and get back some lost speed.

SteveW

That this s*it accumulates and the only way for the average person to remove it is by re-installing the OS, is *yet* *another* reason not to bother with Windows.

Why do you clowns put up with it?

I actually use a number of Windows 10 machines, one Windows XP virtual machine for an old CAD package, Nethserver for my home server, Ubuntu and Raspbian, as well as having a Linux Satellite TV box. Moving my wife from Windows to Ubuntu wouldn't be easy (she is not technically minded at all and any slight change involves me repeatedly demonstrating how to do something - often when I have already been in bed for an hour). The kids would undoubtedly cope fine (the 13 year old probably better than me!). I have a number of technical programs that I do not have access to Linux versions of (if they even exist). If I have to maintain Windows machines for these reasons, there seems little point in switching the main PCs over to dual booting and having to maintain both OSs on each machine.

SteveW

The last OS I re-installed was Win 95. Then someone put me on to Ghost and Zip drives. Now USB caddies A new OS is loaded along with core programs with the machine off-line and an image is made. At any time any new programs need to be installed, the image is loaded, the new programs installed from disc - all off-line and a new image made of that. For the next time. The last time this was necessary was the registry tweak to persuade XP it was an EPOS machine which allowed continuing updates of Security Essential definitions. Data is on a second drive and archived onto other drives in USB caddies using XCOPY using the date parameter.

michael adams

...

Many don't put up with it of course, because 1) they wouldn't maintain their own OS, no matter what is was and 2) many enjoy doing stuff that simply isn't available on OSX(BSD?) or Linux.

Most of my Windows PC's also dual boot something else, in the case of this XP running on a Mac Mini it's OSX and most others, Windows plus one (or more) of the million different Linux distros / respins.

Whenever I try some new software or get some new hardware (that is inevitably 'Designed for Windows') I often see just how well Linux (typically) copes with it. Sometimes it can and even better than XP (particularly) but equally often this admin / user ex commercial network / PC / user admin and ex IT trainer (CNI, MCT, A+CT) doesn't really have a clue what to do. Little of what I have learned in my everyday support for Windows and 'Designed for Windows' hardware is of use when it comes to resolving the inadequacies of Linux hardware support.

Like, I saw you could get (free) Sophos for Linux so I downloaded it (on Ubuntu), un-tarred and potentially installed it but then couldn't see how you actually ran it? Like many such things it may well only have a CLI and because I have more interesting things to do than waste even more time on an experiment, I shut it down and got onto something more productive (for me an billions of other people that's just

Cheers, T i m

Just tell her it's the latest version of Windows.

Because some of the apps I want won't run on anything else.