Why do computers become slow after a while, even after factory reset or hard disk formatting?
In: Technology
A drastically oversimplified example is this: A similar reason why no matter what size space you live in, over time, it just seems to get cluttered up with stuff. Because it’s much easier to accommodate something new than it is to get rid of it forever.
Let’s take a real life example. Let’s say that you have a laptop for work, and you like to use Google chrome. But one day your work requires you to use Mozilla Firefox. So You install Firefox. Both browsers have a file that’s a component of the code that handles how your browser does secure connections to websites, HTTPS. This component gets linked to a bunch of other stuff in your operating system, like cryptographic services, password data stores, etc. But Mozilla and Google have, for their own reasons, decided to use slightly different versions of HTTPS. So you’ve got two files linking to basically the same things, doing basically the same thing for their particular product.
But then, you decide that you don’t really care that much about chrome anymore, and you’re just going to use Firefox. So you uninstall chrome. But the chrome uninstaller program doesn’t want to break your computer and any other programs that might use HTTPS, so when it removes itself, it’s extra cautious. So if it encounters some kind of difficulty unlinking that module, it doesn’t get all aggro and just rip it out, it probably just leaves it in place. So now you’ve got one set of links going to a file/function that actually does something, and another set that does nothing. And nothing’s ever going to try and remove that file ever again, cuz chrome is already gone.
And the two pieces of software that I’m giving examples of here are actually well-written pieces of software so they probably do a decent job of uninstalling. Many don’t. Remember that if you’re installing a piece of software, the company that makes a software is motivated for it to install properly. If you’re uninstalling their software, they just lost a customer, so they’re going to put their development efforts into the installer, and not the uninstaller.
And this example is still way oversimplifying matters. Windows registry editing is quite possibly one of the most painful IT support tasks that anybody could ever ask of anyone else. The Windows registry is just obscenely complicated, It’s the central nervous system of the operating system, and it never, ever gets less convoluted and tangled with use.
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