Lots of variables I accept 《edited to remove personal view》
After say, five years, their performance is noticeably slower than it was when they were new, and the question is not in reference to increased graphical demands from games. The question is referring to day to day operations, web browsing and so on. Moving parts are limited, could they be the cause?
Thanks in advance
In: Technology
1. Thermal throttling: Your system is dusty, clean it, or have it cleaned. (A combination of compressed air and sonic cleaner may be necessary depending on environment.) Most electronic components in the system will slow themselves to cool down.
Fan bearings wear over time and become less efficient or seize entirely. This can reduce cooling, or even add heat.
2. Occasionally run DISM and SFC to check for issues with system files. These can affect performance or cause crashes.
3. Occasionally clean temporary file data, consider running the “system refresh” option. It’s possible you’re loading junk into operating memory, or simply needing to sift through junk, before able to load good data.
4. Updates: This is unlikely to go the direction you expect.
Some systems will handle updates without issue, however hardware moves on, adds new micro-code instruction sets, new capabilities, and over time, software (yes Operating Systems too) will begin to rely on these new features. They may begin to focus so heavily on these new features, that they begin to drop optimizations for the way things used to be done. Anyone using Windows 10 version 1803+ can attest to the drastic drop in performance they notice if they still have a spinning disk (AKA: Spinning rust, or more correctly, Hard Disk Drive/HDD) instead of a form of solid state storage.
4a. Security: Security is an on-going thing, as new issues are found, new fixes are introduced, some of them, like fixes for Spectre/Meltdown type bugs necessarily slow down the system’s performance because they are targeting a type of process which only exists to increase performance per clock.
5. Silent failures: its rare that hardware degrades significantly, but it does tend to degrade before it outright fails, and some things degrade silently, unless you’re specifically running tests to find the issues. RAM is especially bad for this as the system can often work around the issue for a time, or my favourite is when a RAM stick is completely dead, no longer reporting in system, but you just don’t notice because nothing ever told you.
Bad sectors on a Hard Disk are also a common issue to performance, or degraded memory cache on CPU which is another thing you just won’t see, but may start to cause intermittent blue screens under load. (I have a system on my bench doing this now.)
6. Finally bloat: As more/faster hardware becomes cheaper, software programmers have become lazier. Combine that with our ever growing lust for high-fidelity media, and you end up with both larger programs, AND larger content. All of which must be loaded into RAM. If your software stack requests more RAM than you physically have, they will fail over to “virtual RAM/paging files/swap space.”
This is a way of saying, what should be stored in fast RAM is now stored on your slower main storage. (SSD/HDD which ever you have.) This is of course configurable to a some degree.
This software bloat/creep means that over time, the demands on the system for simply being flipped on and opening basic software grow, while your hardware stays the same.
I don’t know about explaining like you’re five, and I’ve avoided a lot of specifics/notoriously resource hungry software (Chrome/Excel, etc.) but I’ve tried to cover most of the concepts that you might be able to control in one way or another.
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