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
I have never experienced such a thing. They do get slower on one install, (on Windows, Linux doesn’t as far as I can tell) but if you re-install, your computer should be fast again. The reason might be psychological, and also if you keep your software up to date, then it might become slower because software gets more and more bloated, same goes for webpages. These are essentially applications you’re running on your browser.
Absolutely not true. It could have been the case 10-15 years ago but it’s just nonsense to claim it nowadays. If you bought a half decent system in the last 10 years with at least a quad core i5 enough RAM and an SSD, you won’t have any issues with your system slowing down and not responding to clean installs and factory resets. On the other hand Google and Apple ending updates on devices 2-3 years old is the real fuckup.
Windows has a really poor handling of software installation/update. Basically, it’s up to the software to do 95% of the job.
For example, most software will share some common “redistribuable” if they are already there. But Windows don’t provide a way to know who is still using what, so most software simply don’t uninstall those when they upgrade themselves or when they get uninstalled.
Additionally, a lot of software need some “always on” service. They all do the same thing, typically, check for update, pre-load the app for faster start, receive any associated file access request. But those service start with Windows and run continuously, taking a little bit of compute cycles.
Full disks are slower, especially with SSD. Data need to be relocated when it grows, files stop being continuous.
All those things add up, and the system become more and more busy all the time. Doing a full reinstallation get rid of all this.
Most hardware doesn’t really get slower with age. It may heat a little bit more and consume a little bit more energy, but usually there is room before reaching thermal throttling, and before that is reached, it doesn’t really slow anything down. So that isn’t the main culprit, unless you toy with overclocking.
Unless the storage (hard drive) degrades, they don’t. They perform the same as they did when new.
What might be happening is the software becoming more demanding. The requirements for comfortably browsing the internet in 2010 is very different from 2021.
Back then, 720p30 youtube videos where all the rage. Now you have 4K60 and even 8K60 do deal with. 2gb of ram was plenty for running Windows 7 and a browser. Now it’s really not enough for Windows 10.
I wipe and re-install windows on my laptop annually. Takes me a weekend to get back up & running – ie downloading and re-installing my apps, running all the updates. When I’m finished, it’s like having a new laptop, it runs that much faster.
Have been doing this for over a decade now over multiple laptops.
A lot of it has to do with Windows patches. Microsoft appears to do no performance testing on their service packs what so ever. So when you update your PC you are just piling on more load for it to deal with.
Either that or they purposely reduced the speed of older OSes to ensure people would upgrade. In addition to that if you have an old school spinning disk it might get fragmented. The ELI5 explaination for file fragmentation is that over time files get stored in a random and not at all organized way making it slower to find stuff. It’s like when you don’t organize your stuff for a while.
There can be other reasons but basically those two are the primary reasons I have found.
Source, been fixing computers for living since 1995
There are already allot of great answers. I just wanted to add that I noticed you specified Windows machines. I have 15 years in IT, and I can tell you that macs are not exempt from age or high mileage either.
The reason macs seem to age better is that you can’t buy a cheap mac. Apple starts their machines at a higher pricing point. A ton of very cheap Windows machines will muddy the water. However, spend the same price on a Windows machine and you can actually get better performance in some cases as you can get higher components for the dollar if you’re not paying for the name and aluminum chassis.
These days it doesn’t. There is a degree of newer software being written for newer and faster processors, but these days the range of processing power varies a ton and simply browsing the web should not be slow. I’ve had my currently laptop for 2 years, my wife has had hers for about 5, neither are any slower than when we bought them. If your computer is getting slower as time goes on you need to ensure defender is turned on and that you aren’t running dodgy programs or accidentally installed adware. Might be worth checking task manager to see what’s chewing up CPU cycles if that’s the issue.
Hard drives can degrade but if you have an SSD it’s unlikely the case, and I would be surprised if a 5 year old computer is running spinners aside from mass secondary storage.
The answers about things like circuits getting hot and degrading is wrong. I burn the hell out of my laptops, especially my work laptop (like I would be shocked if I didn’t peak 90C daily) because it’s unavoidable and a macbook is just what they offer. If heat is damaging components you will start to see things like sporadic crashes, or it simply won’t turn on. It would take some really odd circumstances for heat damage to cause slowdowns. Computers typically will throttle the CPU when it gets hot to prevent damage, but that would be true from day 1. If anyone wants proof of this my 2011 sandy bridge CPU was only recently retired and replaced, has chugged along the same for almost a decade, and it’s gotten some heavy stress put on it from gaming to running as a pretty active hypervisor.
Slowdowns these days are almost exclusively related to the software, usually poorly written or malicious software.
It Windows. It’s core design is incapable of changing due to a need to maintain backwards compatibility with software written 20 or 30 years back. It can’t even do no brainer stuff like delete the contents of temp file folders on bootup… no instead you have to run disk cleanup to do that manually. Probably because some shitty developer of some shitty enterprise app decided to treat a temp folder like a storage location for permanent program data.
I have run a lot of OSes over the years and Windows on the desktop is the only one that needs a fresh reinstall every few years. Windows on the server doesnt suffer from the same downside in my experience, presumably because most of the cruft accumulation is the result of adding / deleting software packages and the way competent admins operate a server precludes a lot of that kind of thing.
Believe it or not Macs can get slow as they age and sometimes it helps to reinstall Mac OS on it to freshen it up.
Windows has a nifty “reset” function to reset everything to the default state and get rid of the bloatware and unnecessary software.
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