Why does Microsoft Windows' performance appear to degrade over time?

Windows XP/2003 and earlier (can't attest to Windows Vista, but I suspect it's the same) all appear to become more sluggish over time as applications are installed and uninstalled.

This is not a scientifically tested observation, but more of a learned-through-experience piece of wisdom. (I've always suspected the registry as being behind the issue.)

Is there any concrete evidence of this degradation occurring, or it just an invalid perception of mine?

Solution 1:

I don't know what it is with the others here, I haven't met someone that doesn't know what you are talking about. There are many reasons for it, but some have not been identified.

I'll start with a better description for those that don't know. A fresh install of Windows will boot in under 1min. Over a period of 6 months the computer's boot time will not only slow but the entire experience of the OS is not on par with a clean slate. If you ever reinstall windows after 1 year of use you are sure to see the difference.

Reasons for the slow down have been attributed to increased clutter in your registry, and fragmentation of your disk. You have noticed that uninstalling does not help, this is in part because everything isn't cleaned from the registry. Ad-ware can be an issue, but this is usually not the cause.

You can get registry cleaners, defreg, and remove ad-ware, but even this will not return the system to its original speed, no one has come up with a reasonable explanation for this, it just is.

Note to others, this is not a normal behavior for an OS that is being used, I have been using Linux for 4 years, while this wasn't without re-installation, there had never been performance increase from a re-install or a slowdown from large amounts of installing/uninstalling programs.

Solution 2:

No-no, It's bit rot! ;)

Seriously, a windows installation does not degrade much if you don't use it at all. But a computer you're using will much likely have more and more software installed, many of wich automatically set themselves up to start running in the background on startup. In fact all computers, no matter what OS, can be expected to run slower as more and more services is running. Windows is perhaps notorious for allowing programs to install themselves in the "startup folder" or similar.

There allso seems to be an apparent loss of responsiveness with many programs installed, even if they are not running; I'm not sure what causes this, but a random guess would be that there is a bit more data to parse through each time a menu is displayed wich subjectively slows the computer down without really impairing the average processing power...

Solution 3:

Not sure what you're asking about without any more specifics. Older versions of Windows had some issues, but I've found XP and Vista to be pretty solid, to the point where I can leave them running for a couple weeks without a reboot and don't see any problems. I'm sure that certain software combinations might cause problems, but Windows itself (at least in recent versions) doesn't seem to degrade in performance.

Solution 4:

On the other hand, even a clean reinstall won't make an old computer feel as fast as it did when it were new; because we expect more and more. Ten years ago you used smaller simpler applications, wich used less CPU and RAM, today maybe even your word processor is using hardware accelerated 3D effects...

This, I beleave, is the number one cause of this (often not measurable) feeling that the computer is getting slower. (Of course on a windows system there may be measureable differences before and after reinstallation. Windows is a complex system doing a lot of things in the background, and some processes may not do a good enough job cleaning up after themselves. Windows have been criticized for many things during the years, and being to effective and not wasting resources is not one of them) ;P