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Why is my computer so slow? |
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Author: Agner Fog | Date: 2009-10-06 07:48 |
When I buy a new computer, I am happy that it runs much faster than the previous one I had. But after a year or two it gradually becomes slower and slower. Finally, I have to buy a new and faster computer and the history starts over again. But why? I remember the good old 1980's where a PC was just a PC. The computing power of the original IBM PCs was ten thousand times less than today, and so was the RAM and hard disk capacity. Yet, they appeared to be faster than computers are today. In those days, you could press a key (there was no mouse) and expect to get an immediate response on the screen. Today, you sometimes get an immediate response, sometimes not. The other day I had to wait more than half a minute from I clicked on a drop-down menu before the menu actually appeared on my screen. The computer was out of RAM and was busy installing an update I never asked for. Come on, computer industry, you can do better than that! My computer is ten thousand times faster than it was back then, and yet I am wasting more time waiting in front of my screen than I was back in the old DOS days. As you know, I am doing a lot of research on computer performance, and here is my list of the main culprits:
Now we are getting closer to answering the question of why a computer gets slower after a couple of years. Every time a new piece of software is installed we are also installing a potential new resource-thief. Newer software is possibly programmed with more resource-hungry high-level tools and frameworks than older software. We keep updating software all the time. Sometimes it is updated automatically. Sometimes we update it because we want new features. And sometimes we have to update our software because the old version is incompatible with something else we have installed on the computer. The increasing number of background processes use more RAM. The system database keeps growing. And the hard disk becomes fragmented. There are many incentives to installing new software: A website that we visit requires a new version of Java, Flash, QuickTime, or whatever. A document we have received requires a new version of the word processor. A software package that we install tells us that it needs the latest version of .NET. And the next gadget we buy tells us to update to a newer version of Windows. A lot of the software we are running and the websites we are visiting have built-in incentives to make us update and buy more. The software industry keeps making products that require bigger and faster computers. And the hardware industry follows Moore's law and produces ever more powerful computers that make these developments in the software industry possible. This is what keeps the whole business going. I don't think there is an evil conspiracy between the hardware and software industry to make us buy more and more. It's simply the market mechanisms. The software industry is focusing on producing more advanced features in a shorter development time for competitive reasons. This makes them choose the highest level of development tools. As consumers, we would be more satisfied if software developers would focus more on optimizing performance and minimizing resource use. New software products are typically tested under the most favorable conditions. The software developer may test his product on the fastest state-of-the-art computer that is running nothing else. Network features are tested with an isolated test server - not on an overloaded server in a crowded network. It is time that software developers begin to test their products under worst case conditions rather than best case conditions. |
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