Path: csiph.com!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feeder01.blueworldhosting.com!peer02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!post02.iad.highwinds-media.com!fx30.iad.POSTED!not-for-mail Sender: From: Joe Subject: Re: Damned Windows Bloat Newsgroups: comp.misc References: User-Agent: tin/2.3.1-20141224 ("Tallant") (UNIX) (Linux/4.7.2-ck1 (x86_64)) Lines: 56 Message-ID: <48FBz.1392$6O2.939@fx30.iad> X-Complaints-To: abuse@newsdemon.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2016 21:30:40 UTC Organization: http://www.NewsDemon.com Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2016 21:30:40 GMT X-Received-Bytes: 3115 X-Received-Body-CRC: 3066360743 Xref: csiph.com comp.misc:11985 Sylvia Else wrote: > On 12/09/2016 8:40 PM, Rich wrote: >> BartC wrote: >>> On 12/09/2016 09:16, Sylvia Else wrote: >>>> I wondered why my aging Windows 7 laptop was struggling to the point >>>> of unusability. I discovered that by the time it lets me do >>>> anything after booting, it's already loaded 1.8Gb of junk into its >>>> 2Gb memory. >>> >>> That's 1.8GB after a full restart? >>> ... >>> I suggest some of that might be apps that load themselves, which >>> might not be to do with Windows itself. Use the Task Manager to have >>> a look (Shift-Ctrl-Escape). Click 'Processes' tab then the box 'Show >>> processes from all users'. >> >> This is very possible, as nearly every third party program that one >> might install all end with a screen much like this: >> >> X - automatically start "this wonderful app" >> >> X - add a desktop shortcut for "this wonderful app" >> >> X - add "this wonderful app" to the start menu >> >> Where all of the options are checked on by default such that if one is >> not careful, after installing everything necessary to convert a plain, >> rather useless, basic windows install into a useful system, one is also >> auto-starting 10 or 20 different app's into the background (even though >> one might only use 1 or 2 of them together in any given moment). >> > > I routinely turn off the desktop shortcuts, but I doubt that they cause > much bloat (even Windows surely doesn't need to read the entire thing > just to find the icon). > > I suspect a big culprit are auto-updaters that are unreasonably large. > > On seeing how (relatively) responsive the system was in safe mode, I > contemplated just running in that mode all the time. > > Sylvia. Prefetching and Windows Search are the two things I shut off first on slow systems. But yeah they run some crazy updater in background on W10 that grinds things to a halt, I'm assuming it's for Windows Defender but haven't nailed it down yet. W7's updater was worse though, new installs there's a pack of like 5 KB's I need to install *before* updating. Most of those options taking forever to load up are on memory contrained systems that need to swap out to disk (ssd or hdd). Browsers are the worst for eating memory, I'm split between W7 with Palemoon or W10 with Edge for mem constrained systems. Forget Chrome or Firefox. Joe