I am not a person who habitually defers software updates - I try to keep my machines up to date, but I know there are people who have (possibly by quite complex means) stopped their Windows 10 machines from applying updates. It’s these people whose feedback I particularly want.
Background: I have an old-ish HP laptop in which the wireless adaptor died - I replaced the laptop, but I kept the old one for offline stuff such as driving my laser engraver and offline video playing.
This old laptop remained unconnected to any network for maybe 18 months. Over that time, and despite fairly modest and occasional use, there was a perceptible increase in both boot time, and generall lagginess during use - it got steadily worse across the period.
The other day, I decided to plug a cable into it and I left it running updates for an evening - it’s now fully updated and is actually running much faster - boot time is back to what it was. Performance during use likewise.
So why did this machine slow down? I could understand that a machine that is online, and is caching updates, but not applying them, could experience performance impact, but this machine has been completely offline - so it wouldn’t even have known that there were updates.
I am not normally an MS-skeptic, but my cynical passenger wants me to suspect that MS may have included throttling into the OS, in order to encourage people to keep updated (i.e. by creating chatter to the effect “I just updated Windows! It’s so much faster now!”
So, users who have held back updates (albeit with your machines probably online, unlike mine), have you noticed a performance hit?