Windows 10 without SSD

Windows 7 definitely has lower hardware requirements than 10 (and upcoming 11). Install XP and your machine will scream. Newer OS’s never run faster on older hardware than their predecessors. And this is true for macOS, iOS, etc.

Tried it again with 16GB RAM, just to see what happens, and the extra 8GB RAM didn’t make any difference (although it may make a difference for other uses of the machine). It claims it’s running at 20-25% RAM utilization now, so no surprise that 8GB was enough.

I’ve decided it’s just Windows 10 and all the crap that’s accumulated, not so much one or the other. Everything’s running, and starting up, and checking for updates, and updating, and updating log files and registry entries to record the starting up and checking and updating, and all being monitored by the AV, and it all adds up to 90% disk utilization for the first 3 minutes, then 50% for another 5 minutes, and then random stuff constantly starting up in the background (WTF is a ‘MS Edge’ process doing starting up?) until I get sick of it and turn it off. On the slower disk, all too much competing with each other.

Even when I leave it on for a couple of hours, it’s still busy enough to be unresponsive when starting typical modern bloated applications, and I have no reason to do that: with the SSD, it starts faster than any other desktop OS and computer I’ve ever used, and all the competing crap is invisible.

From what I experienced with nine machines of different configurations and uses (from routine browsing to video and audio editing and games, including four laptops), slowdowns eventually take place with hard drives, and it can get bad, e.g., it takes a minute for the menu from the smart button or the context button to show up. This may continue even after I do a manual defrag using the built-in program, do a boot defrag using the same, do an sfc /scannow and chkdsk /r (sometimes there are issues that are fixed and sometimes there are none, but the system is still slow), use a third-party defrag, etc. It also happens after a few weeks, after the system runs fast.

I switched to SSDs given the request of some users (for three desktops and three laptops, and of varying ages–from around five years old to a few months old, with one desktop where the hard drive was failing), and the problems disappeared. It’s still taking place for two machines using hard drives for the boot.

However, I noticed that there are still a few problems even with SSDs, like around ten seconds of delay to view folders containing thousands of files, and they sometimes disappear when I do an sfc /scannow, which detects and fixes problems with the system. I don’t know what causes that corruption for systems. Some say it’s due to some drivers, or third-party programs, or a system update.

One more thing: at least for desktops (I don’t use laptops often), I notice an additional improvement if there’s 16 GB of RAM, esp. when opening browsers with lots of tabs, using graphics and video editors, etc.

Generally true, of course, but not always. Windows Vista was a bloated pig, and Windows 7 was primarily a bunch of performance optimizations and some functional improvements. Vista was a dog’s breakfast in terms of its design goals; being a focused evolution and fine-tuning of Vista was a large part of what makes Windows 7 one of Microsoft’s “good” operating systems.

I guess there are exceptions to most rules :slight_smile:

Windows 10 is also one of their good OSs. Of course that is the generic “Windows 10”. There are a lot of versions of Windows 10 in the 6 years of major releases - some had flaws that took correcting.