I fired up an old Pentium III, 512MB laptop I own, I don’t use it as the screen has an expensive to fix fault which is a shame as its a tiny little lightweight Tosh but I have kept it as an emergency machine as its just about usable. It runs Windows 98. It’s been a long while since I have used 98 and was shocked how quickly it booted and how fast all the software ran.
It got me thinking, at first I though bloody M$ always making things slower then I realised the difference in speed was mainly due to non Microsoft software!
Win2000 upwards, brought nice little tools for software vendors to keep their software up to date, I think all these pieces of software, all running ‘services’ is causing complete sludgedown of machines. A good example of a culprit is Apple.
Apple slowing windows down? Gasp, surely not! Well these days if you want to use the web with its full media rich experience, you are not going to avoid Quicktime, music video etc just disappears without it. When you install Quicktime, you are pretty much forced to install iTunes. Now you can opt out, but it isn’t easy and I bet over 99% of Quicktime users have iTunes installed as a result whether they like it or not.
The result was gaining some software I didn’t need as I prefer Winamp and won’t buy my music from Apple for a number of reasons. I was left with a system that had some software always running checking I had the latest and greatest version of iTunes which I don’t even use. This has to load up, and check in with Apple on a regular basis slowing down my machine, and taking up memory for no gain to me at all.
Of course having a bit of knowlege about Windows, I removed the service, but that isn’t that straightforward for the average user who wouldn’t even know such things exist. I guess it’s great having software update automatically, but why do it with a separate always running service rather than within the software package itself, where it could check if and when the software is used?
I have singled out Apple here because of the iTunes/Quicktime thing, but all the media players do it Winamp included and of course every single other bit of software you can imagine, that’s dozens and dozens of little applications all fighting to connect to their parent and make sure you have the greatest experience of their product possible while making sure you wait for 10 minutes to be able to run anything at all after booting, great!
So don’t always blame MS for how slow Windows has got! I will be putting Red Hat on this laptop soon, one of the reasons I booted up the old laptop in the first place was to make sure I still had a backup machine that run OK just in case I messed things up!
