Every Windows user has come across this at some point after using a Windows machine for a couple of years – without fail, every single version of Windows I have used (not including 3.1 that just sat on top of MS-DOS), including 95, 98, NT4.0, 2000, XP, after a period of about 2 – 3 years of intensive use and of (and I think this is the killer) installing and uninstalling multiple applications over time, Windows boot up time and performance drops to the point of pure frustration.
I’m sure this is something that can be resolved, it’s just that MS has no incentive to fix this issue. I’ve used multiple versions of Linux on different machines on and off over the years and no version of Linux I’ve used has this same problem. I have Fedora Core running on a small Pentium running this website, and that box is exactly the same, all the time, the performance has never degraded over time the way that Windows does. To really make a point about the unreliability of Windows, I rarely reboot my Linux server, perhaps once a year, and normally that’s only because of a power outage or because I had to turn off the power to do some DIY in the house. From day to day usage of Windows over the past 13 years as a developer I would never, ever, trust a production system running on Windows, it’s just not stable enough.
Anyway, back to my point about no incentive to fix the performance degradation, isn’t it strange how the performance of a Windows installation degrades to the point of severe annoyance, to roughly coincide with each new version of ‘new and improved’ Windows?