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Anyone else noticed that "Software Bloat" in PCs is getting worse?

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The now-famous Law of Computer Bloat, as shown graphically in this Gizmodo article, doesn't quite seem to cut it any more.

It portrays the difference between potential performance & actual performance as a constant proportion, but the gap seems to be widening.

Take, for example, the specifications & performance of the three main PCs I've owned:

1. Windows 95 on a 233MHz processor with 128MB RAM, acquired 1997:
Took up to five seconds to launch an app, but was completely stable & ran pretty fast for a machine of its era. Booted in about thirty seconds, shut-down in five. Never crashed or BSoD'd until the BIOS chip on its cheap motherboard wore-out.

2. Windows XP on a 2.1GHz processor with 512MB RAM, acquired 2002:
Launched apps almost instantly, sometimes froze for a couple of seconds while saving work. That said, it went like a rocket most of the time. Took about twenty seconds to boot & ten to shut-down. Never crashed or BSoD'd until I got a virus due to accidentally disabling my AV software while updating a third-party application.

3. Windows 7 on a 2.4GHz processor with 1.5GB of RAM, acquired 2010:
Can take five to ten seconds to launch apps, always freezes while saving substantial changes to files, can lag quite badly when playing media in spite of a reasonable graphics card. Often will not boot, requiring use of repair CD, can take nearly a minute to boot when it does decide to & as much as thirty seconds to shut-down. Has only BSoD'd once in all the time I've had it (when I attached a second monitor).

Why is it that; as my computers get exponentially more powerful, in accordance with Moore's Law, the actual productivity they support seems to be dropping off in a linear fashion that implies my computer will be more-or-less unusable by about 2015?! :Grimmace:
 
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The one similarity I see in all of your examples, is that you've never used a decent amount of RAM in your machines. How do you even go about getting 1.5 gigs of RAM?! I've never seen a current configuration with less than 2 gigs at the LEAST! And Windows 7 with less than 2 gigs ? LMSAO!

We can get into the specifics as to why Windows needs at least 4 gigs to run sort of efficiently, but that would be a long story which I'm not all that hyped about. Do you own a Mac or are you solely a Windows guy? Either way... do your poor machine a favor and feed it some RAM!

Doug
 
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What about a 4th option? - "I don't have that problem because I own a Mac" ;)
 

RavingMac

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I can sort of see where you are going--but only sort of.

What drove me to Mac in the first place was my last Windows machine (Gateway Laptop) that got progressively slower to boot and log onto my network. I reformatted and reinstalled Windows and boot up times dropped back to like new, then began the required updates and security patches. By the time I was done I was back where I had started, so I got mad and grabbed a Linux distro and installed it. Took me a day to get everything sorted out, drivers and updates but when I was done my machine was a fast as it ever was.
Six months of living with Linux made me decide to try Mac and I've been seeing the same levels of performance I got out of Linux ever since.

Having said all that, I have no real idea what is going on now as that was four years ago. I still use Windows daily but it is at work, I don't maintain the systems and they generally don't come to me with all the bloatware on them.
 
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I think you just illustrated why I went Mac. Previously...

1995: Win95 on Pentium 75/8MB RAM - Ran like a top for exactly 1 month and then would horribly crash. Eventually got sick of it and gave it to my Grandma. She still thinks its top of the line and offers it back to me all the time. If she only knew...

1998: Win98 on P366Mhz/64MB RAM - Thanks to the AMD chip, ran absolutely bulletproof. My one Windows success story. It still runs decent actually.

2000: Win98SE on AMD 1200+/512MB RAM - Spuddered, coughed and died gloriously. When the chip went, it even had a mini-nuke mushroom cloud. Coolest thing I ever saw. I grinned like a 4-year old until it hit me I had no computer.

2002: WinXP on AMD 2700+/1GB RAM - Ran kinda decent. Went from being just "okay" to mildly retarded over the scope of several years. Eventually hard hard drive failure, video card failure, power supply failure, and then I lost faith in it.

2011: Mac i5-Core /12GB RAM - Runs wonderfully. No complaints.
 

robduckyworth


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lets not Windows bash, eh? ;)

I think to do a fair comparison, we need to compare recent Windows vs. OSX machines, not 2002 vs 2011, or the OP's latest, obviously mal-nutritioned RAM-wise PC.

I have seen fair amounts of very stable and decent PCs. the same with Macs.

with the increase in production of flash memory and SSDs, i think we will see some very stable computers in they years to come, regardless of what OS they are using or what brand they are.

Software can only get better, unless the developers reeaaallly mess up.
 

iWhat

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What about a 4th option? - "I don't have that problem because I own a Mac" ;)

Having a Mac for so long now, I forgot about the bloatware. In the past, I remember anything with a trial, I went straight to the uninstall window and got rid of it. :p
 

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Don't they have crapware uninstallers?

I only have my Custom built Windows 7 Gaming rig and my Macs, so I wouldn't know anything about bloatware.
 
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Do you own a Mac or are you solely a Windows guy? Either way... do your poor machine a favor and feed it some RAM!
I use the iMacs at my university on a regular basis, but at home I'm currently a Windows & Ubuntu guy (I do own a Mac, but it's an old G3 iMac running 9.2 & X10.0 that I bought on a whim, so hardly top of the line!).

I plan on getting a Mac for university this September, but until I've got the money together, I'm stuck with my cobbled-together PC...

I would upgrade my computer's 1.5GB RAM, but the motherboard can't handle any more than 2GB anyway (it's a refurb'd catalogue terminal from a university library)! Doesn't seem worth the effort of upgrading by all of 512MB for a computer I'll likely not use for much longer!

And both computers I had before had the max RAM their cheap mobos could handle... :\
 
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What about a 4th option? - "I don't have that problem because I own a Mac" ;)
I did consider that as an option, but as Macs don't seem to have this problem, it seemed appropriate in this one case to make this poll about PCs only. If you don't own a PC in addition to your Mac, then you needn't worry about the topic of this thread! ;P
 
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What drove me to Mac in the first place was my last Windows machine (Gateway Laptop) that got progressively slower to boot and log onto my network. I reformatted and reinstalled Windows and boot up times dropped back to like new, then began the required updates and security patches. By the time I was done I was back where I had started, so I got mad and grabbed a Linux distro and installed it. Took me a day to get everything sorted out, drivers and updates but when I was done my machine was a fast as it ever was.
Six months of living with Linux made me decide to try Mac and I've been seeing the same levels of performance I got out of Linux ever since.
I'm exactly the same, my computer is slowing down more & more all the time, I can actually see the amount of free space on the HDD decreasing every time I start the computer even though I haven't installed anything new!

As with you, using Linux has breathed new life into my PC - and I've found it's UNIX-like architecture to be superior to that of Windows - but I still want better hardware & if I'm gonna buy a new computer I may as well buy one pre-installed with, & optimised for, the most advanced UNIX-based OS on the market: Mac OS X

Hence why I'm gonna buy a Mac (and, of course, I can always put Linux, or even Windows, on it if I really need them for something).
 
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Don't they have crapware uninstallers?

I only have my Custom built Windows 7 Gaming rig and my Macs, so I wouldn't know anything about bloatware.

This. I have never owned a PC that came with a bunch of bloatware. Why?

I build them myself. Would be nice to see a day where I can build my own Mac at home.. Legally and fully functional... :) OSX86, what a joke.
 
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Windows seems to have big problems with file registry as well. The larger the and more fragmented the registry becomes the slower it seems to run. The machine I am posting this on is a windows pc I hope to be well rid of once my new mac gets here. With all the updates my os has nearly doubled in size from its original install even after cleanup.

8GB of ram and 3ghz you would think it wouldn't have such lag. Even with a clean install so I can sell the thing it still is slow and horrible. I'll probably have more luck parting it out individually.
 
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Windows seems to have big problems with file registry as well. The larger the and more fragmented the registry becomes the slower it seems to run. The machine I am posting this on is a windows pc I hope to be well rid of once my new mac gets here. With all the updates my os has nearly doubled in size from its original install even after cleanup.

8GB of ram and 3ghz you would think it wouldn't have such lag. Even with a clean install so I can sell the thing it still is slow and horrible. I'll probably have more luck parting it out individually.

You could partition it do a clean install then run Ubuntu on the second half.
 
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If I ever buy PCs I buy the business versions so that don't have junk installed. Or, if I need to purchase a standard PC for a client, I wipe the whole drive as soon as I get it and start fresh.'
 

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If I ever buy PCs I buy the business versions so that don't have junk installed. Or, if I need to purchase a standard PC for a client, I wipe the whole drive as soon as I get it and start fresh.'

Doesn't the business version usually cost more? So, you pay more money to avoid the bloatware?
 
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Doesn't the business version usually cost more? So, you pay more money to avoid the bloatware?

Not really...I get them from the Dell overstock store so they don't cost as much as a brand-new machine. I feel the business machines are much more study in design too. I had a gateway a few years back that had hinge failure three times. The D630 PC I have now is built like a tank.
 

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Software "bloat" is by no means limited to Windows. Mac apps and the OS are just as fat as anything else out there. I still don't fully understand why 10.6 on my new MacBook Pro takes about 1.3GB of RAM just to boot cold, whereas the same exact software load on my older 2008 MacBook Pro required just over 700MB.

Why is software getting more and more bloated? Well, hardware is cheap and plentiful from the perspective of the developer. And they also assume that you only run their one app on your system, so it shouldn't have to conserve resources in any way. One of the things I find particularly offensive is Adobe Reader, which is a fairly simple app, but requires 100x more resources than FoxIt Reader on Windows (which does pretty much the same thing).

But I guess I've come to accept this "bloat" as the new normal... it's just that as a former Amiga user (a platform that was synonymous with extreme efficiency and speed), it's hard to fully grok that in these times, an OS *requires* almost twice as much RAM as it would take to store an encyclopedia's worth of information, just to boot.
 
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I think I read somewhere that it is not necessarily using that ram ( the OS ) but is reserving it, but don't quote me on it. I'll try and find the source. Certain processes will use a different amount of memory. I am not sure about the Mac but if I compare my old PC to my old laptop side by side the exact same system process will be using up to 4 times as much on the PC even though both are sitting idle and the laptop is loaded with other bundled junk causing 35 more processes to run. The laptop has 3GB and the desktop 8GB.

I'll have to do some digging around and find that source.
 
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The now-famous Law of Computer Bloat, as shown graphically in this Gizmodo article, doesn't quite seem to cut it any more.

It portrays the difference between potential performance & actual performance as a constant proportion, but the gap seems to be widening.

Take, for example, the specifications & performance of the three main PCs I've owned:

1. Windows 95 on a 233MHz processor with 128MB RAM, acquired 1997:
Took up to five seconds to launch an app, but was completely stable & ran pretty fast for a machine of its era. Booted in about thirty seconds, shut-down in five. Never crashed or BSoD'd until the BIOS chip on its cheap motherboard wore-out.

2. Windows XP on a 2.1GHz processor with 512MB RAM, acquired 2002:
Launched apps almost instantly, sometimes froze for a couple of seconds while saving work. That said, it went like a rocket most of the time. Took about twenty seconds to boot & ten to shut-down. Never crashed or BSoD'd until I got a virus due to accidentally disabling my AV software while updating a third-party application.

3. Windows 7 on a 2.4GHz processor with 1.5GB of RAM, acquired 2010:
Can take five to ten seconds to launch apps, always freezes while saving substantial changes to files, can lag quite badly when playing media in spite of a reasonable graphics card. Often will not boot, requiring use of repair CD, can take nearly a minute to boot when it does decide to & as much as thirty seconds to shut-down. Has only BSoD'd once in all the time I've had it (when I attached a second monitor).

Why is it that; as my computers get exponentially more powerful, in accordance with Moore's Law, the actual productivity they support seems to be dropping off in a linear fashion that implies my computer will be more-or-less unusable by about 2015?! :Grimmace:

This example is completely invalid, your variable is time, and the windows OS. However, your using a control, which in my opinion would be matching the Software or OS with the fastest and highest quality hardware available at the time of purchase. Your first two examples, depending on when you purchased then in that year, your hardware is almost top of the line as fast as it comes. But using less that 2GB of RAM in 2010... thats unreal. This comparison was doomed from the start to make it look like Windows 7 failed to progress.

To put things simply, this would the same as comparing A base model Corvette, Z06, and ZR1 but putting an 4 banger in the ZR1, then stating "Conclusion: Chevrolet top of the line ZR1 fails to impress"
 

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