Untrue, eh? Suppose “7″ installs a trojan and invites a dozen of its friends to run on your machine. Do you have a core and a gigabyte for each and a NIC for each and an ISP for each so that no bottlenecks get plugged? Suppose your hard drive fragments so that every file is in a dozen parts and you malware scanner has to sift through all of them as well as the applications and OS…. If you install “7″ on an old PC with slow 40gB hard drive and 256 MB or RAM it will thrash like crazy. That will get worse as the disc fragments and more updates are done and more bloat added. Of course “7″ slows down. That’s no myth. What is a myth is that “7″ is immune from the host of malware designed for it or for its applications or that NTFS never fragments. Also, on day one, “7″ will be slower than XP or GNU/Linux. Asking a PC to do more irrelevant stuff is a great way to slow it down.
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“Suppose “7″ installs a trojan and invites a dozen of its friends to run on your machine.”
Well, Robert, suppose that doesn’t happen. Then what? With Win7 you have a new, up to date OS. With Linux you are back in the 70′s trying to grep and awk and such. People look at you funny.
“a new, up to date OS” with 17 year old bugs in it. How many more ancient examples of Microsoft’s software craftsmanship lie buried, waiting to be exploited the cybercriminals? If the past is any indication, thousands.
There’s two problem to the statement that windows 7 slows down due to fragmantation. First, Windows 7 comes with auto-defrag by defalt. And second, Windows 7 isn’t the only operating system that fragment over time, Linux and Mac OS does too. On Linux, until recently, you couldn’t defrag, so the only way to fight fragmentation is to reinstall. (Thank god for ext4
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“f you install “7″ on an old PC with slow 40gB hard drive and 256 MB or RAM it will thrash like crazy.”
Pog:
Lets be real here – my 11 year old dell xps550 had better specs (512Mb RAM) and ran a modern LINUX like crap – actually SLOWER than Windows NT 4 and the obsolete set of apps that I paved over to install it.
Bottom line – Obsolete is obsolete!
An old PC is not obsolete as a thin client unless the display resolution is too poor or the NIC is too slow. Folks here were satisfied when XP ran on one of these things. They were overjoyed when I put GNU/Linux on them and their mouths dropped open when I use them as thin clients. My grade 9s go through an X “chooser” to get to the terminal server and the dillying is worthwhile because the performance rocks. They would need a brand new PC to do as well. Actually, no. The terminal server is faster than our brand new Lenovos with only a single SATA drive because so many files are cached. I have quad SCSI 37gB on the terminal server so if it has to seek it can seek four ways.
Auto-defrag is just another parasite like malware as far as I am concerned. I can defrag a GNU/Linux system any time I want by copying to another drive or server and copying back. I have never felt the need in many years. I have done a bunch of dist-upgrades which replaced most of the files on the systems and they end up being snappier than ever (with Debian’s parallelized init scripts).
“I can defrag a GNU/Linux system any time I want by copying to another drive or server and copying back.”
Except that takes considerably longer, because defragmentation programs only move files that are actually fragmented, skipping over the ones that aren’t. Hence the reason these programs don’t just copy data from A to B.
If storage needs defragmenting a large proportion of the files need to be moved anyway. Part of the process can be used as a backup as well. Copy>verify>delete>restore does take time but it does a great job.
Actually copying from A to B is exactly how defragmentation programs work. Normally they’ll copy from one part of the disk to another.
The last time I defraged a Windows hard drive it was XP. XP like all of it’s predecessors copies the files to the end of the disk. If you’re running a “full defrag” then it copies everything into tightly packed contiguous blocks which will instantly become fragmented again the minute you use the PC.
The worst part though is Windows inability to defrag it’s own page file. Which of course sits on the same hard drive partition as every other file. And like every other file it also get fragmented. But Windows refuses to move it. Making a proper full defrag impossible.
Defragmenting in a Microsoft OS has never been fast. It was slow as hell in DOS and it’s slow as hell in Windows. It’s one of those maintenance tasks you set up before you got to bed and leave running all night.
Personally I’ve never felt the need to defragment an ext3 or ext4 formatted hard drive. I’m just not getting a performance reduction from storing data and moving it around.
Windows 7 does slow down over time. If not from a fragmented file system then from the method of patching that Microsoft employs.
As to older hardware there are many modern distro’s that do quite well on even lean hardware. DSL, Puppy and Slackware all handle PII era hardware and are pretty complete “Web 2.0″ capable. Note that these are not abandon-ware OS’es but modern maintained software with active repositories.