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My (windows based) laptop is coming up to six years old now, and it still has semi respectable specs - Core 2 Duo 2.6ghz, 1gb Ram, 500gb HDD, 256mb ATI graphics card. Although the hardware is on its last legs, I am quite proficient with XP and keeping things nice and tidy.
I have minimal start up processes and defrag every six weeks or so.
Now I am experiencing slow downs, but I do not think it is my software being the cause. I am pretty sure it is my HDD being old and decrepit that is doing it.
- Do HDDs get slower with age / use?
- On average, how often should I be replacing my HDD?
- Is there any way of testing / monitoring the HDD speeds?
Had never knew that installing and uninstalling programs would cause slowdowns. Is this true? – JFW – 2010-08-18T10:49:51.263
2If often happens that programs install additional DLL files, and some of them can be shared with other programs. When you uninstall the program, these shared DLL's are left in place in order to not disturb the other programs that use it - but just as often, you have no other programs installed that need it. So your Windows installation slowly fills up with unused DLL files. This is just one example how Windows slowly deteriorates. It's noticeable when installing/uninstalling a lot, or with aging Windows installations. – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun – 2010-08-18T11:17:04.153
2Good answer, +1. All is true here ... however, processors do work slower with age. The constant heat they are supporting over the years makes them burn out slowly. Usually, a processor's lifetime is 7 years, but it may last much longer. Your Core2 Duo runs on lower temperatures and has sophisticated error correcting, so you should have no trouble with it. – Patkos Csaba – 2010-08-18T11:21:08.047
Really useful information. I think it is time for a fresh OS install then. Lots and lots of apps have been added / removed, along with a bunch of malware. Thanks! – danixd – 2010-08-18T18:49:24.060
When I bought my last laptop, the service tech told me I needed to reinstall Windows every six months. I haven't reinstalled yet, but I haven't done a lot of install/uninstall sequences. One web designer referred to the Windows slowdown as bit rot. – BillThor – 2010-08-18T20:30:54.513
I wouldn't recommend a reinstall every half year for anyone, only to power users. Bit rot is a good word for it. (I often compare it to a harbor that accumulates sand over time and needs to be dug deeper again every decade, though it sounds a lot more eloquent in Danish.) – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun – 2010-08-19T06:42:23.503
Don't forget the bloated/fragmented registry from installing and uninstalling many programs over the years, keep your disk defragmented too. I agree slow down is caused more by the Windows OS than anything else. One way to tell for sure is do a clean install, update and defrag it, and see if performance returns. OSX does not seem to have this problem with older installations that become slow like Windows does. – Moab – 2010-08-19T15:56:55.193
Anecdote about how long drives last, in terms of mechanical wear: We had a Macintosh in the family, being shared by 3 people, with a 20 megabytes(!) SCSI drive. The drive ran fine for over ten years. At some point one of the bearings started to whine, but the drive worked fine for several more years and was never replaced. These days it's hard to imagine that three people can share a 20MB drive that contains the OS, all programs, some games, and all data. We only really used floppies for additional games, and data backup. – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun – 2010-08-24T14:57:06.207
Linux doesn't seem to suffer from bit rot since I uninstall and install atleast 5 programs a day and it is still as fast as day one (Arch Linux). This is on a 90mbps SATA II 16ms access hard drive – Suici Doga – 2017-10-26T11:27:10.990
Not true in all cases. I've had a 2 mechanical HDD that have reduced to about 1/10th of their normal speed, over the entire surface of the disk, but continued to operate 100% reliably at that slower speed. Test process was, format, write 256MiB files to whole disk then binary compare with the source. It slowed from about 30~40MiB/s to about 3MiB/s read/write speed. Testing with other same make/model HDD in the same USB port and removable HDD caddy confirmed that setup was capable of 30~40MiB/s. However 3MiB/s was unacceptable and we stopped using the slow disks. – BeowulfNode42 – 2018-03-22T02:11:50.790