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Originally Posted by ArsTechnica
Ahhh, the joy of bringing home a shiny new computer: the speed, the snappiness, the smell. Unfortunately it isn't just the smell that fades over time. Many users believe that re-installing Windows is a kind of ritual of necessity which renews performance and stability. Indeed, 68% of Ars readers indicated that they re-install Windows every 2 years at a minimum, with more than half of that number doing it yearly. Why?
There are many purported reasons for so-called "WinRot," ranging from registry corruption to "DLL Hell" to disk fragmentation, and there are plenty of entertaining rants about WinRot available for your perusal.
One commonly accepted cause for WinRot is "DLL Hell"—a term referring to the myriad problems of managing DLL libraries. Multiple versions of the same DLL can cause any number of problems in Windows, from crashes to random performance problems. Related, and sometimes confused with this, are problems relating to uninstalled software, drivers, and utilities that can haunt a computer. Have you ever tried uninstalling a Norton product? That'll bring you WinRot in no time.
Microsoft is hoping to rid itself of rot with Windows Vista, although one wonders if their proposed solutions will do much good. Windows Vista will automatically defragment hard drives, use a new feature called SuperFetch to load frequently used programs into memory before they are needed, and utilize a new control panel applet to help identify specific areas that are causing performance problems. Furthermore, .NET and WinFX are being designed with DLL Hell in mind—something they have been waiting for since .NET was released.
Gabriel Aul, group program manager for the Windows division is quite confident that the changes Microsoft are making will be enough.
"Certainly a year after a user gets a Vista system, if they do the sort of standard things we encourage users to do (install Windows updates, etc.), it should run the same as when they initially got it."
SuperFetch is an evolution of an existing technology that is included with Windows XP which loads basic resources into memory before they are needed. SuperFetch is going to take that idea and run with it. It will monitor frequently used programs, on an individual basis, and load them into memory automatically.
Personally, I run Outlook, Yahoo Music Engine, and Visual Studio.net almost constantly. After a couple of days Vista will notice that trend and load the necessary components for those applications into memory for me so when I open one of those programs, it's almost instantaneous.
Nevertheless, some developers, like Suse Linux developer Andrea Arcangeli, are skeptical that SuperFetch will solve the problem of WinRot. In fact, it might even make performance worse.
"It might help on a 128MB system that flushes the cache away very fast, but on a 1GB system I doubt it can make a significant difference, and at first glance, it doesn't seem to be worth the complexity it would introduce," the Imola, Italy-based developer said in an e-mail interview.
Arcangeli said it was important to note that, in many cases, preloading new memory means flushing away an existing cache. "So it's not like it's a "risk-free" operation," he said. "It may be a good trade-off but it can actually slowdown the system instead of making it faster."
Microsoft is also implementing a control panel applet that will identify any performance problems with the system. The applet monitors your boot time and if it notices a slowdown it will log what applications have been added to startup. In other words, it is an automatic version of MSConfig.
Microsoft is hoping that these changes are enough to keep Vista from slowing down over time. What do our more Windows-savvy readers think?
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