I can bring any system to its knees

Earlier this year I bought a new computer. And now I seem to have broken it. I appear to have a rare talent, I can over time reduce any computer to abject uselessness. I have behind me a trail of Dell, Novatech and even Apple machines which have slowed down to a snails pace and become much harder to use. Just because I’ve been using them for a while.

My lovely Sony Ultrabook is still mostly lovely, but the touch screen driver has acquired an irritating habit of suddenly tapping the touch screen rapidly and making the mouse unusable. I can get rid of that problem by using CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the lock screen but it is still irritating. I’m not sure if it is hardware or software to be honest, it seemed to start after I took the (apparently stupid) step of enabling the automatic download of updates and the machine turned itself on in my bag and tried to commit thermal suicide.

I can live with the occasional touch screen foibles though, what I’m finding much harder to deal with is the way that the “Anti Malware Service Executable” will suddenly and violently take my machine away from me by pushing the hard drive activity to 100%. This happens after a reboot and when I’m trying to get something done and is very annoying. The stupid process seems to have no way of working out that “Robert is actually using the machine now” and just wades in and breaks everything.

While it is amusingly ironic that a program designed to protect me against my machine becoming clogged and unusable is actually making my machine clogged and unusable, it is also darned annoying.

Verity Stob writes of cruft, which builds up and slows down a machine, and I’m probably suffering a bit from that. I think that when Windows 8.1 shows up I’ll do a complete re-install and see if that sorts things out.

Comments

[Jules]

Does this only happen with Windows machines. Are Apple and OSX any better ? I dunno, but Mirosoft needs to get this sorted.

Its all very frustraing to the average users, which is why a lot of general users are so attracted to lightweight tablets and their slimmed down Operating Systems. But IE10 is awful on my Laptop. (IE10, just like IE9, was supposed to be new, faster, zippy etc, just like IE11 will be) It is because of this experience that many users blame Microsoft, and want to move away from their eco systems. So they need to ensure that Windows will be more robust against deterioting perfomance

Having said that, My Windows 7 Desktop still seems to run OK for me after 18 months on a Quad core 8Gb RAM machine, and excessive slow downs very rare. (I remoevd Norton Anti Virus) And Windows 8 still seems very zippy, but that environent does not yet get much use..

[Álison Fernandes]

You need to disable the "Allow wake timers" Sleep power setting.

Tip: Use Battery Care, activate the "Automatically select power plans" in the Power Plans options and configure the power plans to only allow wake timers if plugged in (it will allow Windows 8 to do Maintenance while you're sleeping, if you leave the compute... Sleeping... as well)

[BrianT]

I've recently been doing some work on a 150 GB Sql Server database on my W8 laptop and I've worked out that there are certain steps to take to turn that 60 minute query into a 5 - 10 minute one -
1) Switch off anti-virus in MS Defender (but switch on again once done) - note there are 2 boxes to untick
2) switch off superfetch in services (have left it disabled with no ill effects but then I spend 95% of my time in desktop)
3) Switch off automatic maintenance but remember to do it manually once a week - usually set it running before going out shopping at the weekend. I'm happy to leave it on on my kids machines (cue evil laughter) unless they complain and tbh I leave it on on my desktop which is much older and less powerful than my laptop so doesn't have to do anything heavier than running the WP emulator but I'm never going back to automatic on my laptop.

The problem is that MS has lost sight of the owner as being the boss of the machine not MS.

I have never dreamt of allowing automatic updates, although I have got past the stage from 10 or 15 years ago when you delayed installing any service packs until either a natural break in the project you were working on or until a fix came out for something that was stopping you from working. I now merely delay installing updates until it is convenient. MS are wise to this on W8, however, and have responded by making almost daily updates for anti virus definitions.