My Windows 10 malpractice
If you’re thinking of upgrading to Windows 10, here’s a tale of woe from someone you know. Results may vary.
I got an early start this morning and switched over to Windows 10, a task which I optimistically foolishly expected to go smoothly. For the most part it did. After about a day of downloading in the background, Win10 was ready to load this morning and I executed the loading task and initialization in about an hour. The fleeting sensation of a successful heart transplant faded as I spent the next several hours fighting organ rejection. Symptomatically it manifested as an incredibly slow system, with hang time between clicks or keystrokes topping 10-15 seconds! The last time I experienced that kind of bog AOL was still mailing CDs to people! What the fun!?!? Not a good way to be introduced to Win10.
I threw open the resource monitor and found the hard drive’s disk activity pegged at 100%! What caused it? An obscure (to me at least) pair of functions known as Prefetcher and SuperFetch, each designed in earlier Win incarnations to preload commonly used applications into memory for the purpose of reducing load times. Or so they should. In my particular case, Win10 and my aging system (i7 processor, 64-bit monster) were not part of the medical trials and some of the worst side effects were now in play. Lucky for me I have an equally vintage iPad that stood in as a reliable surgical nurse, guiding me through regedit and resmon.exe procedures necessary to disable the functions and restore disc activity to single digit numbers.
Despite experiences like this, I hold out for a day when upgrades and migrations go flawlessly in open-architecture environments like Windows and Linux. In that utopian vision we also have reigned back our endless creep toward infinite passwords, develop a reliable, cross-platform bookmarking solution and stopped reinventing new ways to manage music files that completely dismantle our collections. I can dream.
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