Windows 8 vs. Windows 10 resource requirements
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
I have an old Asus X53 that is slow too after upgrading to Windows 10, especially Windows updates take hours during which time the notebook is unusable, so I'm thinking of disabling internet access. Luckily my main notebook is a Dell Inspiron 16 with Windows 11 and an AMD Ryzen 5 processor that I bought this year at a bargain price, it really flies :-\
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
I wouldn't be surprised if that system started performing "acceptably" again if he did a clean install rather than an in-place upgrade. And how long did he wait after the upgrade anyway? Even though you can log in and the desktop is accessible, I believe right after an upgrade, Windows can still spent a significant amount of time "doing upgrade things" in the background.
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
My personal observation is that Windows 10 is slower than Windows 8 on the same hardware. My observation (completely unscientific) is that Windows 10 is slower on the same hardware as compared to when it was first released. I mean it's a common observation that it gets slower the longer it's been installed - but a fresh install once patched feels slower to me. Maybe my expectations have changed. I come home to a lesser specified but blazingly fast Linux machine - so I get to relive the experience every day. Depending on your friends budget, and their intended use of the machine. Perhaps Linux is an option too. My grandmother seemed OK with it for browsing and e-mail. YMMV
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
I've done upgrades on 2 laptops recently with exactly the same problem. Windows 8 ran fine, but Windows 10 was absolutely unusable (the newer laptop took about 3 hours from a cold boot to being able to work after logging in). By far the biggest issue was the hard drive. Swapping it from from 5400 rpm disks to SSD/NVMe made a world of difference. On the newer laptop, every time I had to investigate, the problem was Windows Updates doing stuff in the background, but stuff never finished. Slightly less relevant but removing McAfee (installed from Acrobat Reader) helped every time as well.
My plan is to live forever ... so far so good
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
Not sure, but Windows 10 these days brings very little value other than DX12 and WSL2 enhancements. Back in build 1809, Win 10 used to be pretty solid but builds after 1809 seem kludgy and have problems with many expensive pro audio interfaces that are used for recording bands in studio level music creation. Generally speaking, I have better reliability with GNU\Linux Debian than I do with MS Windows. The big exception is that GNU\Linux won't run Kontakt and Cubase without Wine. For a window manager or low-end or older machines I find that XFCE is the best Window manager for me. XFCE had adequate features with low bloat and doesn't have all of those irritating snapping/docking behaviors that modern MS Windows GUIs seem to have. I've seen several instances where many games would run better in Steam OS (GNU\Linux) than they would in MS Windows but that's not always the case. Sometimes it's the other way around. On thing that REALLY annoys me about my Windows 10 partition that is that it will often "freeze" for a minute in several places and just sit there "thinking" for no reason whatsoever. This seems to happen the most often when Microsoft is pushing down automatic updates that I usually don't want...
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I've done upgrades on 2 laptops recently with exactly the same problem. Windows 8 ran fine, but Windows 10 was absolutely unusable (the newer laptop took about 3 hours from a cold boot to being able to work after logging in). By far the biggest issue was the hard drive. Swapping it from from 5400 rpm disks to SSD/NVMe made a world of difference. On the newer laptop, every time I had to investigate, the problem was Windows Updates doing stuff in the background, but stuff never finished. Slightly less relevant but removing McAfee (installed from Acrobat Reader) helped every time as well.
My plan is to live forever ... so far so good
"the Andy Grove giveth, the Bill Gates taketh away ..."
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My personal observation is that Windows 10 is slower than Windows 8 on the same hardware. My observation (completely unscientific) is that Windows 10 is slower on the same hardware as compared to when it was first released. I mean it's a common observation that it gets slower the longer it's been installed - but a fresh install once patched feels slower to me. Maybe my expectations have changed. I come home to a lesser specified but blazingly fast Linux machine - so I get to relive the experience every day. Depending on your friends budget, and their intended use of the machine. Perhaps Linux is an option too. My grandmother seemed OK with it for browsing and e-mail. YMMV
That was my experience, too. Going from 7 to 10 was a big slowdown, only became usable again when I fitted an NVME drive instead of spinning rust.
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
I have a Norwegian brother-in-law, so am trying to keep up. So far, all I know is what his son taught me: "Du er en prompende ape." Google Translate tells me that "like a flea crawling on a tar brush" is in Norwegian: "Det er som en loppe som kryper på en tjærebørste.". Does that sound right to you?
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My personal observation is that Windows 10 is slower than Windows 8 on the same hardware. My observation (completely unscientific) is that Windows 10 is slower on the same hardware as compared to when it was first released. I mean it's a common observation that it gets slower the longer it's been installed - but a fresh install once patched feels slower to me. Maybe my expectations have changed. I come home to a lesser specified but blazingly fast Linux machine - so I get to relive the experience every day. Depending on your friends budget, and their intended use of the machine. Perhaps Linux is an option too. My grandmother seemed OK with it for browsing and e-mail. YMMV
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My personal observation is that Windows 10 is slower than Windows 8 on the same hardware. My observation (completely unscientific) is that Windows 10 is slower on the same hardware as compared to when it was first released.
That's true and more striking if we compare beta versus release. The many security thing turned on makes it much slower. Especially Intel, I have an Acer Atom tablet that was slow but decent, then left behind without updates (maybe without Creators Update?) then updated again and slow as a mother louse pregnant with twelve babies during Windows 10.
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I have a Norwegian brother-in-law, so am trying to keep up. So far, all I know is what his son taught me: "Du er en prompende ape." Google Translate tells me that "like a flea crawling on a tar brush" is in Norwegian: "Det er som en loppe som kryper på en tjærebørste.". Does that sound right to you?
We shorten it somewhat: "Som lus på tjærekost". So I was somewhat imprecise in my translation: We are referring to louse, not to fleas (which would be "loppe" in Norwegian). First, I think "flea" sounds better. Second, we are used to thinking of fleas being great athletics (like in a flea circus), so the contrast to one crawling on a tar brush makes the point even clearer. I cannot change the Norwegian way of speech, but when translating I can allow myself slightly greater freedom :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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We shorten it somewhat: "Som lus på tjærekost". So I was somewhat imprecise in my translation: We are referring to louse, not to fleas (which would be "loppe" in Norwegian). First, I think "flea" sounds better. Second, we are used to thinking of fleas being great athletics (like in a flea circus), so the contrast to one crawling on a tar brush makes the point even clearer. I cannot change the Norwegian way of speech, but when translating I can allow myself slightly greater freedom :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
Thank you for your detailed explanation!
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A non-computerist friend of mine called tonight: On an ages old portable, he had tried to replace the original Windows 8 with Windows 10. He says the machine went from being slow but acceptable to being "like a flea crawling on a tar brush". (That's a Norwegian expression; I like it better than "slow as molasses"!) I skipped Widows 8 myself, went directly from 7 to 10, but I never thought of Windows 10 being a resource hog compared to 7. What is your experience - especially if you have been through Windows 8: Is 10 really that much more demanding, or is there likely to be some configuration problem in the 10? I talk to my friend through the phone, so I do not see the brand of the portable, the amount of RAM etc. - and right now, he has replaced Win10 with Ubuntu without knowing the first thing about Linux, so I can't get him to report many details over the phone; he doesn't know how to read it out. He is begging me to make a weekend trip to visit him and help him out :-)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
You need to use the right OS for the hardware. Some computers will forever run Windows Vista better than any OS because the drivers were designed for it. Once you start upgrading Windows you run into driver emulation issues or kernel thread scheduling issues. So either you stay on the older version of Windows or you move to Linux which doesn't have these issues at a driver level.