Windows 7 frustration

General Discussions
#1

Bahh… a bit of a nag post here.

My first impression of Windows 7 were pretty good.

Now after using it for 6 months or so, I’m slowly beginning to be irritated by it’s slowness.

I have it installed on Quad-core 4gig machine at home. At work I use WinXP duo-core 4gig.

Comparing the two is like night and day. Windows XP is so much more responsive, applications are prompt. In Windows 7 the Photoshop application takes forever to tab into. It’s like every time I tab from it, for a few minutes, and then tab back it’s like I’m un-hibernating it. Same applies to most apps, e.g. Firefox, Eclipse. I don’t know why, it’s not like I don’t have enough memory, and Win7 is supposed to manage memory better than XP.

Here at work on XP I have two Eclipse running, photoshop, firefox, and tons of other smaller apps. All very responsive. My photoshop has been opened for a month here at work, eclipse instances for weeks, still running smoothly.

At home, with only 1 eclipse, photoshop, firefox, and a few smaller apps, it’s all clogged up, every time I go into a program it’s like it was hibernating, everything taking forever to do for a while, and then even after using it for a few minutes it’s still not as good as in XP. Photoshop usually has to be rebooted every day at home, after doing simple stuff Photoshop just eats up 2 gigs of memory. It’s incomprehensible!!!

Do you guys have similar experience? Can this be tweaked?

I hate the thought of having to downgrade. Why on Earth can’t Microsoft do ANYTHING right??

#2

Why don’t you install VirtualBox, make a WinXP VM with 2GB RAM, and work blazingly fast on your Windows 7 PC :slight_smile:

The developers at Microsoft seem not to care about performance anymore. It’s all about eye candy and a stack of abstraction layers that make developing the OS easier and probably safer. As long as the consumers are not complaining too much, it will only get worse. After Vista, anything seems faster, giving Windows 7 a fast and snappy feeling… until you’d install WinXP on that modern PC… but we both know hardly anybody will run two operating systems, so people won’t see the difference.

I bought Vista, it was my first OS purchase, and probably my last. Next time I’ll install Linux.

#3

Mine is still quick enough. To me the degrade is amount the same compared to XP.

Sounds like something is wrong on your end.

Though SP1 should be coming out soon…

#4

I had VERY similar issues with my Quad Core 4gig machine on Windows 7 as well. I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit (was running the 32-bit originally) and the problems went away. You might want to check which version you’re running.

#5

Installed OpenSUSE here a few years back and never looked back.

KDE 4+ is just beautiful to look at and use. It gets better and better every few months (faster and more polished). IMO its now the best looking desktop (yes even better then windows 7, mac and gnome-ubuntu).

#6

Not much use to you, but i’ve not experienced any slowdown problems on my quad with 4gb.
Though this is with 64bit Windows 7.

How much junk is being loaded at startup? (run->msconfig->startup tab.)
I’m forever having to remove various ‘quick start’ applications from that list.
What’s more grating is that every time there is an update for java, quicktime, acrobat, etc. their quick starter gets reintroduced >:(

#7

Similar to others posting, with my Windows 7 quad core with 4G, it runs fine on 64bit so sounds like there’s a good chance you need to upgrade.

#8

I have Windows 7, 32bit, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD and it’s lightning fast. Photoshop, Eclipse and other programs start up in seconds. I believe Windows 7 is optimized for SSD, so unless you have one, it might be slow?

#9

Windows 7 is not optimized for SSDs, it has optimisations for SSDs.

#10

[quote=“appel,post:1,topic:35493”]
I have the complete opposite. Upgraded from XP to Vista and lots of responsive issues dissappeared. Moving to Windows 7 for me is the same experience again, upgrade bliss. I’m also currently running a quad-core (2.5ghz Core 2 quad) with 4gb of ram.

But I find it very unlikely Windows is to blame for your issues. I also run tonnes of apps continously for weeks at a time and have none of these issues. My first recommendation is to download and run Process Explorer and take a look at excessive disk and memory usage. That should help show you the real issue. I’d also advise booting into safe mode and then running a full virus scan in order to ensure there isn’t something malicious running in the background. It really shouldn’t be running this badly.

#11

OMG.

Been digging around in Windows, trying to figure out what the heck is causing it to do so much disk access activity.

Checked the Indexing Options.

It has just few folders there, the default, “offline files”, “start menu”, and then… “Users”.

Well, guess what I have in my “Users” folder… about 50.000 font files, all my fonts I’ve accumulated over the past 10 years.

Let’s see what happens after this change.

#12

I also have core 2 quad 2.5 ghz and 4 gb ram (popular config, eh?). Windows 7 64 bit, all runs smooth and sailin. I am glad I have a 1080p monitor so my task bar doesn’t overflow :wink:

#13

I had like 30 windows updates pending, and the indexer doing silly things. Fixed it, rebooted, and it runs smoothly now… I hope.

#14

try JNode @ http://www.jnode.org/ :slight_smile: ;D

#15

Excellent idea. Burn Microsoft too ;D I have never bought Windows, I feel so fine. Windows 7 would be completely unusable on my PCs (Celeron 700 Mhz and AMD Sempron 2600+), unbearably slow, it is not worth a try.

#16

There’s all sorts of crap you can turn off. When I started with 7 I went researched literally every service and turned off everything I don’t want. Here’s some of it:

http://n4te.com/tools/win7.bat
http://n4te.com/tools/win7.reg