On Thu, 24 Mar 2016 21:26:56 +0000 (GMT+00:00), Chris French
wrote:

Johnny B Good Wrote in message:
On Thu, 24 Mar 2016 15:25:23 +0000, Chris J Dixon wrote:
-search

The cycnic in me informs me that this is just a 'failsafe' way of
building in 'planned obsolescence' It's the home computer equivalent of
Microsoft's Cockamaimee Pagefile default settings in windows designed to
accelerate "System Senility" by aggravating the effects of file system
fragmentation due to normal file writing activities further aggravated by
the endless file churn from the never ending stream of windows updates
and fixes.

Microsoft's partnership deals with the PC hardware manufacturers,
effectively a cartel and informally known as "Wintel" on account of the
major chip supplier being Intel, benefited both parties in boosting
sales. Obviously, wintel would like to sell as much product as possible
and this pagefile trick was Microsoft's 'failsafe' contribution to
shortening the upgrade cycle to drive such an increase in sales.
on such a sneaky trick).

snip JBG paranoia

As it happened, MSFT's trick was never embarrassingly exposed in the
mass media so they were able to continue this ruse for over two decades.
Part of the reason for this success was that they offered the end users
pagefile settings options to completely eliminate this particular effect,
neatly silencing any outcries from technically competent users who would
more likely feel they'd "gotten one over" on "The Dumb Consumers"
reinforcing their (justifiable) sense of smugness.
.


Funny they should introduce automatic defragmentation in Windows 7
then ( if not before, can't remember now) which would rather seem
to defeat this cunning plan. It seems to work well enough as if I
ever check (rarely) one of my machines it seems to be only
slightly fragmented.

And I'm still running a very mature installation of XP on a low power
Apple Mac Mini (on a 100G partition) and this is my everyday 'go-to'
machine and if it was as slow (by now) as suggested I wouldn't still
be using it (daily). (I'm using Agent V2 and Thunderbird V0.9). ;-)

Ok, it's now struggling with some Youtube videos but not because it's
got slower but the definition of the videos have got higher.

As with your experience, the Mrs runs W7 (again, daily and for
everything, including TV from her STB) and the odd time I get on it
for a 'tidy up' there is rarely anything to do.

She has Linux a reboot away as I have OSX but we both generally use
Windows because it does what we can't do using the alternatives.

Cheers, T i m