Re: [Hampshire] [OT] Hardware degradation

Rob Malpass wrote:
> Hi all
>
> To what extent is a PC as fast now as it was when first bought?

Wow! What an apples and oranges question.

>
> As we know, hard disks get fragmented over time. I'm honestly not sure
> how much this affects Linux as much as Windows or any other OS, but the
> general thinking is that if you defragment a slow Windows filesystem,
> performance will improve. I've personally never seen it improve
> Windows that much - but it does have some effect.

Although there are some disk defragmenters for Linux/Unix, they never
have enjoyed much popularity. Probably due to the fact that most modern
Linux/Unix file systems are good as housekeeping and keep fragmentation
to a minimum.

Having said that, if your application is very disk I/O intensive, a
new/clean disk may improve performance.

>
> Periodially, it's also a good idea to do a clean reinstall of a Windows
> partition. But my question is - suppose you replace your primary HDD
> with a brand new one in a machine that's say 2 years old and otherwise
> unchanged- will it (the machine overall) be as fast as it was when new
> - or can I expect the CPU, the RAM etc to have degraded?

The periodically re-install of Windows use to be due to DLL "rot". A
re-install cleared up this problem, but my experience with this is
ancient history on Win95. I can't comment on the more "modern" versions
of MS-OS as I don't use them.

I new HDD, could be faster. Better and more cache, higher rotational
rates, faster seek times. If you replace the HDD with exactly the same
spec drive, I wouldn't expect to see any change in performance.

Now for a few apples and oranges..... Hardware doesn't slow down but
you could be comparing 2 year old software with today's software.
Generally current software will be bigger, more resource hungry, and
yes, slower. Try comparing Fedora FC3 with the current FC7 on the same
hardware. I would suspect your perception will be FC7 is slower than FC3.
>
> Cheers
> Rob
>
>