Monday, June 16, 2008

Windows is a Slow-Booting Piece of Shit

Yes we all know that one. Don't start spamming me with links about how to make it faster, I'm a dumb-fuck, Switch to Linux, Switch to Mac, etc. That was just to get your attention, and I'm not looking for suggestions. This is a Rant.

Ok, We Are Listening...

It's time for a change in philosophy for Operating Systems. The Hardware is not the most important thing for the OS, it's me the fucking user you stupid fucks!!!

To enable this Nirvana, we must take a radically different approach to how the OS decides what is important to load first. Forget about all these background services and crap; no offense, I don't need those until I do something. And I mean systematically apply this; not just the services you think are necessary.

With this in mind, the OS should be booting up in this order:

  1. Kernel,
  2. Graphics Subsystem,
  3. User Agent (Shell),
  4. Nothing Else You Stupid Fucks!!!!

Profanity aside, the point is Appearance Is Everything, and the sooner I can see my customized desktop, the happier I am; I feel like I can interact, and I can, because the OS won't be frantically loading and starting services and thrashing my hard drive while I try to open the Start Menu.

Once I am logged in, all disk thrashing should cease. This would be because there are no frantically loading services.

I've read lots of the Optimize Windows links, so we know it is certainly possible. I should be able to get logged in with only the absolute minimum number of services and drivers running.

Let's spin it another way. We should be trying to limit the attack surface at all times, and that means not even loading shit that the user isn't calling for.

We've all looked at the Windows Services list and we've looked at Task Manager. Why is there all that shit in there? I just logged in and started my browser, and i already have 60 processes running! What the fuck? I am not naive here; I am an experienced software developer, so believe me when I say that seems excessive. I have not started any other applications. I have 7 items in my task tray, and Virus Scanning.

I'm sure someone from Microsoft would argue the other way and say that is totally reasonable, and more and more "system" tasks get more and more cores to dump useless processing on and rob your applications of cycles.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't agree at all. When I come into work and power up my PC it only takes eight or ten minutes until my inbox is up and everything is ready to go. This give me an excuse to hang out by the coffee maker and chat for quite a while. Moreover, I think that this performance is remarkably swift. After all, I downgraded my home computer (and my wife's) to Vista and now they take twice as long to boot. Let's here it for good ol' XP. See:
http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspx

Disclaimer

Look, this is humor, so put away the flame-thrower! Just have a laugh and go on your merry way....