Windows 10 Expiry response

editor's note:- Terry wished to put this on ChatBox – but it's too big!!

Windows 10 Expiry response

Interesting perspective from Chris Jones on Chatbox to my article earlier this week. Much of what he says is true, and indeed it is well established that virtually any version of Linux will run faster on any given hardware, whether brand new or ancient. It simply is less resource hungry than Windows.

However, the average user might struggle to start with Linux and installing it – it's really an enthusiast's tool and would involve a learning curve for most Windows users, although there are distros that closely emulate the Windows environment these days. Also you may well need use a Windows emulator to run software designed for Windows and this in itself will slow down the machine anyway. Additionally as I understand it, not all Windows designed software will run in an emulator – not that I can say I've ever tried it.

The people I've done this upgrade for are comfortable with Windows and don't generally have exotic requirements. People who run video games or video editing would likely be running the latest high end hardware anyway, and it's not targeted at them. I find most people are generally doing light work, a bit of web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets or photo organising. None of these are generally resource hungry.

However, as my mother used to say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. My day to day machine is a tower I built in 2012. It runs an i5 processor with 8gb memory and an SSD. Using the "Novabench" performance measuring tool it scores 322 on Windows 10 and over double that at 685 on Windows 11 installed over it, and more sluggish it ain't. Of course much of this is down to it being a fresh Windows installation, and no doubt a fresh install of Windows 10 would yield a similar if not slightly better result. It's a known fact that Windows simply slows down with time. However my point is that people choosing the upgrade path will likely actually see a notable performance boost from what they are used to, rather than the machine being more sluggish. This is what I've seen on other machines I've done with boot times reducing from over 15 minutes to a couple at the most. I'm not sure why Chris thinks it's desirable to consign perfectly usable hardware to landfill and fork out a few hundred quid for a new machine unnecessarily. I'm happy to demonstrate this to Chris if he'd like to pop round.

Terry Aston
terryaston@googlemail.com