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I'm not a fanboy of any OS in existence but

1. Most tech-illiterate people are afraid of using regedit and/or GPO to disable Cortana so the point is valid.

2. Disk fragmentation has become an even bigger issue since Windows 10 doesn't defragment SSD disks.

3. It's not an argument.

4. The article talks about laptops specifically and the issue is still there and it's huge even for Windows 10 which often installs Microsoft drivers which do _not_ work.

5. You must be joking about the startup tab of the task manager. Looks like you've never had this issue or you've only used SSDs in your life. Also discover Autoruns by Mark Russinovich.

6. The Windows Store app canNOT be disabled. Read carefully. Also after each major Windows update all apps are reinstalled.

There's no exaggeration - the author is an IT specialist with a lot of experience.

4 comments

> Disk fragmentation has become an even bigger issue since Windows 10 doesn't defragment SSD disks

Defrag on SSDs in Windows 10 runs Trim. And it does do that automatically on a schedule if you don't change anything. Actual defragmentation on an SSD is way less useful because SSDs don't have killer seek latencies like spinning rust plates did, and it would be small-scale harmful because of write wear. And your SSD's onboard controller would likely thwart your efforts anyway, because of wear leveling.

That’s 1/2 right SSD’s do have fragmentation issues, but it’s about IOPS not latency. http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Trends-and-Applications/Does-F...

TRIM is also important, but it’s a different issue.

That article makes claims of 25% reduction in perf with no data to back it up, then mentions fragmention leads to system instability, requiring reboots... What? Again no data given to back up these claims. It's also SAN/Enterprise-centric. Even if you lost 25% perf, you're going from 200,000 IOPs/sec to 150,000 IOPs/sec. This is still plenty fast.

There is no out of order seek penalty for SSD drives like traditional hard drives. In fact you cannot guarantee what the SSD does to your logical blocks underneath the hood (they are mapped in indirect tables). You do not want to do defrag an SSD due to adding necessary erase cycles, that is why Windows has it disabled.

That's only partly true, fragmentation can and does massively effect SSD performance both on read and write, can effect write latency, but not read latency.

(think of it in terms of an SSD being a huge pile of 4MB blocks where each block needs to be completely erased to clear out old content to get a clearer picture)

From what I understand, the blocks are just "marked" as being deleted, the TRIM command erases/wipes the content. Windows does this [TRIM], in default setup, once a month.

5. I police my startup items so that's correct, I've never had this issue. But yeah I know about Autoruns; that's an option too. Are you saying that since it's not built into Windows then it shouldn't count? I don't really agree. It's not like other popular OSes have such tools built in either. And Autoruns is even first-party since Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft.

6. Yes it can. My current Windows 10 system has been installed since March. I disabled the store immediately and no update since then has restored Windows Store or any Store app. You can uninstall the Store (https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script/...) or just disable access/updates through group policy (https://i.imgur.com/ZRxbwNt.png).

5. It's not about policing - it's about knowing what's being launched on startup and at least being able to disable items one by one to understand the root cause of your slow boots (and even that doesn't always help since some slow downs are caused by bad/misbehaving drivers). The startup tab in the task manager is absolutely insufficient as it shows pretty much nothing.

6. Random scripts from the Net to "improve" Windows 10? What could possibly go wrong? ;-)

And you're kinda neglecting the elephant in the room: you cannot uninstall apps in Windows 10 at all without using Power Shell. For some reasons Microsoft decided not to include the apps anywhere in GUI, e.g. in Windows Components which if I remember correctly were/was created exactly for this purpose.

In short the apps and how cryptically they are handled is one of the worst "features" of Windows 10. And don't get me on how they are handled in file system: it's a huge effing mess. And how you cannot really access/edit/remove apps data even when you're an administrator.

In short, UWP is an alien technology to Windows 10. UWP should have been a new different OS altogether (and probably that was the plan).

I'm completely tech literate and I STILL am afraid to use regedit. There are so many gotchyas, so little documentation, and many many side effects.

It would help if regedit had some confirmation dialog as opposed to the current 'direct' editing. An undo function [possibly persistent] wouldn't go amiss either.