Technology will make your life easier

That is how most of these lists work…

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There are a lot of reasons computers run slowly.
Resetting depends on what kind of installation it is using. I am hesitant to recommend it. I would check the website of the manufacturer how it is ensured that you still have an OS (plus the license for it) after reset. I am assuming windows.

One reason laptops can be slow is that they overheat and then turn off various performance boosts. Also when you run it unplugged on battery it is definitely turning those off to enhance battery life.

An additional reason for slow computers is antivirus software–you don’t need any these days. Windows has built-in now. Antivirus is mostly a scam now.

Also check any weird processes: my WSL runs amoc if I leave it unattended and sucks up all computing power.

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“Factory reset” is apparently a Windows thing, so you should probably ask a Windows person, but I’d expect it would get you back to “freshly installed Windows” not “bare metal machine”. It’s certainly the case that Windows installations accumulate slowing cruft over time.

Also: open it up and clean out the fluff.

Also: install Linux. :slight_smile:

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This was going to be my recommendation as well.

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Sorry. What. Virus protection isn’t a thing anymore?

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Windows 10/11 has its built-in protection (Windows Defender) now which works well enough for me and my colleagues and techie friends (as far as I know). Virus protection software often causes problems due to its invasive nature. Sure there is a lot still out there but I haven’t had anything installed for years now.

I have even tried to get my dad to turn off his weirdly expensive (he thinks it is cheap), scammy antivirus thing. I exercise just a bit of general caution when clicking on links. I’ve never had a problem.

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As someone who has no attachment to or affection for Twitter (or any of the social media), watching the dumpster fire found at the intersection of Elon Musk and Twitter has been the greatest highlight of the year, I think.

Elon Musk is an idiot with cash; which makes him more dangerous than your average idiot. And the magnitude of his cash is particularly compounding in its effect.

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Thats a tech thing, right? #onlyhalfjoking

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It is and it is not. I am a techie and I am not running Linux on my laptop.
It is probably more feasible now than it was but Windows is also more feasible now than it was.

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Serious answer: sort of.

These days when most things are webby it’s a lot easier than it used to be to use Linux casually. On the other hand it’s still harder work than Windows so if casual use is what you’re doing it’s not worth the effort unless you care enough about privacy to make the extra effort, which every few people do now. (That’s not a judgement, it’s a genuine trade-off.)

Where it shines is if you do technical things. But if you’re doing technical things for other people who want you to run Microsoft…

(Linux-only since 1999.)

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I use and love Linux. But I don’t run Linux on my primary desktop because it’s nice when things just work and I’ve encountered dozens of weird bugs with a variety of Linux distributions in the past because, after all, they are mostly community (read: unpaid volunteers) developed and maintained; and they just don’t have the discipline that a company like Microsoft or Apple (usually) maintains.

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What @pillbox said.

I am obviously running my server on linux because why wouldn’t I? As a server OS, it far surpasses Windows due to the existence of Apache/NGinx/mysql/postfix/dovecot etc etc etc. If not for a bunch of volunteers writing all that OSS software (and some companies recognizing the importance and also investing in OSS software) the internet as we know it could not exist because it would never have taken off in the first place (insert rant on the current state of ‘things’).

As a desktop system you need to put in extra work. Windows has become good enough for techies to use–not the purists of course and those who stand by their principles (I want to point out I am not intending this to make fun of those people but I admire their persistence). But the rest of us–the fallible ones–can now… be fallible and compromise, especially with the WSL–the windows linux subsystem which is a VM that runs an Ubuntu and provides a terminal as access.

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I know approximately nothing about windows. I recently had to do a thing to a windows server appliance that my team apparently owns. It took me half a day: 1 minute to do the job, 30 minutes to figure out how to log in to the damn thing, 30 minutes to read and understand the guide that told me what I was going to do, and three hours figuring out how to find the guide I needed. I have since learned the approved way of fixing that problem is ‘throw the appliance away and redeploy it’.

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This is the way.

(At least still the windows way)

The nature of my work puts me in touch with a lot of companies that are at that awkward stage of “we’ve always used Windows server products in the past because of the scale we were operating at. But now as we try to grow, we have to either grapple with the scalability concerns of Microsoft server infrastructure, or we have to grapple with our workforce learning to use new systems, platforms and software to accomplish the same thing”.

It’s interesting how each entity navigates that series of challenges. Spoiler: they usually just stick with Microsoft servers

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We were weird. We have gradually transitioned over the last thirty years from using VAX minicomputers, through UNIX workstations, to mostly Windows. We did have Windows servers a while ago, but we now only use Windows Server for terminal servers, testing on many-core machines and a few web servers. We use NetApp fileservers these days, because they work with everything.

We have never had Novell Netware, despite one salesman who insisted that we must have, because we had PCs on a network. Nope! We were using NFS clients on them at the time.

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We have an irritatingly persistent problem at work whereby one of our test machines (a Linux VM) will occasionally just freeze up completely so that we have to restart it. We think that it’s caused by the antivirus software having a fight with Docker, but we aren’t allowed to switch off the antivirus software, so we may never know :person_shrugging:

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The big advertisers have discovered that Musk doesn’t understand the concept of “brand risk” and breaches his company’s TOS for postings frequently and blatantly. He does not get moderated, and they really, really don’t want to find their ads on the site next to his posts. They have no real choice about stopping advertising there.

Rumour has it that Musk is plugging the gap by buying lots of advertising for SpaceX. I’d guess that’s more likely Starlink than launch services.

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This seems to be the standard answer to cloud computing problems.

As a moderately old school sysadmin my answer is “do detailed analysis to find out why the problem happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again”.

Not saying you can’t have both, of course, but you see the philosophical clash.

“What have boring old astronomers ever done for us anyway?”

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