On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Smith, David <[email protected]> wrote:
> We’ve all heard that Windows machines need a wipe/reinstall every couple > years. (I don’t know if that’s actually true, or just anecdotal. I rarely > have the same machine more than a year or two, so it’s never come up in my > personal experience.) Is there any parallel belief here, that MacOS X > installs need to be refreshed periodically? More important, is there any > evidence either way? > Any system that actively has installs is going to accumulate cruft over time, in my experience. (Including Linux and even Solaris. Yes, I've gotten Linux systems to the point that they needed to be reinstalled to clean up cruft, mostly through non-package-manager installs.) Depending on where this cruft has collected, it can have an impact on system performance. OS X and Windows both tend to see more installs *and* more installs and removals done without the benefit of an all-encompassing package management framework, so it's easier for stuff to get lost in the cracks. The main point with Windows specifically, though, is persistent registry corruption bugs --- I would be interested in seeing if this has improved in the wake of Windows 7 and later, as Microsoft seems to have done quite a lot of infrastructure and API improvement. Regardless of what you think of the UI, Windows 8 appears to be considerably cleaner on the inside than earlier releases --- as was Windows 7. (Registry corruption bugs are especially problematic considering that Office traditionally thrashes the registry --- just launching and exiting was shown to rewrite over 50 registry keys at one point.) -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates [email protected] [email protected] unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net
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