Windows 7: Win7 stability, speed, reliability all degrading noticeably fast?

Is this a worldwide problem I'm wondering?

I've got about 8 different Windows 7 boxes (some laptops, a few desktops, and some media machines). The frequency of "inexplicable weird things" and other aggravations has been increasing over time, and just the last few months I've found myself having done at least 4 complete re-installs, and despite this - all 8 of my boxes are suffering various different problems.

I am basically loosing WEEKS of work time dealing with pointless fixes to what I thought would have, by now, been a stable operating system.

Some (and by no means is this a comprehensive list) of the recent issues I'm facing are BSOD problems on 2 different boxes ("Driver state power failure"), various (but not all) internet programs failling to connect from one laptop, *extreme* slowness one another latop and two media center desktops, an inexplicably "corrupted" registry occurence, and other weird but similar things.

Most of my machines are new brand-name (HP mostly) boxes, with a couple of other ones thrown in. They all work fine using "live boot" linux distro DVDs, and I have no problems with my one other box that's not Windows (a Mac).

Do I just happen to have the worlds worst Windows 7 luck, or is this a growing problem with Windows 7 worldwide in general???

No this is not common at all. In fact I can't remember the last time it was reported here and we get them all.

Are you following basic Windows 7 troubleshooting steps monitoring System Resources listed to try to detect problems?

Are you using the drivers given by the installer and updated by optional Windows Updates after enabling hardware auto-updating? Automatically get recommended drivers and updates for your hardware

Are you tweaking Windows 7 beyond normal system settings, editing services, using Registry cleaners or optimizers?

Try following these steps which apply to get a perfect clean reinstall: Reinstalling Windows 7

Then run normally and report back symptoms as they appear.

Welcome to Seven Forums cnd.
One more thing is to have a good security suite, AV, firewall, anti-everything, etc on each mac nine doing regular scans, and keeping them updated. We see many performance issues from infected systems from people who think it won't happen to them.

I recommend as backups, MalwareBytes and Super AntiSpyware for in between scans and Microsoft Security Essentials as a real time suite. All are free. I also use CCleaner to clean temp files, cookies, and garbage from the system. Links to all are in my sig.

If you systems are on quite a bit enable the Windows 7 automatic defragging feature.

Hi all,

Thanks for the tips. The main issue is that it's absolutely exhausting trying to keep these damned machines working. If I only had 1 PC, I probably would mind if it blew up every few months - but with 8 PCs, I'm facing issues at least every other week. I simply don't have time left to stuff around with all this instability! Two of my PCs are brand-new boxes that I bought specifically because I was trying to rid myself of the problems - BRAND NEW - and these are currently the worst offenders, both having given multiple problems in the last 2 weeks alone.

I (wronlgy it turms out) suspected my AV programs many months back, so I've switched a few different times (Kaspersky, Comodo, Bullguard) and I've gone as far as using none at all anymore on about half my PCs - in sheer desperation of trying to swat the big time-waste.

My setups are all wildly different - some re-installs are done from the factory media, other times I use the factory recovery-volume on the hard drive, still other times I've resorted to buying a brand new Windows 7 DVD and starting from scratch.
Perhaps the one thing I do the same on them all is allow windows to "update" itself - maybe I should stop doing that???

I don't even install the same stuff on them all - which is why I am beginning to think that the problem is with Windows itself, and not so much with me or my boxes or what I'm doing.

@gregrocker - I think you've contradicted yourself - you said "not common", but then said "we get them all" - just take a look at the forum stats here - the next most popular forum after "general" is "Crashes and Debugging".

Basically - what I'm wondering about is probably represented by the frequency of posting statistics over time. Is there an exponential growth in the number of new posts into the "Crashes and Debugging" forum - or is it flat over time?

My hunch is that things are getting rapidly worse...

Since this is a help forum, thats why there are a lot of a myriad of issues. May not be your case, but most problems are the users or people expecting Windows 7 to be XP.

Not using any security to reduce waste is a real bad idea. Give the ones I noted a try, MSE is free for up to 10 machines. I can see how having eight PC can be a time consuming chore. (why so many?)

Change you updates to "Download but let me choose when to install."

Keep in mind that there are more and more Win 7 computers coming online, especially as businesses (finally) make the move from XP/Vista. I think Win 7 just passed 400,000,000 licenses.

That's a lot of posts, and it should be obvious that people with a really serious problem are more likely to post than someone who has a minor question.

As for "@gregrocker - I think you've contradicted yourself - you said "not common", but then said "we get them all" - just take a look at the forum stats here - the next most popular forum after "general" is "Crashes and Debugging".", I'm sure the Cleveland Clinic sees more serious heart cases than the average hospital, but that's because they're considered the best in the world at curing them.

Between my housemate and myself we have seven computers running Win 7 and have had extremely few problems. I'd bet that a little investigative work will uncover something unique to your situation which can be fixed up. We'll be glad to help with that. Eight computers all having problems defies the law of probability when it comes to bad luck.

Bottom line is, if you have multiple machines with similar problems, YOU are the common factor among those machines. Therefore something you are installing, changing, etc. is causing the issue.

cnd,

I would like the pass a magic wand over your posts and all of your problems be gone, but.... that just isn't happening as we both know.

Let me suggest, a slow but sure approach. Post a new thread describing the the problem(s) of one of your problem children. But, please, only one problem child at a time.

After that one is solved, then start a new thread for the second problem child. And so on and so forth.

My personal experience has been that Win 7 is the least troublesome OS that I've ever used. And interesting is that I've a smoother, faster system on one laptop when I switched from 32 bit to 64 bit Win 7.

It would help us to help you if you could be more specific with the problems you're having with each computer rather than what appears to be a bit of a rant against Windows 7.

Like millions of others, I've been using a personal computer for many years and have found Windows 7 to be up there with the best (Windows XP SP3).

What we've been given so far is little different to taking your car in for repair and saying "I think there's something wrong with it. I'll leave it with you until you've fixed it."

Give us specific problems as suggested by karlsnooks and we can try and help. As things stand, we're pretty much in the dark.

No contradiction in saying having eight machines all degrading with problems is "not common."

As suggested the issue is obviously something the User is doing.

If really interested in solving problems rather than ranting and being contradictory, you would have laid out the exact symptoms in depth by now. And we would have helped.