Win7 stability, speed, reliability all degrading noticeably fast?

[cnd]

Is this a worldwide problem I'm wondering?

I've got about 8 different Win7 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 Win7 luck, or is this a growing problem with Windows 7 worldwide in general???

 

[gregrocker]

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 Win7 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 Win7 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.

 

[Britton30]

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 Win7 automatic defragging feature.

 

[cnd]

Trouble x 8 = exhausting!

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 Win7 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...

 

[Britton30]

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 Win7 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."

 

[profdlp]

...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?...

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.

SevenForums Stats:
Threads: 151,886, Posts: 1,449,693, Members: 150,383

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.

 

[MacGyvr]

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.

 

[karlsnooks]

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.

 

[seavixen32]

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.

 

[gregrocker]

@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...

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.

 

[Max Peck]

I agree that it's probably something you're doing the same way on your systems. I have 5 Windows 7 machines (2 are 64-bit the others are 32-bit) and none of them are experiencing any issues. These machines run everything from development tools to audio/video processing software. If there was a "general" problem taking place with the platform I think I'd see it.

I've been using Windows since version 1.01 and I'll tell you hands down that 7 is the most solid and reliable version ever built.

-Max

 

[sgage]

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

I've been using Windows 7 since day 1 (actually well before day 1 - I ran betas since early '09), and I have no sense at all of "things" getting "rapidly worse".

How would that even happen?

 

[Britton30]

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.

Ding Ding Ding. Bingo.

 

[seavixen32]

I'm sure that if "things" have been getting "rapidly worse" I'm sure Microsoft would have been deluged with complaints as they were with Vista.

As it is, Windows 7 has been getting good reviews and is rapidly catching XP in terms of volume sales and selling at a faster rate too.

Always reminds me of a young, unexperienced pilot who after each sortie declared there was something wrong with his air-interception radar. After several unsuccessful attempts to fix the "problem" by the radar technicians, the last entry in the A700 log book (servicing record) on this particular problem read: "Pilot changed - radar assessed serviceable."

 

[gregrocker]

I would try a test install using these tips given to get a perfect reinstall, which are based on hundreds of installs done to date without a single issue resulting: Reinstalling Windows 7

Let us know how it goes along and feel free to ask back any questions.

 

[DeaconFrost]

It makes no sense to blame Windows 7 off the bat, because if Windows 7 was the issue...we'd all be seeing it. We all have plenty of boxes in our house running Windows 7. I have 35 company machines, all running Windows 7...and I can't say I've seen anything that wasn't user-caused.

You need to separate out each machine, and independently look for the solution. First, the ones that BSoD...those should be the easiest. Research the codes and error messages.

If they are OEM systems, wipe them clean, and install Windows 7 fresh without all thier crapware. Use the latest drivers, don't go crazy tweaking the OS, and that's it. Aside from a hardware issue, those systems will be perfectly stable.

 

[cnd]

I posted into the "general" forum, not the problems one, because I'm not looking for solutions.

My question was simply whether or not people other than me have noticed Windows 7 getting more and more unstable/unuseable over time.

If there's 400M Win7 customers, and 16K people on this web site posting with Win7 woes, then according to Alexa (which tells us that 0.06% of internet users visit here), that means that 1 in every 15 Win7 customers has a problem sufficiently serious that they need to come here and seek help about it.

Damning methinks...

 

[profdlp]

...If there's 400M Win7 customers, and 16K people on this web site posting with Win7 woes, then according to Alexa (which tells us that 0.06% of internet users visit here), that means that 1 in every 15 Win7 customers has a problem sufficiently serious that they need to come here and seek help about it....

Did it occur to you that people might visit the Internet for other reasons? For instance, sports, hobbies, news, friendship, banking, school, etc?

In addition to that, not everyone who comes here has a problem. Some are looking for hardware advice, or to learn something new. Then there are those who come here just to gripe.

 

[essenbe]

I posted into the "general" forum, not the problems one, because I'm not looking for solutions.

My question was simply whether or not people other than me have noticed Windows 7 getting more and more unstable/unuseable over time.

If there's 400M Win7 customers, and 16K people on this web site posting with Win7 woes, then according to Alexa (which tells us that 0.06% of internet users visit here), that means that 1 in every 15 Win7 customers has a problem sufficiently serious that they need to come here and seek help about it.

Damning methinks...

Methinks.... you do not want to resolve your issues you just want to complain.
As fas as whether others have noticed instability, the answer is NO.

No matter how you want to manipulate numbers to suit your own preconcieved notions, the 3 largest factors in problems with windows 7 are: Operator errors, outdated/incompatible drivers and hardware failure.

If you would like help to resolve your problems, we are here to help. If you just want to complain, I'm sure you can find more receptive places to do it.

 

[karlsnooks]

+1 for Essenbe

Chap, you are barking in the wrong yard.

If you need help, we are here.

If you want to meckern and complain, find another home.