by Athelassan » Thu Aug 14, 2014 2:41 am
I think a lot of the problems are, to be completely fair to Microsoft, caused by Firefox and Chrome themselves; they're notorious memory hogs even when they're not doing much. Much the same goes for many video players, which are bloated with a load of features that just slow stuff down for no reason. I don't know how VLC stands these days but after running into a lot of problems on my old machine with many media players I now use Media Player Classic and it's great. I'm also running an old version of iTunes, since v11 is unnecessarily huge and, for me, mostly pointless.
Background applications are annoying, but to be honest it was that way in XP as well and - shock horror - I'm actually finding that slightly easier to manage in 8 since it makes it easier to identify junk processes. It's hard to kill some programs properly (Steam, Skype, et al) if you're not paying attention but then MSN Messenger used to do that in 2001, so that's not new. And I actually find the Action Centre quite handy for flagging up things that will cause slowdown, like extraneous startup programs and the like.
A lot of the issues too are to do with internet connection rather than the computer itself - and while that's annoying, since it would often be quicker to load from DVD/USB than to download a program, it wouldn't gum up the rest of your internet for several hours, and if you're on a periodic download limit you're screwed, again that's as much the fault of the software as Windows itself.
In general, computers just get gummed up with rubbish over the course of normal use. I think there's relatively little in that sense that can't be fixed with a reformat, but users are reluctant to do that since it's scary and it's hassle. Obviously, you can screw it up if you go poking around in the BIOS without knowing what you're doing, or if you run into hardware issues (usually, PSU failure/battery expiry, heat damage, damaged hard drives) but normal/responsible use shouldn't cause too many unfixable problems (although the battery will expire eventually no matter what you do - but there are steps you can take to prolong its lifespan).
Plus applications, internet browsing and so forth get more demanding almost continually, so over the course of a few years, there's a kind of hardware inflation and things will inevitably slow down just because the tasks themselves have got harder. Modern stuff is also, in particular, a lot more graphics-intensive than it used to be, which is why I put my hand in my pocket for a dedicated graphics card, even if it's not a particularly special one.
As far as I can tell the principal change made by 8.1 was the addition of a desktop tile on the metro screen and a link to the metro screen on the desktop, to make it easier to switch. There was hopefully other stuff going on as well, but since I only used 8.0 for as long as it took me to download and install 8.1 (longer than I'd have liked, admittedly) I'm not really well-placed to judge.
I hung onto XP for a long time, because I hated Vista, and then by the time I could afford to upgrade to 7, 8 was on the horizon, then 8 was rubbish for ages, and so on - and XP did everything I wanted it to (and was compatible with all the third-party programs and games I wanted to use, which Vista/7 weren't). I always found Vista unacceptably bloated and 7 not much better (albeit infinitely better in terms of actually working) but to be honest XP itself was hardly slimline. 8 feels lighter, although that might be an illusion: metro screen aside, it seems to have dispensed with a lot of the annoying (visible) bells and whistles. I guess I'll wait and see.
So far I'm finding it impressively fast. I click on something and it just... does it. It's like living in the future; you never realise how slow your computer is until you use one that operates at full speed. But it's early days - still only a week old - and that's probably at least as much down to hardware as it is the OS.
Ath
Don't be too normal though. Pfft! 
