[bhauer]

Indeed. I've been using home-built PCs since the 1990s, more than a dozen in total, each with lifespans of 4 or more years (many overlapping with one another in periods of usage). Most using some flavor of Windows NT starting with NT 3.5.

In all that time, I've never experienced a computer getting slower during its usage lifetime. It's a story I have read and heard from others, but I don't know if it's real but caused by some usage behavior I don't exhibit or imagined.

I do know that in the 1990s and even more recently, but to a lesser extent, when I examined other peoples' Windows computers I would find they had installed legions of third-rate applications that were on the precipice of being malware. And this was a cascading problem because people would install something harmful to their PC such as iTunes, Quicktime, or RealPlayer and then attempt to resolve the resulting performance problem by installing a snake-oil system-tuner which in turn made matters even worse. Or they would install an anti-virus tool and their system would slow to a crawl. Unraveling all of this was never fun.

My decades of experience with Windows is that if you simply avoid harmful software, performance will remain essentially uniform. The systems do not decay by some natural process as many popular stories imply.