[Groxx]

Ya know what helps a lot?

Reinstalling the OS (edit: from scratch. ie, format the drive + install). I make a point to do so at least once per year. OSX has aged significantly more gracefully than Windows, despite having several times as many files (approached 3 million near the end), but a two-year-old install (I slacked) is nothing like a fresh one. Especially noticeable: Spotlight actually finds what I'm looking for in less than a second again (vs upwards of a minute or more).

It also highlights the differences between the OSes: OSX handles loads and loads of applications at the same time with significantly less slowdown and zero waiting on the UI. Windows launches and handles a single application much more quickly, but it's not uncommon to wait a significant amount of time for a single click to register if I launch a couple large ones at once. Just today I've had to sit for a couple minutes because a large compile+launch decided to happen at the same time as a browser crash and an application auto-updating. Win 7 utterly stopped responding, except for my mouse cursor's movement.

edit: to all repliers suggesting Linux: yes it does, if you consider reinstalling to be "reinstalling from scratch", which was what I had meant (though not stated, apologies). Every OS slows with extensions + libraries + millions of files + hundreds of compiled applications, and I'm likely a bit of an edge case anyway. I pretty easily install 1000+ applications per year for experimenting, many of which add extra cruft that no uninstaller removes completely.

[hristov]

Or you can just install Linux. Probably not as pretty as OSX, but fast as hell.

After running Linux for more than 5 years now, I have never felt my system "age." I.e., it may become slower than newer computers but it never becomes slower than it used to be.

Of course I do kernel updates from time to time, but those keep all my local data and applications in place, so they are not like reinstalling the OS for Windows or OSX.

[barrkel]

Windows has historically been pretty poor at handling concurrent I/O to the same device. I've seen circa 200M/sec sequential disk throughput fall to 10M/sec or so simply by trying to run another operation concurrently. The I/O scheduler seems heavily weighted for latency rather than throughput.

[rphlx]

Maybe they optimize for latency because NTFS still fragments really badly.

[munchhausen]

> Ya know what helps a lot? Reinstalling the OS.

I know that you went on to talk about OSX and Windows, but you did say OS, so I thought I'll drop by and mention that reinstalling Linux will not give you a performance improvement.

[dkarl]

My Windows XP box is pretty much dead at this point. I wonder sometimes what I could do to improve its performance if I actually knew jack shit about Windows, but I'm not that interested. I'll just back up my files and have IT reflash it. I get paid to program Linux boxes, and I'm sure as hell not going to pick up Windows as a hobby.