Windows 10 slow?

[Benm]

Although I should point out - just because cell phones and most of the on board radios (Not just AM voice on VHF and whatever mode they use on HF, ADS-B is much closer to cell frequencies at 1090MHz) operate on entirely different bands doesn't mean they can't interfere with each other.

That said, isn't it more of a blanket ban on electronics with transmitters in them anyway? That makes sense - rather than restricting certain transmitters that might cause issues, just restrict them all. Way easier to manage.

It's easier to blanket ban, but often also nonsensical.

If there actually IS a problem it is easy to explain to people why they should not use devices on planes. It seems to vary between airlines, some ban the use of electronics that cannot transmit at all (like mp3 players without any wifi/network ability) during take-off and landing. Other airlines don't give a darn and only tell you to put cellphones in airplane mode as a formality.

Airplanes do use several systems in various frequency ranges that could be interfered with, but none of them are both critical to flight operations and sensitive to cellphone interference.

VHF voice communications, beacons and ILS localizers work at low frequencies, typically in the 108-200 MHz range, and are immunte to any cellphone transmissions.

ADS-B transponders and TCAS work at 1080 MHz which is not in any cell band, but could be affected by cellphones that aren't really in spec either - probably not brand name ones, but perhaps some chinese clones.

Radar and radio-altimeters usually work in higher frequency bands (over 2 GHz) which would not be directly affected by cellphone signals, but could get interference from harmonics from the cell base frequency in badly designed handsets.

In short: If both the aircraft systems and the cellphone comply with regulations, there is no problem. If either or both are defective, there could be, but it would be unlikely it would pose more than a nuisance.

 

[Chrisbee]

Oh boy this is frustrating. After a bit of more extensive use of the new installation, everything checks out except the system. All applications are fine, but windows explorer just doesn't want to run, and in some cases won't even open... :scowl:

It gives me a bit of time before it crashes, I'll do as IE says and see if that helps, but as it seems there is something in my PC that win10 just doesn't seem to get along with.

That's pretty much what mine does. Seems fine right after the install, but not long after will start lagging. It hasn't actually crashed yet though. I'm currently waiting on some ram to show up to see if 8gig instead of 4gig will help anything before a fresh install.

As for the key thing, the last OS I've installed from cd was 7, and there was a defer option to install the key later. But I remember back when installed XP that you couldn't do that. I used to have a program called 'magic jellybean' that would find the Windows key for you before you would try a re-install of the OS. That helped if you didn't have the key from the OS cd anymore.

 

[InfinitusEquitas]

I had so many pre vista keys... never really had an issue with it

4gb ram is kind of low, I find myself needing more just to accommodate my browsing habits, and opening a whole bunch of tabs. 8gb and up seems to be fine though.

I was able to extract the key, after upgrading to windows 10, but it was a bit of a hassle, and I don't remember exactly how I did it. After I found out I didn't need to bother, and haven't thought about it since.

Check your taskmanager when you notice the pc slowing down. Pay attention to anything that's using over 5% or so of your CPU, memory, and disk. Or alternatively if you notice 5+ of the same processes running, that you don't recognize. I did have an issue with one process kind of running amok on my older laptop that brought it to a crawl. It didn't slow the computer down immediately either, but only after a few minutes would pass, and I ended up just disabling the related process altogether.

 

[Dr_Evil]

LOL at the 4 to 8GB of RAM. I've had a minimum of 16 since mid 2012. I'm at 32 now and could go to 48 if I wanted to use the 4x4GB sticks I have and populate all 8 slots. Using Chrome with add-ons eats a lot of RAM.

 

[ElectricPlasma]

Yikes, I couldn't imagine going much more over 16gb. I've got 12 in my machine right now (Yea I know, kinda inefficient but I'm using what I have ) and it's plenty for CAD rendering, skype and e-mail, and web browsing at the same time. Dunno why you would want such a high RAM count, unless you do heavy video rendering or editing or intensive gaming etc etc.

As per serial keys and what not, my PC's life span went from win7 to a free upgrade to win10, and I have no idea what my key is now, was lost somewhere in translation lol.

 

[Chrisbee]

I had a 16gig setup back in '13. That was back when I did a lot of gaming though. Not so much now. Just don't have the time anymore. I require very little from my PCs at the moment. Mostly streaming and basic tasks.

 

[DashApple]

Never had more than 6Gb of RAM : P , My Laptop has 6Gb but I'm not a heavy browser and my Pico has 4Gb onboard but that's more than enough for its use .

 

[Bionic-Badger]

It's easier to blanket ban, but often also nonsensical.

If there actually IS a problem it is easy to explain to people why they should not use devices on planes. It seems to vary between airlines, some ban the use of electronics that cannot transmit at all (like mp3 players without any wifi/network ability) during take-off and landing. Other airlines don't give a darn and only tell you to put cellphones in airplane mode as a formality.

But they are explaining to people why they're disallowing certain or all devices to not be on during phases of the flight by saying it can interfere with the aircraft. Yeah, maybe their explanation doesn't capture the whole story, or may not even apply so much these days, but it's not the flight attendants' duty to know or be communicating every reason behind each regulation, inspecting each device to see if it applies -- or for that matter debating it with passengers. Explaining something such as the FCC doesn't want cell phones interfering with networks from the air, rather than having the story be that it can interfere with the airplane, just dilutes the message and doesn't improve anything. For the most part the airlines just want those 200+ passengers to prepare themselves for flight without much hassle, and most passengers probably want that too.

I've also found that most airlines have standardized on people keeping cellular devices off or in airplane mode after takeoff and before landing, allowing laptops out after ascending/descending, and WiFi off until the airline's WiFi is enabled. It used to be that the policies varied, but that was also when cell phones and other such devices were not so ubiquitous. Now they can't and don't verify that the phones are in airplane mode except for obvious actions, and of course people forget and whatnot. Mostly though, it ends up working out as they instruct.

 

[Bionic-Badger]

Yikes, I couldn't imagine going much more over 16gb. I've got 12 in my machine right now (Yea I know, kinda inefficient but I'm using what I have ) and it's plenty for CAD rendering, skype and e-mail, and web browsing at the same time. Dunno why you would want such a high RAM count, unless you do heavy video rendering or editing or intensive gaming etc etc.

I used to have 12GB, but then doubled that when I kept hitting the rails. I keep both Firefox and Chrome browsers open all the time for different reasons, and often they'll be using 3-4GB of RAM each. Then there's the OS that likes to keep things in memory, and other stuff like games using 6GB or more. I'll even alt-tab out of them to do other stuff. I regularly hit around 20GB of RAM use.

A lot of people seem to think that much RAM is only necessary if doing a lot of computations or CAD work and such. It is certainly useful for that. For myself though, I like having lots of RAM so I don't have to shut down programs -- and lose my current work-state in the process -- to do other things. I've even set my taskbar to be vertical (and modified the height of the tasks) so I can organize lots of windows. I guess it's just how I work.

 

[InfinitusEquitas]

Due to years of having had no choice but to work on shitty systems, I've developed a habit of closing all programs that I am not actively using, except messengers, and outlook. Currently my home pc has 12 or 16gb of ram, I don't remember, and rarely find myself needing it.

Chrome is a very serious ram hog, as of late I've started using firefox more for this reason alone. Otherwise I've been having issues with ram running out at work on an 8gb system.

Where computers are concerned, more is generally always better, but not always needed, depending on expectations, patience, and requirements.

 

[Benm]

How much you need depends on application obviously, but windows 10 itself doesnt really require much ram to run well. I have 8 gigs in the system i'm currently on, with a little over 4 gb used. Couple of (chrome) browser tabs, winamp, photoshop, komodo and filezilla open.

One thing is that the system will use memory as long as it is available. I'm currently using a bit over 4 gb, but i'm sure the system would work with 4 gb installed just as well - there just is no need to free up any memory when there is plenty left.

The laptop i have connected to my tv has 4 gb installed and i've never noticed any problems on that either, despite running several browser tabs, a torrent client, vlc, and what not. This system came with win 7 and functioned perfectly well on that too, there seems to be little difference either way.

 

[Bionic-Badger]

Windows will also cache stuff in the extra memory for faster loading. It doesn't make quite the difference it used to before SSDs, but it's still decent. I was pretty happy when I could reliably disable page files entirely.

My browser setup is a bit excessive too. I have about 48 Chrome tabs across five windows. Probably about 200 tabs with Firefox (using Tree Style Tabs extension. Yeah, a ton of tabs, but I like keeping tabs of sites I've been to in case I want to explore that topic again where I left off. Firefox's tab history works pretty nice that way.

Note that while there are an assload of tabs in Firefox, Firefox is smart and won't load tabs until the tab is clicked. The Chrome tabs, however, all load when the browser starts up. They're probably, overall, more memory intensive (around 70MB on average each), as Chrome will load all the tabs, and it's up to the website designer to prevent content from loading until the tab is in view.

Most of the RAM problems with Firefox, for me, come from its memory fragmentation, which sometimes requires a browser restart. The reason I keep using Chrome, aside from separate cookies, is that even with lots of total memory usage, it never crashes the way Firefox does. It's also why I disabled Flash in Firefox long ago: it seemed to fragment memory and force me to restart more often. I still like Firefox's extensions and overall ergonomics more than Chrome, the latter of which is locked into Google's vision of their browser, not the users'.

 

[Benm]

Operating systems tend to fill whatever memory they have available, sometimes to extreme extents.

For example, i have a client that operates a website which deals with huge peak loads, but is minimally loaded most of the time. It has 24 gigs of ram on this VPS.

Even when you reset the thing in a period of virtually no load, it will fill up that memory over time. A server with 2 GB of ram could easily handle the traffic during the low-load period without ever having to even swap to disk.

I suppose it's just the most efficient way of doing things, despite it looks really odd having 7 out of 8 cores sitting 100% idle, 1 core having a few percent use (guess for the ssh connection) yet memory filled up to the brim. And no, more memory will not make this thing faster

 

[ElectricPlasma]

Operating systems tend to fill whatever memory they have available, sometimes to extreme extents.

For example, i have a client that operates a website which deals with huge peak loads, but is minimally loaded most of the time. It has 24 gigs of ram on this VPS.

Even when you reset the thing in a period of virtually no load, it will fill up that memory over time. A server with 2 GB of ram could easily handle the traffic during the low-load period without ever having to even swap to disk.

I suppose it's just the most efficient way of doing things, despite it looks really odd having 7 out of 8 cores sitting 100% idle, 1 core having a few percent use (guess for the ssh connection) yet memory filled up to the brim. And no, more memory will not make this thing faster

Servers are a bit different, in fact much different from personal computers. They're based on serving clients the most efficient way possible (most server OS's). Even with no requests I wouldn't be surprised if a server had over 75% of it's memory in use, that's to store data for the next few requests as much faster access than on the main drive, essentially preparing itself. And, obviously if there's no processes or events taking place there won't be any CPU usage.

Operating systems tend to fill whatever memory they have available, sometimes to extreme extents.

Mmm, not necessarily. Sure it happens sometimes but when there's nothing running then there's nothing to store in it's RAM other than itself, the OS. Gotta remember, it's majorly the programs running that control the RAM cache as that's where the instructions and runtime executions lay. Other than the OS and maybe some bus/serial/port processing information, it's mostly running programs that occupy your RAM capacity in a PC. And even that can be considered part of the main OS's share.

 

[Dr_Evil]

Windows will also cache stuff in the extra memory for faster loading. It doesn't make quite the difference it used to before SSDs, but it's still decent. I was pretty happy when I could reliably disable page files entirely.

My browser setup is a bit excessive too. I have about 48 Chrome tabs across five windows. Probably about 200 tabs with Firefox (using Tree Style Tabs extension. Yeah, a ton of tabs, but I like keeping tabs of sites I've been to in case I want to explore that topic again where I left off. Firefox's tab history works pretty nice that way.

Note that while there are an assload of tabs in Firefox, Firefox is smart and won't load tabs until the tab is clicked. The Chrome tabs, however, all load when the browser starts up. They're probably, overall, more memory intensive (around 70MB on average each), as Chrome will load all the tabs, and it's up to the website designer to prevent content from loading until the tab is in view.

Most of the RAM problems with Firefox, for me, come from its memory fragmentation, which sometimes requires a browser restart. The reason I keep using Chrome, aside from separate cookies, is that even with lots of total memory usage, it never crashes the way Firefox does. It's also why I disabled Flash in Firefox long ago: it seemed to fragment memory and force me to restart more often. I still like Firefox's extensions and overall ergonomics more than Chrome, the latter of which is locked into Google's vision of their browser, not the users'.

Welcome to "excessive browser tabs anonymous." I'm the same way and have different windows open on each of my 3 monitors.

 

[Bionic-Badger]

Mmm, not necessarily. Sure it happens sometimes but when there's nothing running then there's nothing to store in it's RAM other than itself, the OS. Gotta remember, it's majorly the programs running that control the RAM cache as that's where the instructions and runtime executions lay. Other than the OS and maybe some bus/serial/port processing information, it's mostly running programs that occupy your RAM capacity in a PC. And even that can be considered part of the main OS's share.

OSes will usually keep data and libraries in memory to speed up loading. On Windows, for example, SuperFetch will keep programs you're likely to run in memory so that you don't have to retrieve the data from disk. Likewise, Linux will keep file data in RAM as well. The OS will always free up that memory if a program requests it, but will do its best to use up all the memory available if possible. After all, unused RAM is wasted RAM.