Overcoming software bloat and slowdown. What Microsoft should have done

Mike Halsey | Oct 13, 2009 | Comments

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Windows 7 is fast, very fast and exactly what we need to make us forget the performance headaches that Vista caused. But hang on a minute! My brand new copy of Windows 7 has suddenly become slow and clunky. What’s going on?

The problem here is I appear to have wanted to install software. How irresponsible of me, and how utterly irresponsible of Microsoft to not take some of the job away from these companies and spend valuable time and money doing some of their job for them.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s exactly what Microsoft should have done.

If you start MSConfig from the Start Menu and look at what’s running under the startup tab, you’ll probably find several pieces of software that have updaters running. Apple, Adobe and others all run little utilities when you start your PC to check for updates.

Now this is stupid in a way because at most there’ll only be updates once a month, but if they patch critical vulnerabilities the user can’t be relied upon to manually run the updater.

This is where Microsoft should have stepped in. All these updaters that are needlessly running in the background are slowing Windows down, especially at boot time. Now Microsoft have proven that Windows Update, the system used to keep the operating system patched and up to date, can be used to deliver patches and updates for other software, like Office.

But why haven’t they opened this facility up to other vendors yet?

Surely this would make sense and it’s something that the technical community have been calling on Microsoft to do since Windows XP came out.

Whatever Microsoft’s reasons for not doing this they’re certainly keeping quiet about them. Maybe they’re keeping quiet because they know just how simple a job it would be?

The simple fact is that the only defence we have at the moment is to disable these updaters in MSConfig and hope for the best. This is far from ideal and, frankly, it would be much better for all of us if these software packages checked for updates when we actually use them rather than all the time. It would seem however that they don’t care about us either.

So come on Microsoft. Show the competition how it really should be done and open up Windows Update for us.

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