In a previous post, I had complained about the fact that my year-old Windows system took enormously long to get up and running, and I received a few comments on that. The past few days, triggered by a hardware issue with my old “main” hd, I took the time to reinstall the system completely. I have just finished doing that, at least to the point where I have all the must-have software up and running again, and I have had success in one area at least: the complete system boot process, including login and loading of the usual desktop accessories, takes only 2 minutes now, as opposed to 10 to 19, as was previously the case.
Now I really wonder how fast that will be in a year’s time… I’m not going to invalidate any of the arguments that were really the topic of that older post, though. I still think a programmer shouldn’t just assume that the user’s computer is used in a specific way… nor that is being rebooted regularly. And although I might be tempted to run a defragmenter a bit more often that I used to (one of the files on the old hd was allegedly composed of around 43000 fragments), I’m not planning on changing my habit of letting the system run all the time.