Windows Rot

Everyone who's ever used windows for an extended period of time is probably definitely familiar with what has come to be known as "Windows Rot." The peculiarity of the matter is that, this seems to occur no matter what kind of environment the PC is in, networked or not. Even defragmented systems free of malware, seem to be subject to this decomposition of proper function.

I haven't been able to find any data suggesting that anyone had taken it upon themselves to quantify this Windows Rot, but im pretty sure everyone knows its true. I myself have a few conspiracy type theories revolving around Windows Rot, including that Windows contains code to purposely slow itself so users are forced to buy the upgrade, but as a Linux lover my opinion may be somewhat biased. However, we all know Windows Rot is true, so I am here to offer two feasible non-conspiracy related theories of why this may occur.

The first reason, and the most popular theory among beleivers of Windows Rot includes the fact that Windows operates around the registry. Ever time a program is called, its default values need to be accessed from the registry. As more and more programs are installed on the computer the registry grows in size, and the time taken to load a program will increase O(n) time where n is the number of newly installed programs. And when programs are constantly installed and uninstalled registry values are not always deleted properly further adding to the rot. This phenominon does not seem to take place in Unix systems for the simple reason, it doesn't. Most programs have a config file the corresponds to that specific program so all of that time is not wasted searching through the registry.

The second problem that may contribute to Windows Rot is the organization of the NTFS filesystem. An oversimplified representation of the NTFS for windows is as follows, a pagefile which is all contiguous, a MFT section which is all contiguous, and the files. The MFT is a sort of indexing in the beginning of the partition that indexes all of the files to a memory location. As more and more files are added and this indexing file increases by size n, this too will cause an O(n) increase in disk access time. Especially if the files are fragmented.

Well there you have it two valid theories for Windows Rot. But dont rule out the conspiracy theory either.