I’ve only had one client ask me this exact question recently, but I am getting this general sentiment a lot more these days than I ever had in the past. There’s nothing more disappointing than buying a brand-new device, getting it out of the box, setting it up, only to be severely underwhelmed by its performance, or in some cases, discovering that it’s just plain not working at all. Personally, I feel bad when this happens, and professionally it’s not a good look for C2 when a computer we recommend or procure for a customer stumbles right out of the gate. Unfortunately, this is happening for a lot of clients lately, and while this explanation may seem like we’re trying to pass the buck – we’re really not – you should know what’s actually going on.
So what the heck is going on?
Here comes another numbered list. It helps me think, and hopefully gives you helpful guide posts on where to pause, digest, and uncross your eyes because this is complicated. I wish it were something as simple as gremlins, but we should be so lucky in light of what’s actually going on.
- Microsoft has been releasing some real winners on their recent updates. And by winners, I mean losers. I explained this in a previous post, but basically back in 2015, Microsoft converted its quality assurance operations from a professional, in-house team, to one powered by volunteers in the wider technology community. Microsoft crowd-sources the testing of their updates, and the results are poor.
- New PC’s can sometimes sit on shelves for weeks, if not months, before arriving on your desk. During this time, Microsoft has been dropping (bad) updates like they were hot (see #1), so when it finally gets connected to the internet, your new PC pulls a Kanye and says, “Imma let you finish…” and proceeds to apply gigabytes of back-dated patches, in some cases well over 100 gigabytes if your PC is really behind.
- Oh yeah, some of those updates are bad. Don’t forget #1. Some of them don’t even get successfully applied. Repeat “Imma let you finish…” except in reverse as your PC rolls back an unsuccessful patch. Why did it fail patching? Who knows. Microsoft is not going explain what went wrong. It just throws the whole thing into reverse, reboots, and waits to try again.
- A lot of new PC’s come with antivirus software already installed. Most antivirus software aren’t particularly speedy, especially if it was provided for free. So your PC is applying literally thousands of changes to your operating system files, and the antivirus software has to follow it around with a clipboard, saying, “OK, you can apply that change. WAIT…OK that one too. WAIT…let me check that one…OK.”
- If you happened to buy a PC with a spinning hard drive instead of an SSD, add a speed penalty to all the above nonsense.
- Throughout all of the above, Windows 10 is trying to do this in the “background” while letting you “work” on your PC. Except your PC is pinning the needle on your hard drive and you get the spinning, blue wheel of “please wait an interminable amount of time for this file to open.” This is probably the greatest failing of Windows 10: updates are applied in the background with zero notice to the user of what’s going on. If you dig, you can find out what’s happening, but, “ain’t nobody got time for dat!”
So basically, out of the box, your PC needs to go through a “break-in” period. Any of you who have ever participated in a sport that requires gear knows that this feels like. On a PC, this can mean a new computer won’t actually hit its stride for several days (up to a week, depending on your internet speed!), and that period can be even longer if you are also installing newer versions of software that are now “Windows 10 compatible”, and, oh by the way, also very different from their Windows 7 counterparts you are “upgrading” from. This break-in period happens on high-end, expensive PCs just as often as budget PCs, and in my experience, is not really avoidable. Just like stretching out before exercise, today’s PC’s need a “warm up period” when fresh out of the box, so plan accordingly.
