Small rant at university

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My university has recently upgraded all the machines to Windows 7 (from XP).

Since then the PC's have had loads of bugs and have been CRIPPINGLY slow, with frequent min or two long pauses where the whole system hangs.

What the hell is the point of upgrading if the hardware/infrastructure or whatever can't handle it? Seemed to be working fine beforehand.

Literally every few pages it will just hang. (and I'm not the only one).


edit: Just looked, this machine has been upgraded (e7600, 4gb).
 
Windows 7 runs pretty decently on low end hardware, I've got a low power laptop I use when I need good battery uptime (actually manages 9 hours of normal useage) that has a Intel Pentium ULV SU2700 1.3 GHz with Win 7 home premium on it and the OS itself is perfectly responsive, etc. quick to boot, no long pauses.
 
We had a very similar problem when testing Windows 7 before migrating our XP infrastructure to it. It was nothing to do with the infrastructure or the hardware but a small networking feature of Windows 7 which we had to disable.
 
Also possible its the anti-virus or other anti-malware/security software the Uni is using, when I was at college they had some horrid bloaty security suite that would take about 5 minutes to scan a PC on booting the OS and constantly grind things to a halt when you opened a new web page or started a new application.
 
The ram usage is incredibly high (2.01gb atm with just firefox and microsoft word open) so there must be a software conflict somewhere.

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edit: also, why are they still on 100mbps cards? Surely gigabit is standard now?
 
The computers here (Department of Engineering) run Linux - I think it's probably half for the performance on the older computers and half to be cheap :p
 
kenmare said:
The ram usage is incredibly high (2.01gb atm with just firefox and microsoft word open) so there must be a software conflict somewhere.





edit: also, why are they still on 100mbps cards? Surely gigabit is standard now?
Click to expand...

Win 7 doesn't just leave RAM sitting around doing nothing as much as previous versions so it will appear to have a higher RAM usage and 100mb is perfectly adequate unless you need to transfer massive amounts of data, not only would they have to upgrade all their machines but probably a fair bit of their back end equipment as well for what would be quite a small real world difference.
 
We have some abysmally slow machines here (Nottingham Uni where I work).

My general desktop machine isn't too bad a spec (i7-930 with 8Gb and Win 7), and when I run a simulation on it it crunches numbers just like you would expect for a machine of this spec. But try and do any ordinary every-day things and it's a joke... Opening Chrome takes usually 30s to 2 mins, as does loading word or excel or Tecplot. On boot I have to wait (literally) 15 mins before I can attempt to open any programs. Often I will be typing in word and I will have to wait for the letters on the screen to catch up to my typing!

My first thought was that the HDD was the problem, but benchmarks put it about where it's supposed to be. In fact it's the anti-virus software... I think it scans everything that you do, and I think that it has to wait for authorisation to open programs or something. It really makes the computer un-usable. Now, I can kill the task in task manager and that gives me 15mins of peace. But then it comes back... I have to kill the damn thing every 15 or 20 mins if I want to get any work done.

I've taken to using my personal laptop for general purpose work, and just using the desktop for fast simulations that aren't worth using the cluster. Since the desktop has around 10x the processing power of my laptop that's really pathetic. Many of us have asked the IT department, but they say there is nothing that can be done as security policy is set by the University, not the department. But who knows... I think we have 2 competent IT staff out of 7 in the department.

Universities seem to get some simple things so, so wrong :mad:
 
moss said:
We had a very similar problem when testing Windows 7 before migrating our XP infrastructure to it. It was nothing to do with the infrastructure or the hardware but a small networking feature of Windows 7 which we had to disable.
Click to expand...

Out of curiosity, what was it? Might be helpful to know just in case as we've introduced a couple of Windows 7 machines (notably my own, hooray for being a guinea pig :p).
 
I don't think it's W7, more the network infrastructure the Unis are using...

We have basic PC's at Uni - Think P4's.

These are horrific and struggle to load more than 2/3 internet explorer tabs at once...

It takes about 5 minutes to log into your user (minimum), and most of the time when you walk in 50% of the machines have got stuck on a loading network settings kind of config...

kd
 
Duff-Man said:
We have some abysmally slow machines here (Nottingham Uni where I work).

My general desktop machine isn't too bad a spec (i7-930 with 8Gb and Win 7), and when I run a simulation on it it crunches numbers just like you would expect for a machine of this spec. But try and do any ordinary every-day things and it's a joke... Opening Chrome takes usually 30s to 2 mins, as does loading word or excel or Tecplot. On boot I have to wait (literally) 15 mins before I can attempt to open any programs. Often I will be typing in word and I will have to wait for the letters on the screen to catch up to my typing!

My first thought was that the HDD was the problem, but benchmarks put it about where it's supposed to be. In fact it's the anti-virus software... I think it scans everything that you do, and I think that it has to wait for authorisation to open programs or something. It really makes the computer un-usable. Now, I can kill the task in task manager and that gives me 15mins of peace. But then it comes back... I have to kill the damn thing every 15 or 20 mins if I want to get any work done.

I've taken to using my personal laptop for general purpose work, and just using the desktop for fast simulations that aren't worth using the cluster. Since the desktop has around 10x the processing power of my laptop that's really pathetic. Many of us have asked the IT department, but they say there is nothing that can be done as security policy is set by the University, not the department. But who knows... I think we have 2 competent IT staff out of 7 in the department.

Universities seem to get some simple things so, so wrong :mad:
Click to expand...

Does it load word ect from the server? If its overloaded or something faulty somewere it could severly limit your speed opening things.
 
If they are PCs that have been re-imaged (or even if they're new) the default speed setting for the network card may have been reset to one that no longer matches the network ports. This means that anything involving network traffic will run abysmally slow. If you use roaming profiles then pretty much everything will be affected as all files, emails and maybe some applications will be opening from a server. Worth trying a bandwidth test to see if that's the bottleneck.
 
dfarrall said:
Does it load word ect from the server? If its overloaded or something faulty somewere it could severly limit your speed opening things.
Click to expand...

No, all applications are installed locally. Sometimes it feels as if I'm simply waiting for authorisation to proceed, rather than waiting for the HDD to finish grinding away.


Belmit, not sure if what you said applies to me also, but anyway: I can get good download speeds (> 1Mb/s) once the file has started downloading, though sometimes it seems to take forever to actually get access to the file. All is much better once I kill Sophos Anti-Virus (savservice.exe is the bane of my day!).
 
At our uni they upgraded to Win7 and it slowed the system down. Was because they had virtualised the system(?) i.e. everything was installed on a server and the pc downloaded it from there when you wanted to run it. When term started the whole system slowed right down because the network people had tested it during the summer holidays, when there was barely any load on the system. As soon as big groups of people started logging on it could take 15 minutes just to get onto the PC :s
 
JHeaton said:
Out of curiosity, what was it? Might be helpful to know just in case as we've introduced a couple of Windows 7 machines (notably my own, hooray for being a guinea pig :p).
Click to expand...
TCP/IP autotuning, caused lots of issues for us, mainly major slowdowns/freezes when connecting to file servers/exchange etc.
Disabled it through netsh:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled
 
Duff-Man said:
Belmit, not sure if what you said applies to me also, but anyway: I can get good download speeds (> 1Mb/s) once the file has started downloading, though sometimes it seems to take forever to actually get access to the file. All is much better once I kill Sophos Anti-Virus (savservice.exe is the bane of my day!).
Click to expand...

I just ran a test at speedtest.net and got 94.93Mbps! A PC I fixed the other day at the university was getting 4Mbps and was on its arse. Network card was hard set to 100Mbps/Full Duplex, ports were on Auto Detect. Switched the card to Auto and suddenly... 50-60Mbps. All problems with applications/web/crashes/corrupted profiles disappeared. Unlikely it's the same issue for you or even the OP, but goes to show that a single setting can cripple the computer, so it's not necessarily a simple matter of the architecture failing to run the OS properly.

Sounds like a lot of places aren't testing their upgrades beyond checking the recommended spec on the back of the retail box.
 
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