“I was taken down a rabbit hole, trying to get authoritative answers to a simple question”
It’s easy to blame Windows Update for your PC slowing down over the years, but third-party software can be just as guilty
At the end of a very long, rather bad-tempered road of diagnosis and fixes lay a little gem. I was chasing a common problem: the almost universal accusation that Windows PCs tend to slow down over the longer term. In this case the issue was hardly subtle, with a database access process bringing up the whirling beachball and leaving users tapping their feet and making cups of tea. Not great when this was the sales mechanism for a busy ski resort.
I’d gone through the usual tricks, running Disk Cleanup and CCleaner and snuffling through the temp directories for lurking signs of infections. The whole slowdown thing just wouldn’t go away. This was a machine that started out being pretty damn quick, both in my view and in that of the software supplier, who would often through gritted teeth admit that this was one of its faster-running deployments.
So I threw most of my normal caution to the winds and started hunting for suspicious-looking burdens. While it’s true that Windows can splurge out hundreds of thousands of files that you neither see nor ever use courtesy
