or how stop Windows from using 100% disk and Mac from eating your bandwidth.
TL;DR; scroll down for the solution for each OS.
Man, What is up with operating systems? seriously, I keep finding myself chasing foe processes that straight up consume almost ALL of my resources.
A short story to explain the pain:
I go over some newsletters, watch some videos and for f*ck sake, what the hell is wrong with my poor windows computer?
My computer has a top notch processor, abundance of RAM and a fine SSD, even my internet connection is pretty fast. what could possibly make my wonderful computer so slow?? simple web pages takes long seconds to load, opening My Computer makes the computer heat up to gazillion degrees, WHATS UP!?
opening task manager…
Task manager shows something amazing, CPU is mostly idle, RAM allocation is at 50% or less but the disk… oh the disk. The poor disk is at constant 100% without even the slightest relief. the offender, no other than the one and only Microsoft Windows.
Another story happens couple of month later, Been working on a Mac Book Pro from my work and I see that the network is suddenly becoming so sloowwwww. usually my internet is ridiculously fast, even over WiFi. I plugged the computer through cable just to be sure it’s not interference or so, still slow. Checking from my phone, the WiFi is LIGHTNING FAST.
opening Activity Monitor…
once again, the beloved Operating System - OS X is snacking my bandwidth through a process called nsurlsessiond.
Sigh…
The Solutions
I didn’t let go, and read hours and did all kinds of weird things and guess what, it worked!
It’s been weeks and even months since, and It didn’t happen again in both cases — so there is hope!
Windows
The solutions that worked for me:
- disabling Windows Search Service
- disabling Superfetch service
- disabling automatic downloads of updates
How to do it?
- Disabling Windows Search and Superfetch with images (method 1 & 2)
- disabling auto updates and another one
Mac (OS X)
The solutions that worked for me:
- disable unwanted iCloud synchronizations (namely photos)
- disable Spotlight suggestions
- disable background download of updates
How to do it?
- disabling spotlight suggestions
- disabling background updates (and specifically this image)
- changing iCloud sync settings Thanks Apple! (don’t miss this image)
Epilogue
Use linux. seriously, that’s what I use on my main computer, and it’s amazing!
I mean, it’s still an Operating System so it has to take something out of you. but in the case of Linux Mint MATE which is the distribution I am using, it’s mostly drivers, and some dependency resolution for exotic package i install every once in a while, I’m fine with that.
But seriously, never give up on your computer. if it’s slow, checkout the Task Manager/Activity Monitor/System Monitor and see what’s the bottleneck? that’s the most important question of them all. if you had infinite CPU, RAM, Disk and Network everything would take 0 time. If it doesn’t, it means something is being a bottleneck, and you should mitigate that something by eliminating unwanted software that clogs your system and it will go away, i promise. there is always a solution/workaround!
Happy speed up!
Don’t be shy and comment what’s worked for you so others can use it too.
