by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-28 18:30:35+00:00
When it comes to tweaking Windows,

>Doing things manually by recipe is also less than optimal.

>The ideal, therefore, is an automated Windows detoxifier

I've already seen it baked in for a few years now for specialized uses.

There are scientific instruments which require very specialized software from the manufacturer, Windows-only naturally, and to use the latest software you need a post-2022 OS version now.

The most recently-purchased are on Windows 10, set up by the "experts", and run like dogs compared to the 20-year-old instruments still using Windows XP.

The same app version on W11 is very noticeably worse and I've been working on it in preparation for migration.

For XP Pro there was a couple documentation pages of manual settings to Windows that you were expected to follow which increased Windows performance, before installing the major lab app.

Now there are quite a few pages to the manual checklist beforehand, and then during install a factory autoscript tweaks away and stuffs in some dependencies for about a half hour before the package finally begins to install. Afterward alerting you if any recognized beneficial manual changes are still recommended. Not only Pro, but Enterprise and LTSC are supported now but they are not so great either.

Arf arf, it still wants to make you howl :(

There are dozens more settings that need to be identified and experimented with, fortunately it's a 24/7 lab and this started as soon as W11 was released.

Anyway, Windows has gotten to the point where I can make plenty as a consultant just visiting labs and recovering untapped workflow from the electronics. Which never would have paid off even a few years ago. I don't even need to automate. Manual is just fine. As things progress it's likely to pay better than being a referee witness or calibrating the instruments against NIST-traceable materials too.

Decades ago I wrote thousands of LOC before they had very advanced software like this, now I still write pages of text but it's all "scripts". And not mainly the code kind, more like a screenplay where I'm the actor following the script my own self with a number of one-liners :\

Reproducible results require a reproducible environment so it's worth it.

Today the instrument manufacturer's offerings are very advanced, you need their current app version to support the newest instruments, but the app also does still support a number of 20-year old models. Basically new software has shipped with updated factory device drivers for the old (expensive) lab hardware to keep it running with later Windows versions.

I have one of those on the bench that is highly reliable for years on XP, that way it uses up less than 1 GB of memory and only 1.2 GB of drive space for Windows, plus another 1.4 GB of 2006 instrument software and it runs like a top.

The new software on W11 can get the same instrument to analyze the chemical in the same amount of bench time and get the same result from the same calibration. This is impressive but anything less would always be complete failure. The instrument factory engineers have gone the extra mile with their built-in auto-tweaking script too. Too bad nothing less would do. But all interactions with the combined system are still like you've got a Chihuahua in a Greyhound race compared to XP. And Windows 11 does it with Enterprise "only" taking up about 10 GB, and then the lab app takes another 15 GB on the drive, plus you've got to have at least 8 GB of memory.

Or approximately 10x the PC resources to do a noticeably poorer job of accomplishing a comparable thing using the exact same instrument. Or if you are not prepared to give the workflow a complete workover, a much worse performance when it comes to what you can get done on the same analyzer in one day.

Although everybody should have a chance to get their hands on XP when it's mainlining SSDeroids on the bare metal :)