MS Windows Code Automatically Corrupts Itself to Force You to Upgrade!!!???

Hi All,

So I was wondering and I think this may be quite possible...you ever notice that after a couple of years your computer starts to "act-up", show errors, it turns "slow", even when trying to run programs that it never had a problem with before? I've been in the PC industry for about 15 years and no matter which brand I have purchased, how many system factory restores I do to the machines, they always end up with the inherent systematic problems that make you feel like the computer is "old", "outdated", and you have to "upgrade" or buy something "faster". Granted, some newer programs/games require additional RAM. CPU, etc., but I'm talking about the same programs not running as they did when the computer was first purchased.

Take for instance my Windows XP Professional, about 4 years ago this computer started "acting up". No matter how many times I restore the computer, (at first it runs fine), but after 3 or 4 months, little by little it starts to become "corrupted". Trojans, Viruses, etc. are not an issue, again, I'm in the software programming field so I can say this with authority.

So it occurred to me, since we don't have access to the actual code, what if Microsoft purposely programs its code so after "x" months or "x" years and months, the system starts "mis-behaving". Anyone who has any programming knowledge knows this is quite easy and simple to do.

Another reason why they would want to do this, is to make sure the latest govt. spying software gets installed on all the new PCs. But wait!! What am I thinking about, Microsoft who has been fined multiple times for anti-trust issues would never think of doing something like this; this idea would never occurred to any of their top executives and 6 figure engineers and programmers...and our govt. would never be in it on something like this...yeah right...

Peace!

I suppose it is possible. I mean, really, anything is.

I think, however, it has more to do with registries getting corrupted Keys or really huge, allowing corruptions to occur.

why are you still using XP,
microsoft stopped supporting it already.

windows 8 came out today.
upgrade.

they might write sloppy code, but i doubt they code in a kill switch.
its more likely the hardware is no longer up to running the newer software you are using.,
hardware ages. from heat and use.

i have been in PC repair and operating system support for 25 years, so i can say this definitively.

of course as a plain old code cruncher you probably dont care what goes on inside you box.
ever cleaned it out with an air compressor?

Gee, I thought built-in obsolesence was the cornerstone of modern capitalism.

Whether it's cars or refrigerators or computers.

Think about Japan. They built quality products that did not need replacing.
For the last 30 years their economy is slumping.

Because their products were so reliably built, they did not require replacements again for a long time.
Once a certain saturation of markets are achieved other industries in places like China boomed because they built their products for export like crap.

Well, I think from a practical stand-point, what almost any money loving software company would do to ENSURE you needed to upgrade is have a slow kill switch programmed into the software. I understand about registries getting corrupted, but if you do a system factory restore then the registries would be perfect on the new install, yet a few months later, the system starts running like crap again.

reply to post by beyondsense


It could possibly be due to faulty hardware. Both new and older computers will start to act like you're describing when the harddrive or ram is going bad because it can't read correctly causing programs to not start or causing them to crash.

Could also be your mobo. I didn't see if you wrote how old your computer is (might be an oversight on my part) but consider upgrading. At least buy new ram and a new harddrive and see if that works.

Check your harddrive for errors using the built in MS tools and then scan your ram using this tool: memtest86.com...

Honestly, I don't think Microsoft purposely set up Windows XP to "self destruct". I think it's just a mix of a bloated registry, bad install disk (it happens) and/or the above described bad HD/Ram.

I personally still have an XP machine that has run fine for ten years. It isn't "slow" and it has no other deficiencies. Yes, Microsoft has stopped "supporting" it, but I really don't care one way or another. I have yet to depend upon Microsoft for anything and have never called them for support. I know there are no more upgrades, but that doesn't bother me either.

In my last job I had 500 machines running various versions of Windows. I recall no real software issues on these machines. They were well protected from outside attacks. There were plenty of hardware failures, mind you. The most common was a video card failure, followed by hard drives, but I never had to reinstall the OS from scratch. More to the point, my policy was to NEVER upgrade the OS. The machines got replaced on about a 7 year cycle (less if we had more money) and the OS was automatically upgraded that way. Now in these cases I controlled what software was loaded onto the machines, so it isn;t like a home user that keeps putting crap on over the years and forgets what he has done. So mine were "cleaner" than your average home machine, which may have contributed to their longevity.

I see no evidence that Windows code "automatically corrupts itself to force you to upgrade." I think that is a fantasy.

Well Those in control of the systems, including hardware manufacturers have actually forced people to upgrade.
PCI ... PCIe Try to put an AGP video card in a PCIe slot...Forced upgrade ..but that isn't tracking.
I do believe the code in the Operating systems have been written to force upgrades as well.
. I have an old pen4 system which is slow, but still quite stable.
When I put it up against my quad there is no contest. Not because of an operating system conspiracy, but because a quad is considerably faster than an old pen4. That ascribes to the difference in speeds, [Both win xp]
but it does not explain Auto corruption. Which seems to me to be a done deal. ie.
I make multiple redundant backups of everything. I do so because over the years I have lost so much to corruption of files and hardware that I back up religiously, knowing that the next moment I could have a failure.
Stinks of a conspiracy to me.
I use a third with UBUNTU which is for online work.
I have no intention of upgrading to windows 8 for the exact reason you have stated.
If they didn't figure this out up to Windows XP,. They would have done so by Win7 and it very well may be full of bugs.
So my opinion is...they did it with the hardware. They did it with various manufactures of software.
Truly I have no doubt that at some point they did indeed mess with the code. To force you to either upgrade, or simply become distracted to just spend more money. Not withstanding the tracking that can be done.
Be mindful that Win8 was intended for mobile systems. I tried it on a desktop and it was a complete failure.
I have no doubt that what you are saying here is right on. I view Windows 8 as a system built to track and fail.
I do believe it is in the code. So am I paranoid? Perhaps, but even paranoid people are right sometimes.
DH

Hard-drive has already been replaced twice. Again, this isn't an isolated issue, it has happened with nearly every machine I have bought. And something that I noticed too, after installing a required update or patch, a few weeks later, new problems start to "appear" out of nowhere. I have since disabled the automatic updates from all the PCs I have owned and thus have experienced fewer problems.

There could a variety of factors at play here.

For one, as said above, the actual hardware could be reaching the end of it's useful life. That is always something to bear in mind.

Also, over time, your computer can become a mess, file wise. I've had problems before on XP where after 6-9 months of use it would be noticeably slower, but this would be 6-9 months of installing/uninstalling games, programmes, moving files, copying pictures...the usual. A defrag would help, but often a clean sweep and a total re-install of windows is the only way to get your machine running at full pelt, simply because it isn't full of crap.

For example, I built a new PC a few months ago, a right monster of a machine too. i7, 16GB RAM, 2 x SSD's, the lot. When I installed windows, it took 10 minutes, not the usual 2 hours on an HDD!. On startup, it was POST to Windows in under 10 seconds.

Now, after installing a slew of games and other programs, I now have to wait a whole 20 seconds from POST to login (I know - ages right!), simply down to all the extra crap I've put on the machine since it was "born".

If you keep on top of your housekeeping, everything should run fine. Also, don't forget that Windows likes to index things, it loves page files etc. All this extra crap is largely unneccesary and I turn it off, but it can be a major drag on the system if you leave it all at "default", especially if your hardware resources are tight as it is.

Originally posted by okamitengu
windows 8 came out today.
upgrade.

Such ill advice.

If you are going to move from XP, your only safe options are Windows 7 or a Linux Distro.

A few months ago I read here on ATS how a college professor through a freedom of information request unearthed that all major companies who make printers (HP, Canon, Sony, etc.) had put in tracking software into scanners so that if you tried to scan U.S dollars, it would detect it, and send some information back to the Secret Service (IP address, location, money being scanned, etc.). All of these companies had done this at the request of the U.S govt in SECRET. So is it possible that Microsoft could be implanting malicious code or double-purpose code into their software, hell yeah I think!

Much like ones house, your computer has a tendency to collect crap. Even though one uninstalls the "proper" way, the uninstaller will often times leaves tons of garbage behind. The Windows registry is especially sensitive to that.

Deleting files, does not really delete them, it just marks the sectors the files were in as available and after time data becomes fragmented, hence "Defragging" the hard drive. Not so much an issue with VISTA and up as they auto defrag, but I do not believe XP auto-defrags. So if you are still running XP, make sure to defragment every couple of months.

Software also starts to act badly with new patches and updates to the OS. Microsoft has a set of guidelines for using the OS various API's, but programmers have a tendency to cheat and use shortcuts.
Which will inevitably break when Microsoft fixes something because the programmer used an API in such a way Microsoft didn't watch for.

If you have a look at the application compatibility list, you will see a HUGE list of applications that Microsoft had to specially program around because the authors of said programs refuse to fix them or are simply out of business.

Particularity bad were sound cards drivers, so much so that since VISTA, Microsoft refuses to let sound card drivers direct access to the sound card hardware. Creative labs (A particular nasty offender when it came to drivers) starting promoting and using OpenAL as a workaround the Windows restriction.

Anyway, it is not any one thing and I highly doubt there is a "kill switch", if there were I think Microsoft would have pulled it on XP a long time ago.

reply to post by beyondsense


When I had XP, disabling the auto updates would inevitably lead to a slow down in the system to a point where it would be unusable.. But, as is the nature of the PC, everyone's is different and the hardware inside can make a difference between a system working a dream or not..

I was on Vista for 2 years until this July and then switched to 7 (although I had 7 on my lappy for 18 months) and I've not had any issues with either, even though I know people will berate Vista till the cows come home.

Again, housekeeping and running the latest versions of both the OS and any system drivers (often overlooked by many) can make the difference between a machine that can run BF3 easily and one that struggles with Outlook.

People, thank you for the advice but you're taking to someone who is in the computer/programming business. The machines I mentioned have absolutely no games installed, almost no images, I used them strictly for work Dreamweaver, PhotoShop, etc. kind of programs. I'm not constantly installing/uninstalling crap into them. You all must be Microsoft employees trying to convince me I'm paranoid, but it won't work! I won't let it happen! You won't get me!!

You could be using Windows 8 or the latest Ubuntu it doesn't matter, after some time it will run slowly. Just reinstall the same OS and you're fine.

reply to post by beyondsense


Just my two bits, I think it may be possible. Their code is proprietary, and if asked MS would say it doesn't but if they did I don't think they would admit it. I just don't think it's necessary. Software and especially hardware is evolving faster than new operating systems are being developed. OS's have to be updated to just run some of the newest video cards, ssd's etc. As a tech guy you know this. So while it's completely possible for their to be a sortof self-destruct code in the OS, I think it's more likely you are having conflicts with new vs. old technology. Old hardware doesn't run new software well because the software wasn't written for obsolete hardware. OS's nowadays are lucky if they get 5 years shelf life as it is.

so switch to Linux

Problem solved

Originally posted by beyondsense
Hard-drive has already been replaced twice. Again, this isn't an isolated issue, it has happened with nearly every machine I have bought. And something that I noticed too, after installing a required update or patch, a few weeks later, new problems start to "appear" out of nowhere. I have since disabled the automatic updates from all the PCs I have owned and thus have experienced fewer problems.

But how many have you purchased? I've purchased 500 machines and I haven't had your experience at all. At any given time I had about 35-50 servers running various versions of Unix in addition to the Windows machines. (HP-UX, Solaris, BSD, Red Hat, and a hardened version of Linux by an Israeli security company that was just awesome!) Statistically speaking, if this werre the case, I should have seen it on a great many more. I'm not doubting these things have happened to you, but they do not represent an industry-wide trend. I would chalk it up to a) statistical aberration or b) mis-diagnosis, or c) You're doing something different to your machines that causes these problems.

I'd concentrate on c) because that's where I HAVE seen problems with upgrades. Because of my situation I had purchased several very rare third-party programs to run on dedicated servers. A home user would never buy these because they were for more industrial use and cost thousands of dollars. Basically I had one program on a dedicated server parceling out data to a number of different PCs. As I remember, this sub group was about 150 PCs.

So an upgrade came out and I, without contacting my third-party vendor, installed the upgrade only to have the program fall apart. Now this was my fault because I should have asked them first, but what had happened was that this vendor did not exactly follow standards with their software. They relied on some tweaks they could get away with on the older OS, but the new one wiped out their tweaks and broke the program. It took two days to get tha darned thing working again. It was embarrasing for me because I got too cocky about the upgrade, but it was also embarrasing to them because they hadn't followed the rules. We decided to "call it even" between us, both having learned a lesson.

So yeah, it can happen, but you've made quite an accusation here, so you are the one who must prove it. I maintain there is no Microsoft conspiracy to degrade code to force you to upgrade. None. You're indulging in another fantasy conspiracy here.

reply to post by okamitengu


Funny story about using an air compressor to clean the dust out of my old machine, so shave an industrial air compressor, it was set to 95psi ........turns out that is way to high, blew the heat conductor paste out of my both my my video card and my CPU. Ever since then I only use canned air....lesson learned after tearing apart the video card to put new paste for both.