"Now I'm off [sic] the land of the fairies"

Well, sounds like that's where you came from...

On topic, are these critical holes in IE8? Already?

Sounds about par for the course, I wouldnt be surprised if they are deliberatly engineered to slow down a system.

That & a good old sprinkling of FUD about security & so on, then sit back and wait for the tills to start ringing up sales of Vista SP2,

oops, I mean Windows 7

I think you can put money on that!

I'd love to know causes your machines to get slower over time, because I've never seen it happen with any systems I'm responsible for; not with Win2k, XP nor even Vista.

I'm not saying it's not happening, because clearly some of you do see it, but I am curious to know what's going on.

As for those of you who aren't patching, I can guess why your machines might be getting slower. Virus/worm infections. Seriously, install those patches. Some of those patches also cover performance issues.

Well, it's a curious little thing. That windows slows down towards the end of it's lifespan is verifiable. GO run an RTM Win2000 or WinXP on a machine, throw the benches at it, and re-run after fully patching. Depending on the age of the hardware, (low RAM, and small hard drive) you will definitely see that more fully patched systems are slower.

There are a few reasons that I can think of. Firstly, on systems that are older, (I still maintain a fleet of P-IIIs with 20GB HDDs,) a fully patched Windows is much larger than an RTM version. This pushes your app installs and data to the end of the drive, where everything seems to be quite a bit slower.

Also, it seems that a fully patched system has a slightly larger RAM footprint...and certain components behave quite differently when loaded. (Windows Explorer enumerating 100,000+ files, for example.)

IE got bigger, fatter, and less responsive under a great many "normal" loading scenarios. Etc. etc. The list could of course go on.

While I doubt that there is any great conspiracy to "slow down" Windows in an effort to sell the next generation, feature creep, patches, and even the sheer size of the OS can make a difference in speed, most especially on older systems.

Is the windows bloat noticeable on a system with a 500GB HDD and 4GB of RAM? Not so much, really. The speed differential between RTM and Fully patched XP is probably less than a rounding error. On a 10 year old system? That's another story.

There will always be those people who jump up and down and claim that if you don't have the fastest, the newest and the greatest hardware and software, you have no right to complain. That's their privilege, but not everyone has the resources for that. Many a small business or not as well off family has to "make do" with a system that is five or ten years old.

In any case, that is what I see as regards the speed of "aged" Microsoft OSes. Hope that helps some!