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A comment on Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up. Parent comment

Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by ams6110 on Sunday March 05, 2017 @08:27PM (#13800074)
At the same time, Windows 10 on my Dell laptop will heat up, spin the fan noticably and something called "Service Host: Local System" will consistently use 48 - 52% of CPU when the laptop is sitting doing nothing at all, with no applications open. I really can't understand what it's doing but have a hard time taking it seriously as an operating system.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by acdha on Sunday March 05, 2017 @08:38PM (#13800124)
Check the resource monitor to see which service that corresponds to: it's likely Windows Update since they changed it to mine Bitcoin or something about a decade ago when it went from being I/O to single-core CPU bound.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by sounds on Monday March 06, 2017 @02:26AM (#13801218)
This is just a guess -- being very late to the conversation -- but in case someone even later is curious, this may be the well documented case of the .NET framework recompiling libraries in the background after an update.

It seems like it will never finish, but it does ... eventually. However, the lack of any UI, any indication of its presence or its progress, and also that killing it will just make it come back later are all pretty hostile.

(Google for more info.)

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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by acdha on Monday March 06, 2017 @05:35PM (#13806708)
I'm not sure what it is but it's amazingly inefficient: I notice it most when downloading VMs from https://modern.ie because as soon as I start a test VM the updater will run and then it's multiple hours + reboots before a browser in the VM is remotely usable.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by bagels on Monday March 06, 2017 @01:30AM (#13801041)
Is this a serious statement, that windows update mines Bitcoin?
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by acdha on Monday March 06, 2017 @08:19AM (#13802440)
No - just my boggled speculation about the kind of work which would tie up a modern CPU for hours installing a few GB of files. (SHA-256 could hash each file in a couple seconds)
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by TheKarateKid on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @10:06AM (#13876151)
A MS engineer posted a lengthy blog post on why this is the case. The ridiculous time has to do with insane system state and dependency checking for every update and each one in history before it, since Windows Update allows you to add or remove every little update ever for the OS.

The Rollup updates that MS moved towards, even in Windows 7 now, is supposed to help this. However, a completely new solution is really needed to replace this antiquated one, like many other lingering parts of Windows.

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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by bagels on Thursday March 09, 2017 @01:30AM (#13827473)
Decompression. They probably weighed compression time vs file size and realized that every byte not downloaded is money saved on bandwidth.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by zargon on Monday March 06, 2017 @01:39AM (#13801077)
No.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by majewsky on Monday March 06, 2017 @04:47AM (#13801668)
Come to think of it, that's actually an interesting monetization scheme. "You can use our software for free, but when your computer idles, we use x% of its computing power for mining cryptocurrency" (or whatever profitable endeavor). It's of course disastrous from an environmental perspective, but still interesting.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by Walf on Monday March 06, 2017 @06:36AM (#13802033)
And if it doesn't idle enough, we'll make it.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by DougN7 on Sunday March 05, 2017 @08:51PM (#13800178)
This is very likely it from my experience as well.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by greggman on Sunday March 05, 2017 @09:46PM (#13800348)
Macs do the exact same thing

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/233061/maspushagent...

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/111197/runaway-dist...

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/150945/nsurlstorage...

There are plenty of other examples

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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by darpa_escapee on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @03:41PM (#13814641)
It happens on OS X. Kernel freezes as well.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by pjc50 on Monday March 06, 2017 @06:16AM (#13801951)
Svchost.exe is a bonkers bit of design that goes against the simple, basic separation of concerns that OS-level processes provide by running multiple "services" as DLLs loaded into one process. This makes it extremely hard to pinpoint which service is faulty.

Apparently the magic runes are

    sc config wuauserv type= own
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by midnitewarrior on Monday March 06, 2017 @07:25AM (#13802222)
Just go into Task Manager, Details tab, right click on the columns and add "Command Line". Now you can see what each svchost does.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by pjc50 on Monday March 06, 2017 @08:23AM (#13802449)
That helps a little, but fundamentally the runtime of a module is still "billed" to the svchost.exe process as a whole - so if a particular one is at 100% of a cpu, you can't tell which module is causing the problem.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by phaed on Sunday March 05, 2017 @09:41PM (#13800336)
This kind of bug is not unique to Windows.
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by grennis on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @12:22PM (#13812365)
Seriously as I am typing this right now, on Mac OSX, the "kernel_task" is using 50% CPU for no apparent reason and fans have been running for > 20 minutes
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Re:Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up by skookumchuck on Sunday March 05, 2017 @08:32PM (#13800099)
> I really can't understand what it's doing

Probably backing up your files to government servers :-)

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