Since I had to return my work computer, I pulled my old Windows desktop out of the closet where it's been sitting for the last two years and hooked it back up. And it's doing the classic Windows thing where when it boots, it's ridiculously, unuseably slow. I'm talking minutes between clicking a thing and something happening. Why?! It was fine the last time I used it, and literally nothing has happened to it since then. It's just been sitting there. It's like simply being old makes it worse, but that doesn't make any sense. Is it possible that an accumulation of dust or something could somehow cause this? Seems unlikely. Is it something stupid where because so much time has passed, it tries to update everything and gets confused for some reason? I don't know! I eventually managed to pull up the task manager and it doesn't look like it's doing anything particularly taxing. The CPU is only at like 34% capacity and disk is at 0. It's infuriating! This should be a perfectly good computer! Yes it's like eight years old, but so what, it did what I needed it to do, until now. Not to be that guy, but I never had this problem on Linux.
I'm hoping that if I just let it run for a while it'll eventually sort itself out. Fingers crossed...