"OS Rot" - Like vulgarity, it's hard to define. But you know it when you see it.

I don’t think there’s a single Windows-using tech support customer of mine out there who hasn’t heard me talk about Windows “OS Rot.” I’ve even blabbed about it in other blog posts.

There’s a great piece by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet called “Windows Bit-Rot: Fact or Fiction?”  He takes a look at whether OS Rot is real, imagined, or mainly just used as a way to justify getting a bigger-better-faster new PC.

Turns out the debate can really come down to semantics. Yes, if you install tons of badly-behaving applications over the years, uninstall things, and generally junk up your computer, it will get slower and less reliable. But some would argue, that’s not really the operating system’s fault per se.

Anyways, check out the article and the discussion thread that follows it. Some good reading for computer nerds to be sure. However you define it and determine what causes it, the results are the same: if you actually USE your Windows computer, it will eventually start to slow down. The only way it stays as fast as the day you took it out of the box is if you don’t use it.

And by and large, in my experience this simply does not happen on OSX. Maybe the upcoming Windows 7 operating system will make bit-rot a thing of the past. I’m not betting on it though.