Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry, Impacting Customer Experience the Wrong Way

Some Windows users may notice that their system slows down and becomes unusable even though the Task Manager program shows very low CPU usage. Games may fail to run properly and there are long pauses in all kinds of applications including especially the file explorer when something is clicked on. Is this a problem with a computer that is older and can't keep up? Or, is there something else going on?

Microsoft has a checkered history of writing programs that come as part of windows, which degrade the user experience as the user installs more and more applications on their Windows system. These poorly written computer programs run in the background of windows ostensibly to create a better UI experience but, actually degrade the performance of a computer over time. For example, some of these background processes might index files for quick searches. The reason for degradation is the background process periodically reads data from the disk thus competing for access to the disk with whatever desktop applications are running. A computer can only write and read data from the disk so fast. A problem can occur when many programs try to read and write to the disk at the same time. Some of these bad acting programs have more to do and run longer as the computer ages and the disk fills up with applications and data.

Even applications that don't use the disk can be impacted because of swapped memory, which are disk files that allow the Windows operating system to use a lot more memory than the actually installed ram on a system. This is called virtual memory. Competition for memory causes swapping to and from the disk which causes competition for access to the disk.

So we have two different sources of disk competition. Not enough RAM memory on the system for all the applications running causing swapping and applications that read and write directly from the disk. The symptoms of disk competition are:

• System seems very slow; almost unusable
• Low CPU usage less than 20% as shown by Task Manager
• High disk usage shown in Task Manager
• More than 75% of memory is in use shown in Task Manager.

These symtoms could mean that one of the background tasks provided by Windows or possibly by a third party is acting badly.

Microsoft installs something called "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" or MCT for short on Windows 10 systems. The purpose of this software is to "periodically send usage and performance data to Microsoft". It is enabled by default. Microsoft has made changes to this software that makes it impossible to disable. Some windows users are complaining that MCT severely impacts system performance.

MCT causes around 2000 page faults a second on my system which has an SSD. The page faults occur even when a system has plenty of memory available. 2000 page faults a second is the maximum number of page faults that the system can sustain. Swapping is disk activity and the system is using the disk 100% while MCT runs. This means that other applications that page fault are out of luck. MCT page faults show up as "IO other" in Task Manager. MCT can cause 4 million page faults in very short order. Page faults cause MCT to go to the disk for more data. It could be that MCT is reading disk files using memory mapping, in which case the reads show up as page faults. It could also be that MCT is reading through the system's virtual memory causing swapped out memory to be swapped in. Whatever the case MCT is badly written and does have an impact, despite Microsoft's assurances that it is a user problem.

I noticed, at least on my windows system that MCT starts up around 7:00 PM in the evening. This may avoid collisions with the workplace but not for gamers and other home users.

I've always wondered, how many people went out and bought a new laptop because they thought bad performance meant they needed a new more powerful system when the problem is really bad acting poorly written program like MCT? Some of these bad actors like MCT actually have a bigger impact as the computer ages because the disk is filling up and the bad actors have more to do. How many extra Windows licenses has Microsoft sold due to Microsoft's bad code? Could this be litigated?