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Comment by ubercow13 | Hacker News Reader

No load times?! I seem to remember Win 95-XP era involved almost comically long boot times especially if you waited for your hard drive to stop churning after getting to the desktop, but maybe I am misremembering. It wasn't so much the OS's fault, though.

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It depends on if you're talking boot times, or program loading times. I agree, every computer I had until 2007 had terrible boot times.

But I've compared how long it takes to start Word on my Pentium II 450 MHz running Windows 98, with Word 2000, to my Core i5 2500 K (3.3 GHz) running Windows 8.1, with Word 2010. The Pentium II wins.

I don't how much of the difference was Windows versus Office, but it's a sad indication of the slowdown in software outpacing the speedup in hardware.

Office has become way way slower, I would mostly put it down to that. Lean applications can still start pretty fast. One other thing making it slower is antivirus software scanning every binary you run before it opens, including Defender. Turning off Defender is a reliable way to improve app load times.

Yah 95-Me era ran pretty slow and horrible.

Though 95 was pretty revolutionary when it came out.

The actual revolution came with Windows Game SDK (later known as DirectX) which allowed Windows to finally surpass MS-DOS as a gaming platform.

Yeah... imagine if they would have shipped that in a single task version, sort of like a DOS / XBOX1 hybrid. Games would have rocked, even on frugal hardware.

Well, DirectX ran games better than DOS.

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