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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Sadly Windows 96 in a browser is more responsive that Windows 10 on real hardware.

What kind of hardware do you run? Mechanical drive?

I have an ancient machine but with SSD, Windows 10 is still snappy.

I switched a while back to Linux and like my setup much better than what I can do on windows but I think a lot of the "windows is slow" stuff is overblown. I temporarily had windows installed the other day and it was just fine in terms of being "snappy".

A fresh install is fast for the first couple days, you say...

Agreed. I run macOS and Windows via Bootcamp and Windows 10 feels snappier than macOS most days. The same might not be said for a new laptop loaded down with junkware, mind.

Opening context menu of task bar items takes about 500 ms here with SDD and i7.

That is an operation I never do. I guess slowness can be attributed to that the menu is application aware, customizable menu options per application. But there is also a slow animation when opening the menu.

And on top of that as soon as you hover above an item in the taskbar it wants to show a thumbnail preview of that window.

All combined the user interaction feels a bit weird.

I turned off "Animations in the taskbar" and I think the context menu got somewhat faster.

Do you have many shell extensions installed? Try disabling some items on the context menu.

I think Windows 10 is simply very I/O dependent, much more so than older Windows or Linux, so having that SSD or not would make or break your experience. I've had really new (8th gen Intel) laptops perform absolutely atrocious until I swapped in an SSD.

Ideally everyone should have an SSD in 2021, but that doesn't seem to have happened yet.

Yes, Windows 10 is very I/O dependent, it will not be a pleasant experience with a mechanical drive. Not sure if Windows 8 was too, I didn't use Windows 8 much (we all know why).

If you can't afford a SSD drive, I recommend buy an older used one. Just as my machine is ancient, my SSD's are ancient too. My main drive is a Intel 530 180GB that started production in late of 2013.

It was too, when you stayed in the new .NET UI, with additional bugs. Note that shell itself is one of those applications.

The problem there I think it's that all the CLR VMs are not free, specifically the libraries in them are loaded from disk, sizable and not shared across processes, and lazy loaded.

Same problem as if you ran a lot of JVM applications.

RAM matters too. I never had much trouble running Windows 7 with 2, 3, or 4GB but since upgrading our office machines I've noticed they feel sluggish with anything under 8.

I'd dare to say it is as snappy as i remembered win95 to be

10$ bet: nobody was disappointed by win95 latency when booting their old 586 era machine

win95 ushered in the 686 era, and people with 586 machines certainly were complaining that win31 had been faster.

> win95 ushered in the 686 era, and people with 586 machines certainly were complaining that win31 had been faster.

Win95 debuted into an era when 486 was still the most common processor and 586 (aka Pentium) was just building steam.

Windows 3.11 was faster on a 486 than Windows 95, so I’m guessing you mistakenly advanced processor generations in your comment.

I would argue that Sleep and Hibernation came about because booting Windows took so long.

last time i booted a win95 machine I was happy waiting during the splash screen :D

I guess you have a point, I was mostly remembering the desktop part, I was surprised how the limited GUI felt snappier than my latest laptop with xfce and didn't lack much important features

I can't remember the last time I booted Win95 but I remember the first. I had installed a Cyrix 586 overdrive chip in my Lazer 486sx 33mhz system that was maxed out with 32mb of RAM. It took forever and I wasn't sure if it would work.

Having used win98 back on a Pentium 200 I was flabbergasted by how sluggish and prone to delay it was. Coming from AmigaOS there were jarring delays everywhere, even for something as simple as opening the Start Menu. God forbid I set an jpg wallpaper, Active Desktop murdered performance.

One of the jokes at the time was: What is Windows? An i386 emulator for Pentium.

Snappier, even. And it boots up faster. I remember Windows 98 taking 3-5 minutes to boot up.

I remember Win98 opening the start menu instantly, but taking annoyingly long to open the "all programs" menu. Considering that this distinction is removed in Win10, Win10 on a 500GB SSD is snappier in that regard than Win98 was on a 3GB HDD.

I agree!

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