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Comment by madars | Hacker News Reader

That's right, Windows 95 on a 600 MHz machine would be even snappier. However, later down the thread the author demonstrates Windows 2000:

>For those thinking that the comparison was unfair, here is Windows 2000 on the same 600MHz machine. Both are from the same year, 1999. Note how the immediacy is still exactly the same and hadn’t been ruined yet.

https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065

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As someone who was hardcore into Windows around that time, all my memory has is waiting desperately for windows to open & apps to load. I remember watching the left-side of explorer paint before the icons came in, and how the icons would paint in order; some days you’d see black squares paint, then the icon. This was running on some dual-socket, 192mb, 7200rpm spinning disk - it wasn’t a slouch.

I also struggle with the comparison between high-end hardware of yesteryear, and low end hardware of today and comparing.

Try running win2k in 16mb, 300mhz P2, and a 4800rpm drive.

The only times I remember experiencing things this fast in my computing career were (a) with a fair wind, and a fully warmed cache that didn’t hit the disk & was a trivial app (b) the first time I used my Apple M1 Max MBP.

Then don’t dodge the question and tell me the specs of the high-end computer that makes modern Windows that snappy. Because I have a fairly ridiculous machine as my main workstation, and I still wait way longer for stuff to load than I used to.

Core i5 or i7, 16-32gb of RAM, a NVME SSD

Single thread performance. My 13900k opens most things instantly, and it's a noticeable difference compared to even a 12900KS

I tested on my own local win10 VM, and I get similar performance for the inbuilt windows apps.

cmd, control panel, and most of the things in admin tools launch virtually instantly.

This is for a machine that is running on relatively slow spinning disks too.

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