This machine had a physical power switch. You could not put it to sleep, so it required a cold boot every time. At boot, it would run a _very slow_ self test of all 16MB of memory, after which it would spend another minute loading drivers under DOS before spending another minute booting Windows.
If you wanted to go online, you spent another minute waiting for the modem to dial out, and 10-15sec for a well-optimized page to load in Netscape. In many cases, like wanting to look up information on some subject, it was faster to put the Encarta CD in the drive, wait for it to spin up and for the program to launch, and search from that.
If you wanted to do _both at the same time_, you could do that! But be prepared for the machine to become slow as molasses as it swapped out to that 4200rpm drive.
Fast forward to today. My laptop is in standby 80% of the time. It's usually reconnected to Wi-Fi before I can enter my password, and I can look up an article on Wikipedia in under 15 seconds of having picked the laptop up.
I disagree wholeheartedly that computing has become slower. I can achieve the same results in a fraction of the time it used to take.