Hacker News Reader

Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

This mentality brings you a loading screen when you start the calculator on windows.

echo ${calculation} into bc works as fast as your fingers

What? Calculator starts up faster than I can figure out on where and on which screen it decided to open

On this machine it took me about 8 seconds to get the start menu open, about 5 seconds to get it to recognize that I'd typed "calc", another 5 seconds for it to let me actually select it to launch, and then about 20 seconds from the calculator window appearing - in its empty loading state - for it to actually come up. I admit this computer is several years old - but ... it's... a calculator.

On Windows 11 I can see a startup screen briefly before it loads the calculator buttons -- takes maybe 2 seconds all up -- seems to be 1 seconds to start up screen then another second to populate the buttons. But can understand why people feel it's a regression though as I reall the win95/98/me calc.exe would pretty much appear near instantly even on the CPU/RAM/etc of the day.

I'm currently on a Windows 10 machine with Core i5 that's more than a decade old. The calculator takes a couple of seconds to start up - provided it's a "good" day (i.e. one when Windows isn't downloading updates or doing search indexing or malware scanning in the background.)

But I also have a Core 2 Duo-based WinXP machine in easy reach (just to keep a legacy software environment alive) and its keyboard has a dedicated calculator button. The calculator is just there the moment I press that button - it's appeared long before I can even release the button.

It's probably very hardware dependent now, just like it was back then. My calculator opens to interactive in much less than 1 second, but I've got a 9800x3d and fast memory and nvme drive. The other guy saying his start menu takes 8 seconds to open probably has a pretty shit computer.

I definitely got the stupid hourglass in win 95 when trying to open anything, but my understanding of computers at the time was that black ones were faster than beige ones, so my computer was probably shit.

I tried to look up calculator win 95 vids on YouTube, there are a couple. One gets an hourglass - but less than a second, one is instant, one shows the calculator crashing lol.

During this I also found out that Microsoft Calculator is open source: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator

Reply on news.ycombinator.com