The past was full of a lot more paging to disk and it was awful. I mean, sure, things haven't progressed as much as they could I suppose, but I also don't know the last time I had to wait 5-10 minutes for a computer to shut down.
I've recently managed to get an ubuntu server to boot as quickly (with preconfigured network interfaces and a few other things), but for years I could find the magic combination that would boot a usable system that quickly.
And I haven't seen a Windows machine that boots to usable state in less than 15 seconds (SSD, 30 seconds on magnetic hard drive) in a long time. "Usable" means you double click on something and it responds, btw - not that it shows the desktop.
Those sounds just went through my head. That noise hurts just to think about.
but I also don't know the last time I had to wait 5-10 minutes for a computer to shut down.
Windows 7 seems to take 5 minutes to shut down, even if I give it a head-start by explicitly closing all applications I can see or understand.
There are 137 "processes" and over 200 "services" running right now on the Windows 7 machine I am at. I can't watch them go away when I shut down, because if I leave the task manager running, Windows 7 complains about the Task Manager still running when I want to shut down.
There are many things that are much better today, but it seems that some things are getting worse.
That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. A Text Messaging app shouldn't have perceivable load time. My phone shouldn't freeze doing a transition between desktops. Computer desktops shouldn't take time to open up a menu.
We've come a long way, and have tons more raw performance, but I just feel that we squander it on things that don't add any value.