Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

Windows 2000 was peak Windows, minus security. Security is miles and miles better today.

Nothing will change my mind about this, ever. It's been downhill since then.

Does Windows 2000 handle native Bluetooth better? What about WiFi SSID management? Does it ship with good IPv6 support?

no, no, and no. Lets see if we can petition Microsoft to add them, and then we'll see if Win2000 still runs decently fast on a P4 with 4gb of ram.

My guess is: yes, it will.

Somehow, in the past 15 years, "progress" seems to include "software keeps getting noticeably worse, but anyone pointing this out has to be shot down because progress."

Ah, there's another question, I'm running 32GB of RAM currently on this machine and 64GB at home. How well does Windows 2000 support >4GB RAM or SMP? Does it come with a good hypervisor? I do like running a lot of VMs in Hyper-V as well.

Sure sounds like there's a ton of gaps in things I really want out of my operating system on Windows 2000...

I think you're right in general but I'll note that Windows 2000 does support PAE (very limited >4GB support on 32-bit) and SMP.

Sure does.

Does the switch to 64 bit slow things down enough to explain what happened between Windows 2000 and XP?

Does the operating system have to support virtual machines? Seems easy enough to install vmware then run operating systems inside it for most use cases.

I mean, you can keep 'what if'ing me here, but, is it really worth having all the features that you, clearly as a power user or professional, use installed on every computer everywhere? No. No it really doesn't. It's bloat.

> Seems easy enough to install vmware then run operating systems inside it for most use cases.

That's a way different experience than running Hyper-V.

> is it really worth having all the features that you, clearly as a power user or professional, use installed on every computer everywhere? No. No it really doesn't. It's bloat.

I also didn't realize that managing WiFi networks or using display scaling are things only power users and professionals would want on their machines. I guess supporting Bluetooth natively in the OS and a modern sound stack is just bloat for most people.

so, I can't reply to your latest message because it's too far down but...

Let me just hop on my wifi and browse the web. Lets do it on a computer from 1999. 2000. 2001. 2002. 2003. 2004. 2005. 2006. 2007. 2008... etc, etc.

Why is it that every couple years from 2012 onwards, doing the same thing keeps taking longer, even with new hardware, without the same revolutions in quality and experience that came with that new software previously?

There's been a problem of lateral rather than forward progress in nearly all industries since the early 2000s. Lateral progress being a different way to do the same exact thing (a doorknob versus a lever latch for example), and forward progress being a new way to do a similar thing but in a much more efficient and modular way.

It's been bothering me for some time ever since I noticed it with the advent of IoT "smart" devices that have the same features as traditional appliances for twice the cost and technical debt. My washing machine still washes clothes and turns itself off, but now I need to set the wash type using my phone because lateral progress dictates a physical interface on the device itself is obsolete.

Your 1999 computer supports WPA-2 out of the box? TLS 1.3?

> doing the same thing keeps taking longer

But I'm not doing the same things anymore. I'm doing a lot more. Things that aren't supported in that 1999 OS at all.

... you completely missed the relevant part with the "1999" part. The relevant part is the "2012" part. Things used to get better, do more, and faster. The last 15 years, the "do more" part has been less and less useful, and the "faster" part has turned into "slower" in a number of ways. Software engineers are relying on an increase in hardware performance to pick up their slack, and that line is running out quickly, and there will be many years ahead where we're cleaning up over a decade of laziness.

> Things used to get better, do more, and faster.

I bought a newer PC because my older one from 2012 legit wasn't fast enough for what I wanted to do. It couldn't handle the VR applications I wanted to run, as its PCIe and RAM performance just wouldn't be up to the task to run the resolutions, texture qualities, and latencies I wanted. The newer one is miles ahead of the older hardware, and the applications I use are significantly better because of it.

But even then, from the other perspective of continuing to run similar-ish workloads using newer software, a lot of the other things continue to run the same experience-wise with slightly better features than when the software was new. When I first built that 2012 machine I installed the then brand-new Windows 8 on it. These days its running Windows 10. From a UX perspective it definitely feels faster than the OS it shipped with. Things like the new Terminal app are way better functionally than the old cmd.exe that used to be on it. I do demand more still from using VSCode with more plugins and what not than before while previously I used things like PyCharm more. I videochat, watch more streaming content on it than when I first had it, and it consumes far more animated GIFs and what not than it used to.

But in the end even with software supposedly getting more bloated and what not, its at least as snappy if not more than it was when it was brand new in 2012, other than the fact there's a whole new class of application I demand from my hardware.

So yeah, even today things are still getting better, doing more, and getting faster. Its not the extreme doubling or quadrupling of stuff like the 80s and 90s where things literally went from only text interfaces to GUIs to 3D apps, but there's still bleeding edge stuff that legit just takes more oomph than a box from 2012.