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

Some additional things to note:

Windows NT 3.51 minimum hardware requirements were a i386 or i486 processor at 25MHz or better and 12MB of RAM for the workstation version. So the 600MHz machine with 128MB RAM is exceeding the minimum requirement by (conservatively) 24x in CPU speed and 10x in RAM, along with all the architectural improvements from going from the i386 to what's presumably a Pentium III-class machine.

If that's actually a Surface Go 2 running Windows 11 - well, it doesn't have a quad-core i5 as the tweet claims - the Surface Go 2 came with a Pentium Gold or a Core m3; both with only two cores and of those is an ultra-low power variant.

As such, that exactly meets the minimum CPU specification for Windows 11 and only doubles the minimum 4GB RAM requirement.

I'm not trying to apologize for the difference here, but it's not an entirely like-for-like comparison.

If you ran Windows NT on the bare minimum it was not as slow (barring hitting swap) as Windows 11 on the bare minimum hardware. Not even close. Windows NT on the minimum hardware wasn't a joy exactly but it was certainly workable. If you run Win11 on the bare minimum you'll very quickly learn to hate everything.

They do have a better example with Windows 2000 on the Pentium 3 which is very era appropriate.

I see similar sluggishness opening command prompt on my Ryzen 3700X with 64GB RAM on Windows 11 22H2 with an NVME SSD. First it draws the outline of the window then fills it in with content. And that's repeatable!

I feel like the intent was to say notepad from 20 years ago and notepad from today has (approx) the same functionality whereas the processors are x4 times faster, it should be at least as fast as it was before, shouldn't it? In my mind, regardless of the OS requirements, a processor x4 more powerful shouldn't need double the time to launch the same program unless you've added x4+ features.

I imagine they're also not using vintage hard drives. Its pretty common in the retro computer world to use things like CF and SD cards for storage emulation. Even a basic CF card is miles faster than a 1990's HDD. Put in a period-accurate storage device and see how bog slow it gets.

I can start notepad on my relatively slow Win10 VM with spinning disks in RAID and it starts with similar speeds - starting it on my physical windows machine with a SSD, it launches at exactly the same speed.

Why is Win11 so slow and unoptimized that it needs such crazy hardware.

Add onto that the fact the 8th and 10th gen Intel low power mobile parts are, well, kinda garbage (low perf/watt, very little boost time, low core count) and were quickly obsoleted.

I'm not sure why Msft put that CPU and RAM combo in their own device when it's just barely past the minimum specs for Windows 10 let alone 11.

I don't think it's unoptimized as much as it's extremely bloated.

You might try reading the second line of the Tweet before criticising its author.

I think the bloating hardware requirements are his point. What precisely have they gotten us? Mind you, this is not the same as "what have we gotten in the time that they've bloated"!

The text content of the tweets seem pretty unreliable as this states its a Surface Go 2 with a Quad Core i5, despite the fact the Surface Go 2 never shipped with anything quad core and definitely not an i5.

Maybe it is a spinning rust disk. Even then there's a world of difference between a period accurate drive and a late model IDE drive. The last IDE drives had more drive cache than most desktops had RAM when NT was new.

In the tweet right below there's a video of them running Windows 2000 on the same hardware and it's just as responsive.

What's the difference?

/s

Bloat is intentional and fills Microsoft’s wallet.

Optimization drains Microsoft’s wallet.

"Bloat" includes the addition of intentional, but frivolous, features. An application can be well-optimized but still slow simply because it's doing too much.

But I think the reason that most modern software performs badly is because of optimization: we're optimizing to reduce production costs over increasing performance.

It's economic in nature. We minimize production costs by using frameworks and other labor-saving tools. The code produced using these tools tends to be poor, but hardware is cheap enough to make up for poorly performing software.

It's an intentional decision.

Yup if you run a Windows VM in a M2 Max Mac or a PC with a Intel 13900, stuff opens pretty fast too.

I'm in university and each exam I have to install windows 10 to run Safe Exam Browser (same hardware), in between I use Linux as my daily driver. The perceived difference in responsiveness is always frustrating, though I find that a lot of it probably is just due to user hostile design. No OS that constantly nags about tracking me, showing me ads, and so on will feel snappy. I'm sure there is some real lag as well though.

Microsoft has essentially turned the OS into one of those websites which show ads, news letter dialogs, cookie notices, location permission requests, notification requests and so on constantly.

Some of that bloat is useful. Windows indexes files in the background, which would choke a single-core machine with HDD for sure. Thanks to that I can quickly access my files... well, so long as Windows is able to find the correct thing...

> Some of that bloat is useful

Well, all of that type of bloat is presumably useful to someone or it wouldn't have been written. That doesn't change the fact that there's a cost for including it.

> Windows indexes files in the background

But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.

Everything's a tradeoff.

Another very similar example to this is the adding text feature in MS Paint. I noticed that somehow on the Windows 11 version, it takes many seconds after clicking the "add text" button to be able to actually start typing. Previously, it was instantaneous.

Notepad back then could only edit 32kB maximum files, even on 32bit NT, it was literally all the text widget could handle.

So no, it's not really fair to compare a 'simple' text editor.

> not an entirely like-for-like comparison.

I'm not sure why Windows minimum hardware requirements are relevant at all. If they were, they could get massive performance improvements by raising the hardware requirements. "Sure it's slow, but it's running on literally 1% of minimum recommended RAM!"

Are you sure this applies to laptops from back then? The minimal laptop that could run NT must have been so much worse than a desktop.

Expect that the search totally sucks. Have you tried Voidtools Everything? It finds files instantly, even on filesystems with millions of files. Yes, instantly, you type a word and it's just there, no matter SSD or HDD. Windows' built in search is a complete waste of time.

The min specs would be the same, laptop or desktop. A laptop with those kind of specs back then probably just had terrible battery life and was really big & heavy, didn't throttle down or anything. Not like today when you'd expect the "same part" or "same clock speed" to not really be the same, between a mobile and desktop chip.

> But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.

Turn it off then?

It is a fair comparison.

If you edit the same 1KB file on each computer side by side the 30 year old computer will be more responsive than the modern one.

That's what people are taking issue with.

Yes? That doesn't affect my point about it being a kind of bloat.

IIRC laptops of that sort of era often used slower RAM, and laptop hard drives were generally _much_ slower than desktop ones.

(Also there was a period when a lot of laptops used non-Intel x86 implementations, which typically weren't very good. Cyrix, Via et al.)

64KB.

The term bloat (as it applies to software) is rooted in gamer-think that has no basis in reality and sends a strong signal of lack of understanding. It's reminiscent of the days of 'BlackViper' and disabling Windows Services -- again, another gamer lack of knowledge issue.

The new Windows Terminal is also extremely slow for some wild reason

> Some of that bloat is useful.

If bloat is useful, notepad in any form on any version of Windows is bloat by definition.

You've got CLI editors that are smaller.

A meaningless term to deride a feature or service you don't like or use.

Granted, a Surface Go 2 won't win any perf competition, but even with infinite budget you still couldn't buy a desktop today that has the response times of that NT box.

Notepad on NT4 could edit files as large as you had memory. I never used 3.5 but I guess they must have made that change in NT4.

And yet when I want to search in the files in a folder searching with windows search won't turn up anything, so I have to switch to the WSL and grep...

Empty notepad, just started. 82,416K working set in main memory. 25.7MB in dedicated GPU memory. 59 threads. 2 billion cycles spent since launch.

Two threads in !OpenAdatper12 spending ~1.5M cycles per second. Two threads in !recalloc spending ~256K cycles per second.

As shipped, this is no longer a single executable, it is a collection of 230 files, totaling 10.5MB, about half of which are bytewise duplicates, and another significant chunk have overlapping responsibilities, between the icon fonts and png icons.

"Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version, while making only dubious user-perceptible improvements or suffering from feature creep." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat

I'm not aware of any substantial new features. It uses a new renderer, but this does not produce a significant observable difference from the previous one beyond using more memory. It supports dark mode.

In 1998, I exclusively used NT 4 on a Dell Latitude to do software development for a month while working overseas. It wasn’t super fast but it was comparable to a non-workstation desktop - in both cases you could not skimp on RAM but otherwise it was fine. The biggest gripe I had was the Synaptics touchpad, which is evergreen.

A graphical user interface? Just bloat.

Ships with a TCP/IP stack by default? Just bloat.

Mouse support out of the box? Who would want that?

Indexing is a weird example to use considering how notoriously garbage Windows file search is.

For some reason even in fairly constrained subtrees it takes forever to find file names.

> Windows indexes files in the background, which would choke a single-core machine with HDD for sure.

This was done also in Win 7. It didn't have such a performance hit, but it was the first thing to be disabled after installing windows.

Windows has been indexing files for over 20 years.

Back then I would turn it off as I didn't find the search function that usable, and more than once I've had a "clean and build" process fail because some file was open and being indexed, and since Windows locks files on read, the build could not delete the file and just aborted. So, I turned it off.

Also full unicode support on high resolution screen.

I'm no gamer, and "bloat" has been a term used in the industry from well before "gamers" (in the sense used today) existed. It's been a term of art for over 30 years.

It also describes a very real thing.

While there are a lot of things that everyone would agree counts as "bloat", there are also areas of disagreement in the form of "one person's bloat is another's essential feature".

I ran NT 3.51 on a PS/2 486-66 with either 40MB (maybe 48MB) RAM and a scsi disk. It was nice compiling VC++ programs on it.

I now use a Surface Go3 i3 with 8GB. It's enough for just about everything I need. Web browser, running script language web apps, Java IDE, StarCraft 2. Disabling a bunch of stuff on Win11 makes a big difference. Whenever it felt slow I looked at Task Manager CPU and googled the process name, tried disabling it and only re-enable if necessary. Oh I also have a Peltier cooler+fan that cools the back of the unit when gaming to prevent throttling.

The PS/2 NT machine was top spec at the time. The Go3 is utilitarian now though should be like a supercomputer.

C64 lovers would likely agree with all of those points.

New renderer, dark mode, auto save, resume on open, HiDPI, tabs, and I'm sure a lot of things I'm forgetting.

Don't forget what Notepad.exe truly is -- a testbed for new technologies. It's not "just a text editor" to Microsoft.

Launches into PoSh 7 x64 in <1s for me on Win 11.

They were very relevant back in the '90s. So relevant, it's why Windows 9x existed. The Windows NT 4 minimum system requirements around RAM were too high, thus deemed too expensive for consumers.

It only searches the names.

It’s also searching the contents. Try turning that setting off.

does your university make you run the ["verificator"](https://github.com/SafeExamBrowser/seb-win-verificator)?

And then 'everything' search tool came with instant fuzzy find. A strange experience after years of buggy and slow MS indexation.

Even when you turn the search indexer off, the indexer background service still seems to be doing ... stuff.

I have a Windows 10 VM I use for some testing and such, and all these background things keep using up huge mount of resources, no matter what knobs I turn and regedit levers I pull I just can't get it to stop.

For comparison, I also have a macOS VM which certainly isn't fast, but nothing like the Windows one. And the BSD and illumos VMs work basically fine (although in fairness they also don't start X11; but I do just ssh in to all of these machines and never use the GUI for anything).

Heh, I've not any one talk about AV and things like the smart screen filter.

A huge number of security related things are going on.

Also windows logs a ton of telemetry these days.

I feel like this is something where determinism would be a win. Maybe have indexing, but pre-prioritize certain common searches.

I notice that I get completely different results on my home and work machines doing the "start button, type" search. for "Downloads", expecting C:\Users\Username\Downloads, the home machine figures it out after three characters. The work machine seems to have decided that I clearly want "File Explorer, not any particular directory" and "Change how I download updates in spite of it being a corporate-managed box where I probably can't push that button without asking IT to remote in and do so" are what I want, even when I spot it the whole directory name.

They don't

On Linux machine I can access and find my files fast. And without any indexing running on the background. Shit... even I could run the OS from a rust HDD and be usable without pain. Windows10/11 without an SSD it's painful slow.

I think the stock Notepad in Windows 10 is perfectly fine and speedy at least, I've never considered it too slow unless I open a huge file with word wrapping on.

Notepad2 is my all-time favorite though. It supports key features like line numbers and directionless search, but is much closer to stock than Notepad++. [0]

[0] https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

By that logic: Windows 10 on my Threadripper 3970x with 256G of RAM should be comparably fast to Windows NT as presented.

Since the aggregate GHz and RAM on offer is more than 25x the minimum spec for windows 10.

Win10 min spec is 1GHz w/ 2GB of RAM - my machine is more than one hundred times faster, yet, everything TFA says is true.

Index for what? The Windows search has always been unbelievably bad and it has only gotten worse since Windows 7.

Oh but that's just Amiga envy.

But if you turn it off, you don't get the start menu indexed anymore. I don't need my files indexed, I just want my start menu shortcuts indexed. There's a few other small things that no longer work without indexing, though I forget what they are now. Everything is great, but there's actually other services that depend on search being enabled, as it tells you when you try to stop the service that is shutting down dependent service first.

There's another post with a video of how an old machine running NT 3.51 is so much faster than what we have now running on modern hardware.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983