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

Well of course it does.

WinNT 3.51 was released in 1995 - the fastest PC in 1995 was either a Pentium or Pentium Pro at ~100 MHz - in 2000 a 600 MHz machine is likely a Coppermine PIII.

A fairly common amount of RAM in 1995 to Run WinNT would have been around 32 megs of ram, 64 megs would be especially generous. 128 megs is a high end workstation amount of memory.

The ATA interface also doubled in performance between 1995 and 2000.

There were significant security and stability improvements between NT 3.51 and Windows 2000 - particularly with changes to the driver model that increased stability. (even more so between 2000 and Windows 10/11)

That's right, Windows 95 on a 600 MHz machine would be even snappier. However, later down the thread the author demonstrates Windows 2000:

>For those thinking that the comparison was unfair, here is Windows 2000 on the same 600MHz machine. Both are from the same year, 1999. Note how the immediacy is still exactly the same and hadn’t been ruined yet.

https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065

> WinNT 3.51 was released in 1995 - the fastest PC in 1995 was either a Pentium or Pentium Pro at ~100 MHz - in 2000 a 600 MHz machine is likely a Coppermine PIII.

This is addressed in the linked thread.

>For those thinking that the comparison was unfair, here is Windows 2000 on the same 600MHz machine. Both are from the same year, 1999. Note how the immediacy is still exactly the same and hadn’t been ruined yet.

He did another video with Windows 2k.

Spoiler: it was still just as fast.

I tested on my own local win10 VM, and I get similar performance for the inbuilt windows apps.

cmd, control panel, and most of the things in admin tools launch virtually instantly.

This is for a machine that is running on relatively slow spinning disks too.

As someone who was hardcore into Windows around that time, all my memory has is waiting desperately for windows to open & apps to load. I remember watching the left-side of explorer paint before the icons came in, and how the icons would paint in order; some days you’d see black squares paint, then the icon. This was running on some dual-socket, 192mb, 7200rpm spinning disk - it wasn’t a slouch.

I also struggle with the comparison between high-end hardware of yesteryear, and low end hardware of today and comparing.

Try running win2k in 16mb, 300mhz P2, and a 4800rpm drive.

The only times I remember experiencing things this fast in my computing career were (a) with a fair wind, and a fully warmed cache that didn’t hit the disk & was a trivial app (b) the first time I used my Apple M1 Max MBP.

Then don’t dodge the question and tell me the specs of the high-end computer that makes modern Windows that snappy. Because I have a fairly ridiculous machine as my main workstation, and I still wait way longer for stuff to load than I used to.

> Well of course it does.

Why does it follow that software designed for modern hardware, running on modern hardware, should be slower than software designed for older hardware running on slightly newer hardware?

Running Windows 10 on hardware with a larger gap in time doesn't match the benefits you see in this video. It's just slower.

Core i5 or i7, 16-32gb of RAM, a NVME SSD

In 1995 getting 128MB of RAM would have been quite expensive. In 1999 not so much. One of the easy things to do with NT or 98 in the 98-2000 era was to put 128MB of ram in when it suddenly became very affordable. It was a night and day experience. I had one game that ran absolutely rubbish in 1995 when I bought it. Years later I came across a few memory sticks and popped them in and gave the thing 16MB of ram from 8. The game started nearly instantly and ran very nicely (usually took 3-5 mins to start). With 8 it was choppy city and slow. Exact same computer only diff was the memory.

If memory serves me they did not really change much in NT from 4.0 to 2k. Other than add in more services and make it more win98 like. So it is maybe not an 'unfair' comparison. But win 3.51 came out getting that sort of computer just would not be in the cards for most people.

Windows went sideways at vista. The 'start the computer up' out of the box would use 2-3gig of ram. Up from 100-200MB from the XP era. Toss in some corp bloatware items. One place I saw it was 10gig just to open the desktop no productivity software even started yet. Then add in the zillions of indirect layers we have added to make programming easier and we are now with applications that seem to start at about the same rate as 25 years ago.

All of those old API's are still there. No one really uses them much anymore. We use the latest cool frameworks. That use the previous cool framework that eventually uses the old APIs :)

The software is running on an entirely different platform with different priorities. Security being the main one.

The only significant difference in priorities as regards speed would be the modern prioritization of "developer time", ads, and telemetry.

I can run Windows 95 applications at better than era-appropriate speed, in an x86 emulator written in javascript running on a web browser. That's at least 3 layers of virtual machine abstraction and the applications are still faster.

So if you're saying "the comparison isn't fair because modern software is too shit to hold up", then I agree, but if you're trying to tell me there is something else inherent to modern computing that makes software so many orders of magnitude slower, than I request that you show data to support that claim.

Single thread performance. My 13900k opens most things instantly, and it's a noticeable difference compared to even a 12900KS