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

Not gonna lie, my memory serves me well. I remember using Windows 98 on an old PC, and it was hot garbage. It took generations to boot up, and applications took generations to open. My story is anecdata, but so it this twitter post. These days I have an infinitely snappy experience with desktop linux on an SSD.

SSDs and adequate memory were the two things that happened where PCs finally started feeling snappy.

Another anecdote: I fixed up a computer running vista for a secretary once. It had been running with a hard disk and would take upwards of a minute to load. After replacing the HDD with an SSD, it booted so fast that you got thrown onto the desktop and all of the "startup sounds" played all at once, the system seemingly booting faster than it could cope with!

A good way to reality check this is to think about how frequently we saw loading splash screens then vs now. Back then it was common. Office suites, IDEs, browsers, pretty much any non-trivial app would show you a splash screen whilst it loaded. Some even had progress bars in the splash screens. Nowadays even web apps don't have splashes (though you could argue that grey loading flashers are the modern equivalent).

Many of those apps switched from using splash screens to pre-loading in the background.

Which ones?

A lot of that was simply down to how slow hard drives were back then. I can not overstate what a miracle of performance it is jumping from a 7200RPM (or 5400!) HD to today's solid state storage. Tens of thousands of times faster in many cases.

NT kernels were always better than the DOS-based hot garbage of 95, 98, and ME.

Windows 2000 is my all-time favorite Windows OS. NT-based kernel, literally nothing extra, fast, stable. Used it til the day support was finally shuttered.

PCs were incredibly snappy before SSDs, and didn't need much RAM at all. Gnome 1.4 was like lightning, whereas KDE was noticeably slower.

You don't need fast hardware to have snappy apps. Most of the microcontrolled devices you deal with day to day are clocked between 4 and 25MHz. Hard drives are only needed to access files once and load them into memory, and microcontrolled devices have like 256kB-4mB of memory. The only reason apps aren't snappy is programmers fail to make proper use of the hardware and OS.

GDI+ was slower due to the alpha transparency than GDI in NT4.

Many web pages have loading progress bars. They're usually only 1-2 pixels thick and take up the entire top 1-2 rows of pixels on the page. Some stuff loads asynchronously, so it can be easy to miss them, but I see them all the time. Just today, I was using Jenkins and it does that!

Any way to legally obtain win2k iso now? I lost my discs from that era and would like to run it in a VM.

WinWorld has been freely distributing copies of Windows 2000 for years now without issue.[0] Someone even tried reporting them to Microsoft and nothing happened,[1] even though WinWorld says they honor takedown requests.[2] It seems Microsoft really doesn't care as long as you stick to stuff older than XP.

[0]https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-nt-2000/final

[1]https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/winwor...

[2]https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/6236/is-this-site-il...

I remember when the Java load time was an issue, as it prevented Java apps from even displaying a splash screen while loading. Sun made a goofy manifest file feature to allow for it: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/misc/splashs...

In my experience it was the opposite. 98SE was great, ME was worse.

NT might be more stable but it was also much slower. DOS applications on 9x actually ran in a VM with hardware passthrough, whereas NT emulated much of the hardware via NTVDM. Interacting with something as simple as the EDIT text editor in a window on 2K/XP is noticeably slower than on 9x.

> In my experience it was the opposite. 98SE was great, ME was worse.

I think you're mixing up Windows 2000 and ME? ME was a rushed update of 98 because Microsoft felt "they should release something" for the Millennium. It was a dumpster fire. Windows 2000 was the continuation of Windows NT, and became the basis for XP and everything that followed.

As for performance, by the time Windows 2000 came out (Pentium 3 era machines) it didn't seem to matter that much any more, and it really was a lot more stable.

I had the same experience.

I remember going to a friends house and using their computer, and it took several minutes to boot, and even after it reached the desktop it still took more time for things to become responsive. Opening any program took at least 10 seconds, possibly more.

Those old HDDs could only reach low double digit IOPS, so opening a program would cause the entire system to become unresponsive until it was loaded!

Modern SSDs are massively faster, and stay fast even when heavily used! Some of the modern SSDs are even faster when lots of operations are queued up!

I'd say it's not so big these days after SSD became the norm, but a lot of apps there for awhile would set a start up program in the system tray. That would preload most of the dlls in memory so when you ran the executable it loaded much faster.

Adobe, for example, has a ton of common libraries that load at startup.

But if you compare data transfer speed of an IDE 33 rotating hard disk against a SATA (or better Nvme) SSD, and then, once data is transferred from storage you managed it in what amount of (much slower) RAM (at the most in 8 Mb in Win 3.x times, probably 48 or 96 Mb with win 9x, 128 or 256 Mb on NT 4.00 or 2K, while nowadays it is 4/8/16 Gb) and on a single core processor, running at 100-1000 Mhz, while nowadays you have likely minimum 4 cores runnning at 3,000 or something like that.

Sure you had splash screens, the sheer fact that you could open a spreeadsheet amd make some calculations (often with automatic calculation disabled and thus pressing F9 manually to re-calculate) was (IMHO) a miracle in Windows 3.x times.

This is a pet peeve of mine but today developers should be (only for testing their programs) be given the lowest powered machines available, connected to the same (shitty) internet connection a large part of the future users of the programs actually experience and see directly why their programs/tools/websites/whatever are laggish/slowish for their customers.