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

(twitter.com)

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NovemberWhiskey ◴[23 Jun 23 14:42 UTC] No.36447461[source]▶

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.

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1. a2tech ◴[23 Jun 23 14:52 UTC] No.36447608[source]▶

>>36447461 #

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.

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2. ◴[23 Jun 23 14:58 UTC] No.36447723[source]▶

>>36447608 (TP) #

3. philistine ◴[23 Jun 23 17:24 UTC] No.36449792[source]▶

>>36447608 (TP) #

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.

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4. bamfly ◴[23 Jun 23 17:51 UTC] No.36450132[source]▶

>>36449792 #

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.

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5. rsynnott ◴[23 Jun 23 18:15 UTC] No.36450393{3}[source]▶

>>36450132 #

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.)

6. acdha ◴[23 Jun 23 19:08 UTC] No.36450965[source]▶

>>36449792 #

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.

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