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

(twitter.com)
752 points dceddia | 9 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.845s | source | bottom
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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. binary_ninja ◴[23 Jun 23 14:56 UTC] No.36447680[source]▶
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.
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2. Aloha ◴[23 Jun 23 15:00 UTC] No.36447753[source]▶
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.
3. stn8188 ◴[23 Jun 23 17:16 UTC] No.36449707[source]▶
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.
4. NikkiA ◴[23 Jun 23 17:21 UTC] No.36449750[source]▶
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.

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5. redundantly ◴[23 Jun 23 17:55 UTC] No.36450170[source]▶
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.

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6. hulitu ◴[23 Jun 23 18:17 UTC] No.36450410[source]▶
64KB.
7. mnd999 ◴[23 Jun 23 18:57 UTC] No.36450862[source]▶
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.
8. pixl97 ◴[24 Jun 23 03:49 UTC] No.36455353{3}[source]▶
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.

9. accrual ◴[24 Jun 23 08:12 UTC] No.36456626{3}[source]▶
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