←back to thread

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

(twitter.com)
752 points dceddia | 3 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(15): >>36447608 #>>36447610 #>>36447680 #>>36447745 #>>36447813 #>>36447953 #>>36448077 #>>36448345 #>>36448687 #>>36448693 #>>36449563 #>>36449787 #>>36450832 #>>36452031 #>>36456701 #
1. vel0city ◴[23 Jun 23 15:00 UTC] No.36447745[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>36448054 #
2. Symbiote ◴[23 Jun 23 15:18 UTC] No.36448054[source]▶
You might try reading the second line of the Tweet before criticising its author.
replies(1): >>36448213 #
3. vel0city ◴[23 Jun 23 15:28 UTC] No.36448213[source]▶
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.