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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: 0.658s | source
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mydriasis ◴[23 Jun 23 14:49 UTC] No.36447570[source]▶
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.
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1. dehrmann ◴[23 Jun 23 15:32 UTC] No.36448281[source]▶
SSDs and adequate memory were the two things that happened where PCs finally started feeling snappy.
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2. mydriasis ◴[23 Jun 23 16:52 UTC] No.36449412[source]▶
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!
3. 0xbadcafebee ◴[23 Jun 23 20:19 UTC] No.36451736[source]▶
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.