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

(twitter.com)
752 points dceddia | 24 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 1.473s | 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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Solvency ◴[23 Jun 23 15:03 UTC] No.36447813[source]▶
Why is Win11 so slow and unoptimized that it needs such crazy hardware.
replies(1): >>36448008 #
JohnFen ◴[23 Jun 23 15:16 UTC] No.36448008[source]▶
I don't think it's unoptimized as much as it's extremely bloated.
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1. szatkus ◴[23 Jun 23 16:35 UTC] No.36449196[source]▶
Some of that bloat is useful. Windows indexes files in the background, which would choke a single-core machine with HDD for sure. Thanks to that I can quickly access my files... well, so long as Windows is able to find the correct thing...
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2. JohnFen ◴[23 Jun 23 17:11 UTC] No.36449662[source]▶
> Some of that bloat is useful

Well, all of that type of bloat is presumably useful to someone or it wouldn't have been written. That doesn't change the fact that there's a cost for including it.

> Windows indexes files in the background

But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.

Everything's a tradeoff.

replies(1): >>36450161 #
3. RedShift1 ◴[23 Jun 23 17:37 UTC] No.36449941[source]▶
Expect that the search totally sucks. Have you tried Voidtools Everything? It finds files instantly, even on filesystems with millions of files. Yes, instantly, you type a word and it's just there, no matter SSD or HDD. Windows' built in search is a complete waste of time.
replies(1): >>36452803 #
4. Jochim ◴[23 Jun 23 17:55 UTC] No.36450161[source]▶
> But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.

Turn it off then?

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5. JohnFen ◴[23 Jun 23 17:59 UTC] No.36450216{3}[source]▶
Yes? That doesn't affect my point about it being a kind of bloat.
6. dinvlad ◴[23 Jun 23 18:33 UTC] No.36450594[source]▶
The new Windows Terminal is also extremely slow for some wild reason
replies(1): >>36452083 #
7. nullindividual ◴[23 Jun 23 18:33 UTC] No.36450602[source]▶
> Some of that bloat is useful.

If bloat is useful, notepad in any form on any version of Windows is bloat by definition.

You've got CLI editors that are smaller.

replies(1): >>36451092 #
8. concordDance ◴[23 Jun 23 18:57 UTC] No.36450866[source]▶
And yet when I want to search in the files in a folder searching with windows search won't turn up anything, so I have to switch to the WSL and grep...
9. vel0city ◴[23 Jun 23 19:20 UTC] No.36451092[source]▶
A graphical user interface? Just bloat.

Ships with a TCP/IP stack by default? Just bloat.

Mouse support out of the box? Who would want that?

replies(1): >>36452037 #
10. TulliusCicero ◴[23 Jun 23 19:39 UTC] No.36451301[source]▶
Indexing is a weird example to use considering how notoriously garbage Windows file search is.

For some reason even in fairly constrained subtrees it takes forever to find file names.

replies(1): >>36453471 #
11. hulitu ◴[23 Jun 23 19:42 UTC] No.36451342[source]▶
> Windows indexes files in the background, which would choke a single-core machine with HDD for sure.

This was done also in Win 7. It didn't have such a performance hit, but it was the first thing to be disabled after installing windows.

12. whartung ◴[23 Jun 23 19:48 UTC] No.36451413[source]▶
Windows has been indexing files for over 20 years.

Back then I would turn it off as I didn't find the search function that usable, and more than once I've had a "clean and build" process fail because some file was open and being indexed, and since Windows locks files on read, the build could not delete the file and just aborted. So, I turned it off.

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13. nullindividual ◴[23 Jun 23 20:53 UTC] No.36452037{3}[source]▶
C64 lovers would likely agree with all of those points.
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14. nullindividual ◴[23 Jun 23 20:59 UTC] No.36452083[source]▶
Launches into PoSh 7 x64 in <1s for me on Win 11.
15. tom_ ◴[23 Jun 23 22:07 UTC] No.36452803[source]▶
It only searches the names.
replies(1): >>36454437 #
16. colejohnson66 ◴[23 Jun 23 23:09 UTC] No.36453471[source]▶
It’s also searching the contents. Try turning that setting off.
17. agumonkey ◴[24 Jun 23 01:05 UTC] No.36454364[source]▶
And then 'everything' search tool came with instant fuzzy find. A strange experience after years of buggy and slow MS indexation.
18. ◴[24 Jun 23 01:16 UTC] No.36454437{3}[source]▶
19. arp242 ◴[24 Jun 23 02:31 UTC] No.36454888{3}[source]▶
Even when you turn the search indexer off, the indexer background service still seems to be doing ... stuff.

I have a Windows 10 VM I use for some testing and such, and all these background things keep using up huge mount of resources, no matter what knobs I turn and regedit levers I pull I just can't get it to stop.

For comparison, I also have a macOS VM which certainly isn't fast, but nothing like the Windows one. And the BSD and illumos VMs work basically fine (although in fairness they also don't start X11; but I do just ssh in to all of these machines and never use the GUI for anything).

20. hakfoo ◴[24 Jun 23 04:14 UTC] No.36455499[source]▶
I feel like this is something where determinism would be a win. Maybe have indexing, but pre-prioritize certain common searches.

I notice that I get completely different results on my home and work machines doing the "start button, type" search. for "Downloads", expecting C:\Users\Username\Downloads, the home machine figures it out after three characters. The work machine seems to have decided that I clearly want "File Explorer, not any particular directory" and "Change how I download updates in spite of it being a corporate-managed box where I probably can't push that button without asking IT to remote in and do so" are what I want, even when I spot it the whole directory name.

21. Zardoz84 ◴[24 Jun 23 05:37 UTC] No.36455881[source]▶
On Linux machine I can access and find my files fast. And without any indexing running on the background. Shit... even I could run the OS from a rust HDD and be usable without pain. Windows10/11 without an SSD it's painful slow.
22. tsss ◴[24 Jun 23 09:57 UTC] No.36457217[source]▶
Index for what? The Windows search has always been unbelievably bad and it has only gotten worse since Windows 7.
23. speed_spread ◴[24 Jun 23 11:12 UTC] No.36457606{4}[source]▶
Oh but that's just Amiga envy.
24. efreak ◴[24 Jun 23 19:10 UTC] No.36461767{3}[source]▶
But if you turn it off, you don't get the start menu indexed anymore. I don't need my files indexed, I just want my start menu shortcuts indexed. There's a few other small things that no longer work without indexing, though I forget what they are now. Everything is great, but there's actually other services that depend on search being enabled, as it tells you when you try to stop the service that is shutting down dependent service first.