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

(twitter.com)
752 points dceddia | 2 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.419s | source
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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.
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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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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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1. 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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2. 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.