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

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752 points dceddia | 6 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.847s | source | bottom
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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. 0xbadcafebee ◴[23 Jun 23 20:13 UTC] No.36451675[source]▶
NT kernels were always better than the DOS-based hot garbage of 95, 98, and ME.

Windows 2000 is my all-time favorite Windows OS. NT-based kernel, literally nothing extra, fast, stable. Used it til the day support was finally shuttered.

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2. nullindividual ◴[23 Jun 23 21:17 UTC] No.36452256[source]▶
GDI+ was slower due to the alpha transparency than GDI in NT4.
3. hosteur ◴[23 Jun 23 22:51 UTC] No.36453290[source]▶
Any way to legally obtain win2k iso now? I lost my discs from that era and would like to run it in a VM.
replies(1): >>36453863 #
4. pakyr ◴[23 Jun 23 23:58 UTC] No.36453863[source]▶
WinWorld has been freely distributing copies of Windows 2000 for years now without issue.[0] Someone even tried reporting them to Microsoft and nothing happened,[1] even though WinWorld says they honor takedown requests.[2] It seems Microsoft really doesn't care as long as you stick to stuff older than XP.

[0]https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-nt-2000/final

[1]https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/winwor...

[2]https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/6236/is-this-site-il...

5. userbinator ◴[24 Jun 23 01:13 UTC] No.36454417[source]▶
In my experience it was the opposite. 98SE was great, ME was worse.

NT might be more stable but it was also much slower. DOS applications on 9x actually ran in a VM with hardware passthrough, whereas NT emulated much of the hardware via NTVDM. Interacting with something as simple as the EDIT text editor in a window on 2K/XP is noticeably slower than on 9x.

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6. arp242 ◴[24 Jun 23 03:06 UTC] No.36455078[source]▶
> In my experience it was the opposite. 98SE was great, ME was worse.

I think you're mixing up Windows 2000 and ME? ME was a rushed update of 98 because Microsoft felt "they should release something" for the Millennium. It was a dumpster fire. Windows 2000 was the continuation of Windows NT, and became the basis for XP and everything that followed.

As for performance, by the time Windows 2000 came out (Pentium 3 era machines) it didn't seem to matter that much any more, and it really was a lot more stable.