This wasn’t my experience back in ~2002 running my Windows NT variant of choice, Windows 2000.
Especially due to the mechanical disk, everything seemed to take 2 to 10 times longer than it does today the first time it had to be done after a reboot, and if physical memory was exhausted and the OS started swapping, forget it, you might be staring at an hour glass for multiple minutes to open a web browser or something of the sort.
I love SSDs and multicore machines of today.