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752 points dceddia | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.414s | source
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NovemberWhiskey ◴[] 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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1. karmakaze ◴[] No.36452031[source]
I ran NT 3.51 on a PS/2 486-66 with either 40MB (maybe 48MB) RAM and a scsi disk. It was nice compiling VC++ programs on it.

I now use a Surface Go3 i3 with 8GB. It's enough for just about everything I need. Web browser, running script language web apps, Java IDE, StarCraft 2. Disabling a bunch of stuff on Win11 makes a big difference. Whenever it felt slow I looked at Task Manager CPU and googled the process name, tried disabling it and only re-enable if necessary. Oh I also have a Peltier cooler+fan that cools the back of the unit when gaming to prevent throttling.

The PS/2 NT machine was top spec at the time. The Go3 is utilitarian now though should be like a supercomputer.

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2. karmakaze ◴[] No.36511680[source]
There's another post with a video of how an old machine running NT 3.51 is so much faster than what we have now running on modern hardware.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983