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

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.

I'm in university and each exam I have to install windows 10 to run Safe Exam Browser (same hardware), in between I use Linux as my daily driver. The perceived difference in responsiveness is always frustrating, though I find that a lot of it probably is just due to user hostile design. No OS that constantly nags about tracking me, showing me ads, and so on will feel snappy. I'm sure there is some real lag as well though.

Microsoft has essentially turned the OS into one of those websites which show ads, news letter dialogs, cookie notices, location permission requests, notification requests and so on constantly.

does your university make you run the ["verificator"](https://github.com/SafeExamBrowser/seb-win-verificator)?