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

(twitter.com)
752 points dceddia | 1 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.294s | 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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JohnFen ◴[23 Jun 23 17:11 UTC] No.36449662[source]▶
> Some of that bloat is useful

Well, all of that type of bloat is presumably useful to someone or it wouldn't have been written. That doesn't change the fact that there's a cost for including it.

> Windows indexes files in the background

But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.

Everything's a tradeoff.

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Jochim ◴[23 Jun 23 17:55 UTC] No.36450161[source]▶
> But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.

Turn it off then?

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1. efreak ◴[24 Jun 23 19:10 UTC] No.36461767[source]▶
But if you turn it off, you don't get the start menu indexed anymore. I don't need my files indexed, I just want my start menu shortcuts indexed. There's a few other small things that no longer work without indexing, though I forget what they are now. Everything is great, but there's actually other services that depend on search being enabled, as it tells you when you try to stop the service that is shutting down dependent service first.