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But what if I want a faster horse?

(rakhim.exotext.com)
1525 points saeedesmaili | 1 comments | 11 Apr 25 11:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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andai ◴[11 Apr 25 13:02 UTC] No.43653301[source]▶
Ironically the old horses were faster! Run XP on modern hardware (if you can get it running at all) and you'll see what I mean. Explorer opens fully rendered in the span of a single frame (0.016 seconds). And XP was very slow and bloated for its time!

It'll do this even in VirtualBox, running about 20x snappier than the native host, which boggles my mind.

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1. noisy_boy ◴[11 Apr 25 16:58 UTC] No.43655971[source]▶
I think they were designed at the time of less powerful machines so they had to be designed better. Nowadays there is not as much push to eke out every last bit of performance because there is loads of power at everyone's disposal and developers are pushed to focus on features first without being given time to refine performance because features mean adoption. So the bloat creeps up, and hardware makers keep designing more powerful machines which further enables the bloatiness. It is a vicious cycle.