Comment by NovemberWhiskey
3 years ago
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.
If you ran Windows NT on the bare minimum it was not as slow (barring hitting swap) as Windows 11 on the bare minimum hardware. Not even close. Windows NT on the minimum hardware wasn't a joy exactly but it was certainly workable. If you run Win11 on the bare minimum you'll very quickly learn to hate everything.
Are you sure this applies to laptops from back then? The minimal laptop that could run NT must have been so much worse than a desktop.
In 1998, I exclusively used NT 4 on a Dell Latitude to do software development for a month while working overseas. It wasn’t super fast but it was comparable to a non-workstation desktop - in both cases you could not skimp on RAM but otherwise it was fine. The biggest gripe I had was the Synaptics touchpad, which is evergreen.
The min specs would be the same, laptop or desktop. A laptop with those kind of specs back then probably just had terrible battery life and was really big & heavy, didn't throttle down or anything. Not like today when you'd expect the "same part" or "same clock speed" to not really be the same, between a mobile and desktop chip.
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I feel like the intent was to say notepad from 20 years ago and notepad from today has (approx) the same functionality whereas the processors are x4 times faster, it should be at least as fast as it was before, shouldn't it? In my mind, regardless of the OS requirements, a processor x4 more powerful shouldn't need double the time to launch the same program unless you've added x4+ features.
Notepad back then could only edit 32kB maximum files, even on 32bit NT, it was literally all the text widget could handle.
So no, it's not really fair to compare a 'simple' text editor.
It is a fair comparison.
If you edit the same 1KB file on each computer side by side the 30 year old computer will be more responsive than the modern one.
That's what people are taking issue with.
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Notepad on NT4 could edit files as large as you had memory. I never used 3.5 but I guess they must have made that change in NT4.
64KB.
Another very similar example to this is the adding text feature in MS Paint. I noticed that somehow on the Windows 11 version, it takes many seconds after clicking the "add text" button to be able to actually start typing. Previously, it was instantaneous.
I can start notepad on my relatively slow Win10 VM with spinning disks in RAID and it starts with similar speeds - starting it on my physical windows machine with a SSD, it launches at exactly the same speed.
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)?
They don't
They do have a better example with Windows 2000 on the Pentium 3 which is very era appropriate.
I see similar sluggishness opening command prompt on my Ryzen 3700X with 64GB RAM on Windows 11 22H2 with an NVME SSD. First it draws the outline of the window then fills it in with content. And that's repeatable!
Why is Win11 so slow and unoptimized that it needs such crazy hardware.
I don't think it's unoptimized as much as it's extremely bloated.
What's the difference?
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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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The term bloat (as it applies to software) is rooted in gamer-think that has no basis in reality and sends a strong signal of lack of understanding. It's reminiscent of the days of 'BlackViper' and disabling Windows Services -- again, another gamer lack of knowledge issue.
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> not an entirely like-for-like comparison.
I'm not sure why Windows minimum hardware requirements are relevant at all. If they were, they could get massive performance improvements by raising the hardware requirements. "Sure it's slow, but it's running on literally 1% of minimum recommended RAM!"
They were very relevant back in the '90s. So relevant, it's why Windows 9x existed. The Windows NT 4 minimum system requirements around RAM were too high, thus deemed too expensive for consumers.
In the tweet right below there's a video of them running Windows 2000 on the same hardware and it's just as responsive.
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.
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
I think the bloating hardware requirements are his point. What precisely have they gotten us? Mind you, this is not the same as "what have we gotten in the time that they've bloated"!
Granted, a Surface Go 2 won't win any perf competition, but even with infinite budget you still couldn't buy a desktop today that has the response times of that NT box.
By that logic: Windows 10 on my Threadripper 3970x with 256G of RAM should be comparably fast to Windows NT as presented.
Since the aggregate GHz and RAM on offer is more than 25x the minimum spec for windows 10.
Win10 min spec is 1GHz w/ 2GB of RAM - my machine is more than one hundred times faster, yet, everything TFA says is true.
Add onto that the fact the 8th and 10th gen Intel low power mobile parts are, well, kinda garbage (low perf/watt, very little boost time, low core count) and were quickly obsoleted.
I'm not sure why Msft put that CPU and RAM combo in their own device when it's just barely past the minimum specs for Windows 10 let alone 11.
Yup if you run a Windows VM in a M2 Max Mac or a PC with a Intel 13900, stuff opens pretty fast too.
I imagine they're also not using vintage hard drives. Its pretty common in the retro computer world to use things like CF and SD cards for storage emulation. Even a basic CF card is miles faster than a 1990's HDD. Put in a period-accurate storage device and see how bog slow it gets.
You might try reading the second line of the Tweet before criticising its author.
The text content of the tweets seem pretty unreliable as this states its a Surface Go 2 with a Quad Core i5, despite the fact the Surface Go 2 never shipped with anything quad core and definitely not an i5.
Maybe it is a spinning rust disk. Even then there's a world of difference between a period accurate drive and a late model IDE drive. The last IDE drives had more drive cache than most desktops had RAM when NT was new.