Comment by a2tech
3 years ago
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.
IIRC laptops of that sort of era often used slower RAM, and laptop hard drives were generally _much_ slower than desktop ones.
(Also there was a period when a lot of laptops used non-Intel x86 implementations, which typically weren't very good. Cyrix, Via et al.)