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Comment by Aldipower

1 day ago

Just an anecdote from yesterday. I got an old Pentium 4 1,5Ghz from a friend, put a Terratec EWX 24/96 soundcard in, installed WinXP, turned automatic updates off and installed a software synth, Native Instruments FM7, connected a midi keyboard via the gameport. Literally 2ms latency and no midi jitter! With an 25 years old setup! And it just works, without any distractions. Really, I almost cried as I saw that. I feel somehow violated by today's Windows11/10/8.

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Aldipower

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danhau  6 hours ago

Apparently Vista introduced a new audio stack with higher processing overhead and thus latency.

I used to boot up XP in a VM occasionally. It‘s amazing how streamlined everything felt, inviting you to be productive. This was before the Electron apocalypse. Almost all UI looked the same, behaved the same and was easy on the eyes (remember when widgets had depth?).

arcanemachiner  21 hours ago

I had a similar experience when helping a friend's parent with an absolutely ancient laptop from like 2007, which which had a crappy Celeron, 256 MB of RAM, and Widnoes Vista.

The damn thing was shockingly performant. We have been played for absolute fools.