3 ms·

I get your point, but I don't agree on the anecdotal front. I haven't used fewer than 4c/8th and 16GB of highspeed ram in probably 5 years - and the only "commo

I get your point, but I don't agree on the anecdotal front. I haven't used fewer than 4c/8th and 16GB of highspeed ram in probably 5 years - and the only "common" applications that I notice going slow on me (unless on the occasion I'm not booting older/slower hardware), are things like IDEs and absurdly large spreadsheets. Even stuff like Electron apps are snappy to me and I haven't had issues with (GitKraken, VS Code, and Slack are daily drivers for me). Browser based apps are a shitshow though, but I figure that's mostly out of anyone's control. I chop that up to the browser being fundamentally a poor place for most applications, even ones that are tightly coupled to a server backend.

throwaway2048 7y ago
Problem is its perceptual, Go back and use windows XP, its a complete nightmare lagfest with any appreciable CPU load compared to windows 7+ (all UI rendering was done directly by the CPU, no GPU acceleration except a few minor things). I bet at the time you barely noticed though.
- cturner 7y ago
  I will try to explain - going back to XP may not take you back far enough. I recently read a history of early NT development, and then installed NT4 in a VM to play with, choosing a FAT disk. It is /extremely/ responsive. Much more so than the host OS, Windows 10. The NT4 and 95 shells were tight code. They were replaced a few years later by the more flexible "Active Desktop". This was less responsive. In later releases, Windows started to incorporate background features, such as automatic file indexing. File indexing is IO intensive and hammers your CPU cache. When I was regularly using NT4 (years ago), I had an impression that there was some overhead caused by registry searches. If this was ever a thing, improvements in raw computing power have conquered it. If anyone else wants to try, NT4 and VC++ cost me next to nothing on amazon. For a good editor, get microemacs. Python2.3 works. (Don't let it near an open network.)
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  I do recall being a luddite in upgrading from Office 2003 to 2010 (rip, '07 on Vista) and rued the day that it became permanent. It did get better though.

throwaway2048 7y ago

Problem is its perceptual, Go back and use windows XP, its a complete nightmare lagfest with any appreciable CPU load compared to windows 7+ (all UI rendering was done directly by the CPU, no GPU acceleration except a few minor things). I bet at the time you barely noticed though.

cturner 7y ago
I will try to explain - going back to XP may not take you back far enough. I recently read a history of early NT development, and then installed NT4 in a VM to play with, choosing a FAT disk. It is /extremely/ responsive. Much more so than the host OS, Windows 10. The NT4 and 95 shells were tight code. They were replaced a few years later by the more flexible "Active Desktop". This was less responsive. In later releases, Windows started to incorporate background features, such as automatic file indexing. File indexing is IO intensive and hammers your CPU cache. When I was regularly using NT4 (years ago), I had an impression that there was some overhead caused by registry searches. If this was ever a thing, improvements in raw computing power have conquered it. If anyone else wants to try, NT4 and VC++ cost me next to nothing on amazon. For a good editor, get microemacs. Python2.3 works. (Don't let it near an open network.)
unlinked_dll 7y ago
I do recall being a luddite in upgrading from Office 2003 to 2010 (rip, '07 on Vista) and rued the day that it became permanent. It did get better though.