5 ms·

Try servicing your neighbor’s P4 running XP machine, then review your position. (I recently had the pleasure of doing this) It’s not all the way back to 1983, b

Try servicing your neighbor’s P4 running XP machine, then review your position. (I recently had the pleasure of doing this) It’s not all the way back to 1983, but the snappiness compared to Win 10 or macOS on recent hardware is startling.

bluedino 6y ago
I don't miss the 2 minutes to boot up or 10 seconds to start Word and 60 seconds to start Adobe products.
- a2tech 6y ago
  Adobe Photoshop 7 took literally seconds to open on my 500mhz Pentium 3. On my brand new SSD iMac, 31 seconds cold, 7 seconds from a warm start (which honestly is WAY better than I thought it was going to be).
- mtgx 6y ago
  The speed-up for those is mostly about using a fast SSD today vs a slow HDD back then, not that much to do with the OS/software themselves. If anything 90's software would run circles around today's software if it was using today's hardware. And I think that's the point of the article.
- usrnm 6y ago
  The progress in boot times has much more to do with SSDs than anything software-related.
  - coding123 6y ago
    Not if you go back far enough. Ultima 8 Pagan, whenever I switched "maps" on my 386 it literally took about a minute to load the next area. When I got my next computer it was a Pentium 100 Mhz. That thing loaded the next map area in about 1-2 seconds. Both of those computers did not use SSDs.
  - hedora 6y ago
    Linux booted faster on my Pentium 100 with a hard disk than with my i7 + SSD. The root cause is that when Linux moved to parallel “fast” boot and DBUS they didn’t add APIs to the kernel to work through all the race conditions around modules loading, etc. So, it has to sleep for a second here or there to let hardware stabilize. I first noticed this about 10 years ago (on a new, faster machine, X would fail to start because the video card kernel module hadn’t finished loading yet). It has gotten worse since. On one machine, I have an NFS mount over WiFi. Network manager wants mount to complete before it runs because they didn’t think before they implemented it. I eventually got that machine to boot, but it takes an extra 5 seconds.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  It takes longer than 2 minutes every time I reboot my 8 year old Mac Mini.
  - CodeWriter23 6y ago
    Which macOS are you running? After Mavericks it seemed to pile on a bit of chug IMO. They need to do an optimization-only release again.
- hedora 6y ago
  It takes longer for my bluetooth keyboard to wake up and pair then it took for Word to start back in the day. Also, when I start typing with the keyboard, I have no idea which web page text box has default focus. At least with Word (which I really, really hated), the document body always had keyboard focus. Also, if I go back to edit a word in the middle of a previous sentence, the operating system sometimes decides I want the first character to be uppercase (and sometimes it doesn’t). Just now, it took 5 tries to get the damn thing to type a freaking lowercase letter. I have autocorrect disabled, or it would be even worse. Heck, you can’t even reliably guess which direction a mouse wheel will scroll any more.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
Try sitting at my 2014 quad core Core i5 with 16GB RAM, SATA SSD, and GTX950 running four 4K displays running Windows 10 and multiple instances of CAD / CAM software, Excel, Outlook, Word, task management software blah blah blah all accesible via AutoHotKey scripts and 22 button mouse. This thing is blisteringly fast. I do not miss Windows XP.
Yizahi 6y ago
I read your comment several times while trying to understand why you seemingly oppose higher level comment and then confirm it at the same time. Only later I understood that you state that P4 with XP was more responsive than modern HW with Win10? Come on, that's not true at all. Every action would be slower and some much slower. Opening any heavy app (like say browser) will take much more time even on older software versions.

bluedino 6y ago

I don't miss the 2 minutes to boot up or 10 seconds to start Word and 60 seconds to start Adobe products.

a2tech 6y ago
Adobe Photoshop 7 took literally seconds to open on my 500mhz Pentium 3. On my brand new SSD iMac, 31 seconds cold, 7 seconds from a warm start (which honestly is WAY better than I thought it was going to be).
mtgx 6y ago
The speed-up for those is mostly about using a fast SSD today vs a slow HDD back then, not that much to do with the OS/software themselves. If anything 90's software would run circles around today's software if it was using today's hardware. And I think that's the point of the article.
usrnm 6y ago
The progress in boot times has much more to do with SSDs than anything software-related.
- coding123 6y ago
  Not if you go back far enough. Ultima 8 Pagan, whenever I switched "maps" on my 386 it literally took about a minute to load the next area. When I got my next computer it was a Pentium 100 Mhz. That thing loaded the next map area in about 1-2 seconds. Both of those computers did not use SSDs.
- hedora 6y ago
  Linux booted faster on my Pentium 100 with a hard disk than with my i7 + SSD. The root cause is that when Linux moved to parallel “fast” boot and DBUS they didn’t add APIs to the kernel to work through all the race conditions around modules loading, etc. So, it has to sleep for a second here or there to let hardware stabilize. I first noticed this about 10 years ago (on a new, faster machine, X would fail to start because the video card kernel module hadn’t finished loading yet). It has gotten worse since. On one machine, I have an NFS mount over WiFi. Network manager wants mount to complete before it runs because they didn’t think before they implemented it. I eventually got that machine to boot, but it takes an extra 5 seconds.
Consultant32452 6y ago
It takes longer than 2 minutes every time I reboot my 8 year old Mac Mini.
- CodeWriter23 6y ago
  Which macOS are you running? After Mavericks it seemed to pile on a bit of chug IMO. They need to do an optimization-only release again.
hedora 6y ago
It takes longer for my bluetooth keyboard to wake up and pair then it took for Word to start back in the day. Also, when I start typing with the keyboard, I have no idea which web page text box has default focus. At least with Word (which I really, really hated), the document body always had keyboard focus. Also, if I go back to edit a word in the middle of a previous sentence, the operating system sometimes decides I want the first character to be uppercase (and sometimes it doesn’t). Just now, it took 5 tries to get the damn thing to type a freaking lowercase letter. I have autocorrect disabled, or it would be even worse. Heck, you can’t even reliably guess which direction a mouse wheel will scroll any more.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

Try sitting at my 2014 quad core Core i5 with 16GB RAM, SATA SSD, and GTX950 running four 4K displays running Windows 10 and multiple instances of CAD / CAM software, Excel, Outlook, Word, task management software blah blah blah all accesible via AutoHotKey scripts and 22 button mouse. This thing is blisteringly fast. I do not miss Windows XP.

Yizahi 6y ago

I read your comment several times while trying to understand why you seemingly oppose higher level comment and then confirm it at the same time. Only later I understood that you state that P4 with XP was more responsive than modern HW with Win10? Come on, that's not true at all. Every action would be slower and some much slower. Opening any heavy app (like say browser) will take much more time even on older software versions.