I keep a bad memory of how slow XP, 2000 and even NT4 were on late 90s machines. Windows 9x was a strange beast, being a VM running on top of a DOS hypervisor,

I keep a bad memory of how slow XP, 2000 and even NT4 were on late 90s machines. Windows 9x was a strange beast, being a VM running on top of a DOS hypervisor, but it was mostly C and inline assembly and felt fast, even with 8MB of memory and a 75MHz processor. Windows 2000 was quite less efficient and would have taken eight times the memory and twice the processor speed to achieve the same responsiveness. Even more with XP. Nowadays Windows, the mere operating system, feels slow even on computers as powerful as datacenters of the 90s. Twenty five years of abstraction layers, subsystems, processes and libraries adding up, and it's getting worse (W11 vs W10).