Find some hardware from the time and compare. Certainly common hardware from around the time of the initial release. It might not run as fast as you remember.

Find some hardware from the time and compare. Certainly common hardware from around the time of the initial release. It might not run as fast as you remember. It definitely won't run as fast as a VM on a modern host with a much more powerful CPU, significantly faster IO (especially if the VM is hosted on an SSD). Also, once you hit the point where the guest OS can't cache as much as it wants (as you've allocated a realistic amount of RAM from time) the host layer may be caching reads at least in the extra memory it has. [though I do get the point: if it can be as fast as it was on old kit, why can't Win10/Win11 be faster on modern kit]