8 ms·
Running Windows 7 on a 5 MHz CPU with 128MB of RAM
- johnklos 4y agoI installed Windows 95 on a 25 MHz m68030, in part just to see if I could: https://twitter.com/AnachronistJohn/status/1575967970391560193 https://twitter.com/AnachronistJohn/status/15759679703915601... I've been curious about whether Windows XP or newer could be finagled to run on an i80486 or equivalent. I bet this NTDEV person would know!
- jacquesm 4y agoAn emulator in software will eat up a ton of cycles. But props for getting it to boot!
- antod 4y agoBack in the day I had W2K Pro running (very slowly) on a 66MHz 486. XP was only 18 months or so behind that, and the system requirements probably weren't much different. Wouldn't wanted to have to use it for anything though.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoI did some Java development on windows NT 3.51 and a 486 (33Mhz?) back in 1996. Worked fine. That was considered a fast machine at the time. I used Ultraedit and IBM's jikes incremental compiler. We were building some applet. Builds took a few seconds with jikes (as opposed to using javac that came with the jdk). There were no ant, maven, or gradle wasting more time. I had a little batch file that set up the classpath just right and then called the compiler. That setup was actually faster than building kotlin projects on my current mac M1 laptop. Of course it's doing more stuff these days but build times seem a constant through the ages. Better hardware just leads to more complicated tooling.
- ahartmetz 4y agoSomething is wrong with your story, possibly the year (or you lived in a poor place). The 486 DX33 was released in 1990 and was lower midrange in 1994. In 1996, it was more or less outdated. I had that problem, a slow 486 in 1996 ;)
- jillesvangurp 4y agoIt was a university computer. They wouldn't have had the latest and greatest. Pentium was released in 1993.
- ant6n 4y agoI had a 33MHz 386 in 1998 while my friends were playing quake on their early pentiums. It was hard to get DOS games at that time, being stuck on civI and wolfenstein…
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoGradle is such a piece of shit, sad it became the default for Spring Boot. Maven sucks too but at least its fast.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoI think it's the difference between getting stabbed and shot. Not a lot of love for either. But I can work with both and gradle seems less hassle these days. Especially if you are doing Kotlin.
- userbinator 4y agoI've been curious about whether Windows XP or newer could be finagled to run on an i80486 or equivalent I believe it requires some 586-level instructions, so it won't work without some serious patching.
- jacquesm 4y ago28 Minutes to boot? That's roughly what will be the norm in another decade ;) It's insane how much faster CPUs have become and how slow an average machine boots to full functionality. The days of 'instant on, instant off' are long behind us. The amount of persistence behind these projects never fails to amaze me, see also the guy that made a miniature version of the Cray-1: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191877-how-to-build-your-own-110-scale-cray-1-supercomputer https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191877-how-to-build-your...
- hackmiester 4y agoWhat computer are you using that boots so slowly? I can’t say I have had that issue in over a decade.
- jacquesm 4y agoI have exactly one windows box in this house and I avoid turning it on but it is a requirement to operate a particular piece of hardware. It takes several minutes before it has completely booted, it runs Windows 7 on what is a perfectly fine machine for that OS. Highly frustrating. That's why you get articles like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 And many others besides. Windows can be such a cycle hog. Probably if I installed 64G of RAM and an SSD I could cut it down to something more decent, but I don't use that machine often enough to offset the expense (and never mind driver/installation media hassles, it isn't broken so don't fix it!). Other machines take on average about a minute or so but they are running Linux, running Windows on them would easily double that. My daily driver is a T540p (mostly to conserve power) and it works well enough. Not exactly a speed daemon in use but maxed out on RAM (16G), a 2.5 GHz i7 and a fast SSD it doesn't perform nearly as well as my 20 year old self would have expected it to. OS and browser will happily eat all of that, and I can't use swap because of the audio drop-outs that would cause. If there was a way to shoehorn in more memory I would take it.
- dontlaugh 4y agoYou need an SSD. My Windows 10 machine boots in 10 seconds at most.
- userbinator 4y agoI don't know if it should be considered cheating to use an emulator because they have a very different CPU instruction timing profile than real hardware; here's a notable result from before, with real hardware running XP down at 8MHz: http://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm http://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm Also, it looks like he started with something resembling WinPE, which is already stripped-down compared to a regular install.
- don-code 4y agoInterestingly, the Pentium Overdrive mentioned in your linked article will actually run relatively recent OSes - the latest release of Slackware, for instance, should still run on it. I have the 83MHz version in my old 486 (though it's really not a 486 anymore - ha ha), and got Slackware booting on it out of sheer curiosity a few years ago. What surprised me is that, modern software aside, 14.x wasn't much slower than a period-accurate Linux - Slackware 14 (2010s) and Mandrake 7 (1999) booted at more or less the same speed.
- giancarlostoro 4y agoThat's a really interesting observation, I sort of noticed C++ being slow to compile doesn't necessarily improve a whole lot even on newer hardware, so I wonder if there's a different OS that runs on 90s and 2010's hardware that could run better on more modern hardware.
- userbinator 4y agoPentium Overdrive is basically a 586 in a 486 package... which also means, with an adapter, it could fit into a 386 mobo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29046117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29046117
- xattt 4y agoAlso from that site: Windows 98 on a 386! (1) https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/386vers.htm https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/386vers.htm
- causality0 4y agowhich is actually a virtual machine running in the 86Box emulator(opens in new tab) Yeah, and I landed on Mars in a simulator. "Doing neat stuff with weird hardware" isn't a thing without the fucking hardware.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sbaiddn 4y agoI think they're running the emulator on a primitive machine to get needed instructions that are otherwise unavailable?
- janebrown456 4y agoIt's impressive to see the persistence and dedication of people who undertake projects like building miniature versions of historical computers. These types of projects require a lot of time, effort, and attention to detail, and it's impressive to see the results of those efforts.
- extasia 4y agoAre you a Chatbot?
- verdenti 4y ago[dead]
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoIf you want to experience similar masochism or torture someone else, set their used-memory value very low in msconfig. It can take ages to figure out for a victim.
- nearlyepic 4y agoWe used to do this at LAN parties if people left their PCs logged in while they were sleeping. Always hilarious.
- helf 4y agoLol. This gets rediscovered every few years. Pretty funny. Slowest I’ve run any modern OS on an x86 chip would probably be about 60mhz pentium 1. I used to daily drive Ubuntu (I think 5.04?) with Beryl and Compiz on a pentium 75 with 512mb of ram (awesome socket5 board) and a pci nvidia 6200. The offloaded composition etc helped a lot. Was a very snappy box all things considered. Helped that I also ran an IDE SSD on it.
- Avamander 4y ago> The offloaded composition etc helped a lot. Was a very snappy box all things considered This has started to bother me recently, performance has gone such a long way but some things are still so damn slow for no good reason. The input lag article gets posted on HN yearly. Something I just recently encountered, why does Windows still install updates for tens of minutes on a multi-GB/s SSD? Why do email clients lag with just 100 000 emails? It's a bit sad I find.
- anamexis 4y agoSlow OS updates drive me bonkers on macOS, too. What could it possibly be doing for 40 minutes to upgrade a minor version on a new M1 mac with 32GB RAM and an SSD?
- helf 4y agoMacOS/OSX has long had insanely slow updating. It’s always bothered me. The time estimator on the installers for it are not even suggestions.
- helf 4y agoRight? A lot of people will start going on about how modern OSes “do more” blah blah but a lot of that is complete hokum. Imo it’s the endless layers of abstraction and frameworks on top of frameworks getting in the way. It’s hard to get a modern OS to respond to input in under, what, 80ms? I’m not a programmer nor am I a systems designer (for a living. I dabble in this stuff tho) so I can’t really speak for a lot of it but it’s really annoying how modern stuff doesn’t seem to prioritize the interface performance both in input and output over everything else like you’d think they should. At least for consumer end user systems. The overall perceived performance of my systems has sorta gotten back in line with my systems from the 90s with the advent of fast SSDs. My NeXTs, BeOS systems, SGIs etc were all, perceptually, snappy (OK, the SGIs were hit or miss at times lol). And that’s on low RAM and slow HDDs. But they ran smaller, tighter programs for the most part. My PCs, running windows especially, seemed to get slower and slower after NT4 (and maybe Windows 2000) from my perspective as all the programs I used ballooned in overall size and switched to “modern” frameworks and cross-platform designs. Finally started to get decent SSDs and the performance started getting back to how I either remembered older systems or could objectively compare against the ones I still had/have. You can sorta improve things in a lot of systems by manually changing CPU and IO priority for various system processes (and other tweaks to system schedulers etc). Like on Windows I use Prio to reset CPU affinity and priority for various processes on reboots. The dwm process I always have set to real-time which helps a lot in responsiveness for Windows. On android, I run some scripts I wrote to renice the IO and CPU priority for several processes related to the UI. I just feel like this shouldn’t be a thing in 2022. BeOS was insanely multithreaded and prioritized the UI seemingly above all else. It was always snappy :( Ok, I’ll stop rambling like an old man.
- bouncycastle 4y agoI guess this was the usual time for os/2 to boot on a 486 back in the day!
- mlyle 4y agoI remember doing OS/2 Warp 3 on a 386SX-16. It took a few minutes of grinding before it got going, but then actually ran pretty well.
- codedokode 4y agoGreat. But can you run Gnome Desktop environment on the same machine?
- Operative0198 4y ago*Can you run KDE? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33951719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33951719
- ksec 4y agoEveryone is so focused on the CPU speed. I could see another 2x single core performance increase in the next 10 years. I don’t see Memory increases for the same price. Would be a better question to ask why does modern OS needs so much RAM.
- nine_k 4y agoSo much RAM: - Every pointer is 8 bytes, and a lot of integers are also 8 bytes, and a ton of structs have padding here and there to the 64-bit boundary. - All graphics are rendered on huge bitmaps which are later composited using advanced hardware, using double or sometimes triple buffering. This allows for nice effects like translucency, shadows, blurring, etc, while requiring simpler logic and producing basically no visual glitches. - While at it, just one screenful at 4K / 32bop is slightly less that 32 megabytes. - A bunch of fonts is pre-rasterized for the high resolution (effectively 3x the horizontal resolution for subpixel smoothing), including fancy emoji fonts. - A ton of services start by default, from system-wide spell-checking to weather and news reporting. The OS's GUI shell strives to be rich and fancy, with nice large previews of images, documents, etc, and also voice output and input. - But this all is nothing compared to the resource needs of an HTML5 browser.with a couple dozen graphically intense tabs running SPAs like Gmail or Slack, with all the state, and all the JIT'ed JS. There's plenty to spend RAM on, compared to my fancy Linux desktop from 1999 which happily lived on 64 megabytes of RAM. Opening ten browser tabs was out of question: tabs mostly did not exist yet :)
- anthk 4y agoGmail works well with mutt and some Google calendar importers into calcurse or ICS tools.
- ksec 4y agoThanks. That was one of the topic we touched on discussing Flash [1] a few days ago. GPU has no idea what Vector is. I wonder how much memory could be saved if we could somehow "compute" all 2D fonts and graphics. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34083092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34083092
- t3rra 4y agoIt is not specifically 5mhz CPU in truth. No pentium class CPU has ever been 5mhz in speed, and pentium has tons of more instructions that Windows require to function than actual original 5mhz CPUs had.
- bearjaws 4y agoReminds me of the time I accidentally set my CPU voltage way too low in AMD PBO. I thought it was in milivolt, but it was in microvolt IIRC. So I did 1100 base and it was .1v. It posted actually, but the CPU (2900x) was capped at 500mhz, total package power was like 15w. Took about 3 minutes to boot and that was when I realized something was terribly wrong.
- adversaryIdiot 4y agoWow for what ever reason i read this as 5ghz and 128gb. I was so confused reading the article.