4 ms·

Perhaps because the level of respect that Windows has for its users has dropped with each successive version? Not to mention bloat: I have a keyboard with a de

Perhaps because the level of respect that Windows has for its users has dropped with each successive version? Not to mention bloat: I have a keyboard with a dedicated calculator button. On a machine with Core i5 something or other and SSD it takes about 2 seconds for the calculator to appear the first time I push that button. On the Core 2 Duo machine that preceded it, running XP from spinning rust, the calculator would appear instantly - certainly before I can release the button. But also WinXP was the OS a lot of people used during their formative years - don't underestimate the power of nostalgia. Also, for some people the very fact that Microsoft don't want you to would be reason enough! Personally if I were into preserving old Windows versions I'd be putting my effort into Win2k SP4, since it's the last version that doesn't need activating. (I did have to activate a Vista install recently - just a VM used to keep alive some legacy software whose own activation servers are but a distant memory. It's still possible, but you can't do it over the phone any more, and I couldn't find any way to do it without registering a Microsoft account.)

refulgentis 9mo ago
[flagged]
- OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
  Why is it impossible?
  - refulgentis 9mo ago
    Tl;dr reaction time, 300 ms is the golden rule for reaction speed, and apparently there was actually a sports medicine study that came to that #. I was surprised to see that, 300 ms comes up a lot in UX as “threshold of perceptible delay” but it was still surprising to see.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
      I was curious, so did a quick web search, which claims that 300ms is the average reaction time and plenty of people run faster than that. But I think the question was the other way: Why couldn't calc.exe launch in 300ms?
      - refulgentis 9mo ago
        300 ms is way longer than they budgeted; separately, I was alive then and it's a ridiculous claim, like, it takes a general bias we all have towards seeing the past with rose-colored glasses and takes it farcically far. Don't want to clutter too much, I'm already eating downvotes, so I'll link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642003
        chungy 9mo ago
        I have Windows 95 on a Pentium 120 MHz and calc.exe is instantaneous enough that it's probably much less than 300ms to launch. XP's calculator is hardly any different than 95. It's easy to believe that launching it on a Core 2 Duo of all things is also instant.
        hnlmorg 9mo ago
        You’re both kind of right. On the average consumer hardware at launch, 95 and XP were slow, memory hungry bloats. In fact everything that people say about Windows 11 now was even more true of Windows back then. By the end of the life of Windows 95 and XP, hardware had overtook and Windows felt snappier. There was a reason I stuck with Windows 2000 for years after the release of XP and it wasn’t because I was too cheep to buy XP.
    - jcelerier 9mo ago
      yeah no. Ask musicians using computers - 50 milliseconds of latency between sound and movement is generally considered unplayable, 20 milliseconds is tough, below 10ms usually is where people start being unable to tell.
      - hnlmorg 9mo ago
        You’ve fallen into the common trap of conflating reaction time with observable alignment time. Reactions are about responding to one off events. Whereas what you’re describing is about perception of events aligned to a regular interval. For example, I wouldn’t react to a game of whack-a-mole at 50ms, nor that quickly to a hazard while driving either. But I absolutely can tell you if synth isn’t quantised correctly by as little as 50ms. Thats because the later isn’t a reaction. It’s a similar but different perception.
        jcelerier 9mo ago
        But here we're talking about not being able to notice whether calc.exe opens in less than 300 milliseconds, not how fast we can react to it opening? It's the same thing with audio latency (and extremely infuriating when you're used to fast software where you can just start typing directly just after opening it without having to insert a pause to cater to slowness)
        hnlmorg 9mo ago
        No it's not the same thing with music latency. For one thing, music is an audio event where as UI is a visual event. We know that music and audio stimuli operate differently. And for the music latency, you can here where the latency happens in relation to the rest of the music piece (be the rock music, techno, or whatever style of music). You have a point of reference. This makes latency less of a reaction event and more of a placement event. ie you're not just reacting to the latency, you're noticing the offset with the rest of the music. And that adds significant context to perception. This is also ignores the point that musicians have to train themselves to hear this offset. It's like any advanced skill from a golf swing to writing code: it takes practice to get good at it. So it's not the same. I can understand why people think it might be. But when you actually investigate this properly, you can see why DJs and musicians appear to have supernatural senses vs regular reaction times. It's because they're not actually all that equivalent.
    - robinsonb5 9mo ago
      I'm not sure why human reaction time is relevant here, since what I'm talking about isn't the time it takes me to respond to a stimulus but the time it takes the computer to respond to a stimulus. I do do still have both computers set up side-by-side (legacy data from an old business), and the keyboard in question was a Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 (the calculator button wasn't a proper key, it was one of those squidgy extra keys so beloved of multimedia keyboards, so not as fast to operate as a proper key.) Anyhow, the point (arguably hypberbolic as it may have been) wasn't about reaction time per se, it was about the older calculator app - and by extension much of the rest of the OS - being a much simpler and less bloated piece of software, and running it on faster-than-contemporaneous hardware makes for a sense of immediacy which is sorely lacking in today's world of web apps. I'd be very interested to know to what that 300ms "threshold of perceptible delay" applies. You might not notice a window taking 300ms to open - but I'd be willing to bet that when you're highlighting text with the mouse or dragging a slider, you'd be very aware of the UI lagging by nearly 1/3 of a second.
      - refulgentis 9mo ago
        This is a lot of words that say "yeah, I was hyperbolic, but it was directionally correct." I do appreciate the candor but its a bit late, as you see by the text color of my comments. Many people do the same thing as you, no worries, I appreciate you validating my quixotic self-destructive work.
        robinsonb5 9mo ago
        I'm sorry you're being downvoted - for the record I've upvoted since it's interesting, even if we disagree in some aspects. Since I still have the machine in question here, and I'm now interested enough to try and get some rough measurements, I've just videoed it with my phone (30fps video) and done some frame counting, both from a cold boot with nothing cached, and also a repeated launch. Firstly from a cold boot: It's hard to tell exactly when the keypress registers, but I believe what I'm seeing is the key being pressed, two frames later the hourglass appears, two frames after that the calculator appears. (The TFT screen will likely be adding at least one frame lag, but let's ignore that for now.) So that's somewhere between 166 and 200ms for a cold launch. If I close the app and repeat, there's now just one frame between keypress and hourglass, and just one more frame between hourglass and the app appearing, so now nearer 100ms. Looking at the videos my finger is off the key the first time the app appears, but not the second time - though if I made a special effort to release the key as quickly as possible I now think I could probably just about beat it.
    - xerox13ster 9mo ago
      The Doherty threshold is 400 ms. That’s the threshold which you start impacting users focus, and flow. Back in the day, we actually used to aim for that as a user experience metric.
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
  Your comment reminds me of that rule from baseball that says something about batters and hats, or maybe it was about helmets or something, it doesn't really matter though because the only point of this sports ball rambling is to distract you from noticing that my "nuh uh" has no substance. Did it work?
  - refulgentis 9mo ago
    This is more than a bit out of place on HN in my experience, please, try to engage politely. I’m not sure what I can say that will qualify as more than “nuh uh” to you, shy of getting a Core 2 Duo running with XP and the same keyboard as OP. That isn’t possible at the moment, is there anything else I could do?
    - actionfromafar 9mo ago
      300ms is a lot of time, especially if the calculator.exe was in disk cache already.
      - refulgentis 9mo ago
        300 ms is a long time on a computer, definitely. Just, the autistic side of me has to speak up when it’s wildly unrealistic glorification of the past. Keypress duration is likely much less than 300 ms, top Google result claims 77 ms on average. And that’s down and up. I see it being in cache already as sort of game playing, i.e. we can say anything is instant if we throw a cache in front of it. Am I missing something about caching that makes it reasonable? (I’m 37, so only 18 around that time and wouldn’t have had the technical chops to understand it was normal for things to be in disk cache after a cold boot)
        do_not_redeem 9mo ago
        Okay, let's say the cache is cold and you're on an old clunky spinning rust 5400 RPM hard drive. Do the math. How long will it take, worst case, for the platter to spin to where calc.exe is stored?
Borg3 9mo ago
Win2003 Enterprise does NOT need activation either. It runs smooth offline.
- piperswe 9mo ago
  There are tools out there (like UMSKT) that can activate MS software from that era fully offline too. They cracked the cryptography used by the activation system and reimplemented the tool used for phone activation, so you can “activate by phone” using UMSKT instead of calling MS.
  - Borg3 9mo ago
    But you do NOT need to.. Read about Volume Licencing. You just enter the KEY and vioala....

refulgentis 9mo ago

[flagged]

OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
Why is it impossible?
- refulgentis 9mo ago
  Tl;dr reaction time, 300 ms is the golden rule for reaction speed, and apparently there was actually a sports medicine study that came to that #. I was surprised to see that, 300 ms comes up a lot in UX as “threshold of perceptible delay” but it was still surprising to see.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
    I was curious, so did a quick web search, which claims that 300ms is the average reaction time and plenty of people run faster than that. But I think the question was the other way: Why couldn't calc.exe launch in 300ms?
    - refulgentis 9mo ago
      300 ms is way longer than they budgeted; separately, I was alive then and it's a ridiculous claim, like, it takes a general bias we all have towards seeing the past with rose-colored glasses and takes it farcically far. Don't want to clutter too much, I'm already eating downvotes, so I'll link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642003
      - chungy 9mo ago
        I have Windows 95 on a Pentium 120 MHz and calc.exe is instantaneous enough that it's probably much less than 300ms to launch. XP's calculator is hardly any different than 95. It's easy to believe that launching it on a Core 2 Duo of all things is also instant.
        hnlmorg 9mo ago
        You’re both kind of right. On the average consumer hardware at launch, 95 and XP were slow, memory hungry bloats. In fact everything that people say about Windows 11 now was even more true of Windows back then. By the end of the life of Windows 95 and XP, hardware had overtook and Windows felt snappier. There was a reason I stuck with Windows 2000 for years after the release of XP and it wasn’t because I was too cheep to buy XP.
  - jcelerier 9mo ago
    yeah no. Ask musicians using computers - 50 milliseconds of latency between sound and movement is generally considered unplayable, 20 milliseconds is tough, below 10ms usually is where people start being unable to tell.
    - hnlmorg 9mo ago
      You’ve fallen into the common trap of conflating reaction time with observable alignment time. Reactions are about responding to one off events. Whereas what you’re describing is about perception of events aligned to a regular interval. For example, I wouldn’t react to a game of whack-a-mole at 50ms, nor that quickly to a hazard while driving either. But I absolutely can tell you if synth isn’t quantised correctly by as little as 50ms. Thats because the later isn’t a reaction. It’s a similar but different perception.
      - jcelerier 9mo ago
        But here we're talking about not being able to notice whether calc.exe opens in less than 300 milliseconds, not how fast we can react to it opening? It's the same thing with audio latency (and extremely infuriating when you're used to fast software where you can just start typing directly just after opening it without having to insert a pause to cater to slowness)
        hnlmorg 9mo ago
        No it's not the same thing with music latency. For one thing, music is an audio event where as UI is a visual event. We know that music and audio stimuli operate differently. And for the music latency, you can here where the latency happens in relation to the rest of the music piece (be the rock music, techno, or whatever style of music). You have a point of reference. This makes latency less of a reaction event and more of a placement event. ie you're not just reacting to the latency, you're noticing the offset with the rest of the music. And that adds significant context to perception. This is also ignores the point that musicians have to train themselves to hear this offset. It's like any advanced skill from a golf swing to writing code: it takes practice to get good at it. So it's not the same. I can understand why people think it might be. But when you actually investigate this properly, you can see why DJs and musicians appear to have supernatural senses vs regular reaction times. It's because they're not actually all that equivalent.
  - robinsonb5 9mo ago
    I'm not sure why human reaction time is relevant here, since what I'm talking about isn't the time it takes me to respond to a stimulus but the time it takes the computer to respond to a stimulus. I do do still have both computers set up side-by-side (legacy data from an old business), and the keyboard in question was a Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 (the calculator button wasn't a proper key, it was one of those squidgy extra keys so beloved of multimedia keyboards, so not as fast to operate as a proper key.) Anyhow, the point (arguably hypberbolic as it may have been) wasn't about reaction time per se, it was about the older calculator app - and by extension much of the rest of the OS - being a much simpler and less bloated piece of software, and running it on faster-than-contemporaneous hardware makes for a sense of immediacy which is sorely lacking in today's world of web apps. I'd be very interested to know to what that 300ms "threshold of perceptible delay" applies. You might not notice a window taking 300ms to open - but I'd be willing to bet that when you're highlighting text with the mouse or dragging a slider, you'd be very aware of the UI lagging by nearly 1/3 of a second.
    - refulgentis 9mo ago
      This is a lot of words that say "yeah, I was hyperbolic, but it was directionally correct." I do appreciate the candor but its a bit late, as you see by the text color of my comments. Many people do the same thing as you, no worries, I appreciate you validating my quixotic self-destructive work.
      - robinsonb5 9mo ago
        I'm sorry you're being downvoted - for the record I've upvoted since it's interesting, even if we disagree in some aspects. Since I still have the machine in question here, and I'm now interested enough to try and get some rough measurements, I've just videoed it with my phone (30fps video) and done some frame counting, both from a cold boot with nothing cached, and also a repeated launch. Firstly from a cold boot: It's hard to tell exactly when the keypress registers, but I believe what I'm seeing is the key being pressed, two frames later the hourglass appears, two frames after that the calculator appears. (The TFT screen will likely be adding at least one frame lag, but let's ignore that for now.) So that's somewhere between 166 and 200ms for a cold launch. If I close the app and repeat, there's now just one frame between keypress and hourglass, and just one more frame between hourglass and the app appearing, so now nearer 100ms. Looking at the videos my finger is off the key the first time the app appears, but not the second time - though if I made a special effort to release the key as quickly as possible I now think I could probably just about beat it.
  - xerox13ster 9mo ago
    The Doherty threshold is 400 ms. That’s the threshold which you start impacting users focus, and flow. Back in the day, we actually used to aim for that as a user experience metric.
mikkupikku 9mo ago
Your comment reminds me of that rule from baseball that says something about batters and hats, or maybe it was about helmets or something, it doesn't really matter though because the only point of this sports ball rambling is to distract you from noticing that my "nuh uh" has no substance. Did it work?
- refulgentis 9mo ago
  This is more than a bit out of place on HN in my experience, please, try to engage politely. I’m not sure what I can say that will qualify as more than “nuh uh” to you, shy of getting a Core 2 Duo running with XP and the same keyboard as OP. That isn’t possible at the moment, is there anything else I could do?
  - actionfromafar 9mo ago
    300ms is a lot of time, especially if the calculator.exe was in disk cache already.
    - refulgentis 9mo ago
      300 ms is a long time on a computer, definitely. Just, the autistic side of me has to speak up when it’s wildly unrealistic glorification of the past. Keypress duration is likely much less than 300 ms, top Google result claims 77 ms on average. And that’s down and up. I see it being in cache already as sort of game playing, i.e. we can say anything is instant if we throw a cache in front of it. Am I missing something about caching that makes it reasonable? (I’m 37, so only 18 around that time and wouldn’t have had the technical chops to understand it was normal for things to be in disk cache after a cold boot)
      - do_not_redeem 9mo ago
        Okay, let's say the cache is cold and you're on an old clunky spinning rust 5400 RPM hard drive. Do the math. How long will it take, worst case, for the platter to spin to where calc.exe is stored?

Borg3 9mo ago

Win2003 Enterprise does NOT need activation either. It runs smooth offline.

piperswe 9mo ago
There are tools out there (like UMSKT) that can activate MS software from that era fully offline too. They cracked the cryptography used by the activation system and reimplemented the tool used for phone activation, so you can “activate by phone” using UMSKT instead of calling MS.
- Borg3 9mo ago
  But you do NOT need to.. Read about Volume Licencing. You just enter the KEY and vioala....