Right? I opened a Windows XP VM inside my 10 box a bit ago to play an old game, and oh boy was that incredibly snappy compared to what we have now. Sure, it's running in anachronistic hardware, but where did we go wrong?
The thing is... I don't care, and I'm sure the original Win 3.1 commenter doesn't care either. I am old enough to have experienced Win 3.1 (and making it slower with the "magic-whatever" software that made animated icons, anyone remember their rabbit/hat logo?).
Aaaanyway: Give me a "chrooted/jailed" environment where I have all my "dumb", "no internet" connection apps (Jails are 2000 technology, chroot is older), and be done with it, so that if anyone hacks my machine or if I quadruple-click on that virus it is only going to affect the chroot environment and doesn't see anything else.
Truth is, a lot of contemporary commercial OS sluggishness comes from ""features"" that are either some kind of telemetry, or just "security" preventing me (the user) from doing things the the company does not want me to do (like the asinine OSX "feature" of disabling write access to certain parts of MY hard disk by default)
I remember XP not being able to paint windows or move the mouse cursor at descent frame-rate under load. It was so bad compared to Mac OS X from the same time.
Neither does Windows 10, my mouse frequently stutters on the first few minutes after booting, and I don't use any particularly invasive customizations.
That’s wild. I remember when windows XP came out I was amazed it was so large. The OS was 300 megabytes or something - and it took up a significant portion of my computer’s hard drive. Despite all of Microsoft’s claims about “media enhancements” it seemed horribly bloated and ugly. It was the embarrassing stepchild of windows 2000 - which I still adore. How times have changed!
3.1 was before my time, but I can imagine.