Darren New wrote:

> I think you're misremembering. Working on Windows used to be PITA slow.

I can remember waiting literally 3 minutes for MS Access to open. And I 
remember sitting there and thinking "oh my god, what the *hell* is 
taking so long?? This thing has 8MB RAM and a 33MHz CPU. My Amiga has 
far lower specs, and just about every program I want to run takes less 
than 15 seconds to start. And that's from floppy disk!"

> What does it mean for "Windows" to be faster, anyway? Knock your 
> graphics card down to 640x480x16 and see how fast you can copy files to 
> a floppy? What part of Windows is "slow" that nevertheless was possible 
> in 1990?

The thing that always used to get me is just how long it takes to move 
windows around. In a system without virtual memory, moving a window is 
almost always instantaneous. But once you have virtual memory, it 
becomes possible for whatever's behind that window (or whatever code 
needs to redraw it) to be paged out to disk. The result is glacial GUI 
performance.

Try running Windows NT on a Pentium III system. Then try running Windows 
XP. Don't ask me why, but the difference in speed is vast. And apart 
from a different colour scheme and all the icons and commands being 
renamed so you can't find them, there's no user-visible difference 
between the two OSes. (The only really significant difference is better 
hardware support. NT unsurprisingly tends not to support hardware 
developed 10 years after it was released.)

I wouldn't mind, but it's not like Linux is any better. I can remember 
people pushing Linux because "it's more efficient". And it did seem to 
run faster. But these days, it seems to be getting just as slow as 
Windows. (Booting my Windows 7 VM takes a long time, but booting the 
OpenSUSE 11 VM takes *forever*!)

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