>> On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely
>> everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which
>> takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the
>> network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes
>> unresponsive.
>
> I don't think that it runs everything as one thread (it doesn't,
> clearly), but that I/O blocking isn't handled very effectively/gracefully
> in some cases.

I seem to recall that when I first experienced Linux, it seemed faster 
than Windows. Then again, it may have just been me *imagining* that it 
was faster, because that's what I wanted to believe.

Either way, I concur with your analysis - Windows tended to be awful at 
dealing with blocking. In particular, it was always *hopeless* at trying 
to cancel things.

AmigaOS is designed to run entirely off of slow-arse 3.25" floppy disks. 
Those guys *had* to design the OS to deal with the delays effectively. 
And the platform has special graphics blitting hardware, which the OS 
makes maximum use of for snappy visual responses. (It also has hardware 
sprite overlay, for a responsive mouse pointer.)

If you run Debian (which has no special optimisations for such 
hardware), you find that it crawls along alarmingly slowly. I mean, slow 
to the point that you can't tell if the OS is actually functioning or 
not. Twenty minutes for GNOME to start!

Today Windows seems a lot less laggy than it used to be. Whether that's 
due to code improvements or just the vast hardware performance increases 
is anybody's guess...

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