"DOS + Win 3.11 was very fast compared to Windows (9x, XP, 7 and 10), OSX or Linux nowadays"

You either have some seriously rose-colored glasses on, or you need to put an SSD in your current computer because a lot of the slowness of modern machines lies in the increasingly-obsolete hard drive. (Due to the increasing prevalence of cheap SMR [1] drives in consumer-grade gear, I'm not just saying "increasingly-obsolete" for rhetorical purposes; cheap hard drives are actually regressing in performance lately.) I remember multi-minute boot times and multi-minute load times for things like office suites and such, which are now entirely foreign to me.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

Jerf, I understand your point. I compare it on functionality, for example compare the load times of for example Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with Word for Windows 6.0 on an old Pentium 1 or 486 with say 8 MB of RAM with Windows10 and the earliest Word version you can get running (or use Wine on Windows). You could say, test them both on SSD drives or HDD drives and allow them 4GB. For a more fair comparison you could use Windows98SE with Office97 and Office97 on Windows10. I think the previous OS's are significantly faster. Once I triplebooted my Mac to Ubuntu, OSX 10.6 en WindowsXP on SSD. WindowsXP was a factor faster to "use", write some office documents, browse the internet etc.

But in a sense you are right, Windows 10 is running very fast on the latest intel proc and SSD here. Still once in a while I get annoying slow downs and it does seem a little bit slower then what I could remember from the speed Win 3.11 was running on HDD on the Pentium I. But the programs were less featured then as well. LibreOffice Writer 5 starts in 7s on SSD here.. I thought Office97 Word was a bit faster on 98 or XP back then... but these are memories from almost 20 years ago, maybe I do see the past as to rose-colored. To test this I have to define what I exactly was comparing to what - general speed of usability or the exact same programs under different OS's with the exact same hardware. On both accounts it might very well be much faster with previous 16/32bit and less featured software.

I recently installed office 97 on my Surface 3 (not pro, so think atom processor) on a lark. It is extremely fast (no waiting for anything at all, ever).

Now, even modern office is surprisingly fast on desktop, despite having lots more features. We can talk about performance on the desktop all day, but if you want to see the real perf regression, look at all these web apps running in the browser - they are absolute nightmares unless you happen to have a very nice machine to use them with.

I can barely scroll a few pages down on Facebook before my X201 starts getting sub-1FPS. This infinite scrolling crap is never done right.

Another fellow x201 user here. The bottleneck of our computers are definitely the CPU. After putting an SSD it felt fast for a while. But now especially whilst browsing I get irritated a lot. I can't decide whether if it's pure psychology or a need for more performance.

I am an avid Debian user for many years, lastly I used FreeBSD for a couple of months on the x201. Now, I'm using ElementaryOS.

With Debian iwlwifi was a problem, did not work reliably. FreeBSD was a lot of hassle to work with -with no network manager being present etc.-, but driver support was excellent. ElementaryOS is currently working like a charm.

Another tip besides installing an SSD is to enable multicore support in Firefox.

> enable multicore support in Firefox

Why isn't this enabled by default on detection of multiple cores?

FF has never been multicore. So many plugins are not thread safe. I think they are slowly rolling out multicore as plugins fix.

Don't worry, many CrapScript sites don't even run properly on a 4 GHz Intel machine.

The best thing i did for staying sane while browsing was to install noscript on firefox. Not sure how it will work now that Mozilla is "reworking (gutting?) Firefox extensions to make room for pr tab processes.

I installed office 2003 on my hp spectre, alongside office 365. Word 365 takes 5-7 seconds to fully load, but word 2003 just appears as soon as you click the icon. The load time is instant. And with the compatibility pack for 2007 / docx files it does everything 365 does

Win98SE took four and a half minutes to boot to usability. It crashed so often, than I timed it to see how much time I was wasting. Unfortunately I can't remember the system specs, but it was a pretty run-of-the-mill pc of the day, neither light- nor heavyweight.

Other versions of windows, I couldn't tell you. Have used everything from 3.11 to 10, skipping 8. Never felt the need to time them.

I've got a Pentium II system on my desk running off a cheap CF card that boots in a minute. What was your setup like hardware wise?

I honestly can't recall. Probably a PII. My 4.5 minutes is 'time to usable desktop', not 'time to login / visible desktop', since W98 was visible long before you could interact with it (that interaction was usually "load up that game again, dammit!"). It also used a hard drive of the day, not flash card. I don't recall having much in the way of shovelware installed that might slow it down, but maybe I did?

Sorry, as anecdatums go, I realise this one is pretty poor quality.

I think the speed of hardware has far outpaced software.

I still use a 3.1 machine for some software that got "upgraded" for more modern computers and became unuseably slow and feature-less compared to the old.

But, that machine has a lot of more modern hardware now. It's little more than a Linux kernel and DOSBox, so no true hardware access.

But it still boots, loads Windows, loads my programs to their last state, in less than 10 seconds.

By comparison, Windows 7's file manager takes longer on double the hardware.

Hi Shakna, if you'd boot FreeDOS and Windows 3.1 directly, perhaps it would even be 4 seconds as you skip Linux booting and the DosBox latency.

I've been watching FreeDOS for this for a little while.

Unfortunately getting the particular program to install requires a little fudging as it tries to detect Win, and underlying DOS, and wants particular numbers to be present in the versions.

perhaps VERSION could fix this -http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/cnfigsys/version.htm

That is very interesting, I might try it out to see if it works.

Bugger.

The program tries to verify the integrity of MSDOS.SYS and VER.EXE with some sort of weak hash, as well as get the result of VER.

FreeDOS's VERSION gets me halfway though, now just to generate some dummy files when I work out the right hashing algo to use...

Thanks for the update! What about just copying those files over from MS-DOS?

Unfortunately that's not working right now... Guessing it does something else hacky to check that it truly is running on MSDOS and Win 3.1.

But it is on my list to investigate when I'm back to work.

Windows 7 is literally the last version of Windows without the Hybrid Boot Mode, so you're kind of punching down there. Maybe compare it to 8.1 Pro instead.

File manager, not boot time.

He doesn't has his nostalgia goggles on. There is new software that can be outpaced by very similar software atop a 486 running DOS.

How about decoding a high bitrate MP3 file in realtime?

DOS programs were decoding MP3 in realtime in the mid-90's, on 90's hardware, just at lower bitrates. By 2000 it was trivially solved and filesharing over P2P was in vogue, while video still presented a major bottleneck(and it still does in many respects). The OS boot time, on the other hand, has remained more-or-less constant in all time periods, when running contemporary hardware.

All of which is to say: Windows has an "accumulated cruft" problem that exists independently of what the hardware could do. The search built into Windows 10 is abysmally slow - in fact, almost every interaction with the toolbar or Explorer tends to be slow if you've installed a lot of stuff, because you oftentimes are "paying for what you don't use" when the program adds an Explorer extension, and there's a paucity of diagnostic tools to throw that fact in your face, so it just manifests as "Windows sure is slow lately". DOS doesn't have that problem because DOS does almost nothing, and cannot be extended to do more.

(On that note, Windows 10 did make a major breakthrough in responsiveness: it compresses memory in inactive programs, so you hit disk much less when running and switching between lots of programs.)

> The search built into Windows 10 is abysmally slow - in fact, almost every interaction with the toolbar or Explorer tends to be slow if you've installed a lot of stuff

Not just in Windows 10. The start menu search in W7 was also always absymally slow, completely independent of hardware. Even on an SSD it's unusably slow.

Which I just don't understand. That thing isn't doing shit. I have literally no idea why it's this slow. I've written an equivalent of it for my Linux/i3 setup, which is completely stupid and naive (no caching at all, parses _all_ program definitions every time it's opened) and that is at least a hundred times faster. The latter is instantaneous (<10 ms on this computer), while the W7 start menu takes seconds to find anything -- on the same computer!

Also, the only start menu w/ search that is comparatively slow is the Unity search. Most others are practically instantaneous (eg. KDE), even on weaker hardware...

> DOS programs were decoding MP3 in realtime in the mid-90's, on 90's hardware, just at lower bitrates.

Back "in the day" I built an AMD 5x86 machine with 4mb that ran DOS and could -just barely- decode 128K MP3s using some DOS-based MP3 player I found. On top of that, I ran a custom menu system (wrote it using TurboC iirc) that drove a 16x2 LCD via the parallel port. I had this idea that I would set it up as a car pc, but never actually did.

> DOS does almost nothing, and cannot be extended to do more.

Remember TSRs eating up precious conventional memory?

A 486 would be capable of that... not sure about 386 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 http://web.archive.org/web/20080619002511/www.sonicspot.com/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3

Appearently there is also an mplayer version for dos.. http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2009-March/07632... and a mpg123 port http://www.fareham.org.uk/music/mpg123/index.shtml

So in theory you could even play small mp4 video's.

Don't forget RealPlayer, it had a very efficient audio encoding for low bitrates http://www.win31.de/esoft.htm - it was later open sourced and called Helix DNA producer.

I think the last version supported for Windows 3.1 was RealAudio 4, even though you might get further along with the win32s setup for 3.11. There is no need though as the low bandwith encoding was the most interesting feature, with Sipro's ACELP perhaps beating even Opus (LPC based SILK or CELT) for very low bitrates < 12 Kbps and for sure beating Speex.

lpcJ, 14_4: IS-54 VSELP (RealAudio 1) 28_8: G.728 LD-CELP (RealAudio 2) dnet: Dolby AC3 (RealAudio 3) sipr: Sipro Lab Telecom ACELP-NET (RealAudio 4/5)

Nope. A 486 simply can not do that. Low bit rate, 22kHz mono is possible however.

> You either have some seriously rose-colored glasses on, or you need to put an SSD in your current computer because a lot of the slowness of modern machines lies in the increasingly-obsolete hard drive.

I have Windows installed on an SSD. I have 16 GB of RAM.

Yet Windows still wants to use a page file, or programs run out of RAM. It's crazy. Programs don't actually USE this much, they just request more than they use.

A page file slows things down compared to doing everything in RAM. Even on an SSD, it's way slower.

While a page file is definitively slower than RAM, it's not a given that simply using one will make the whole system slower. As long as the kernel only sends rarely used pages to the file, the slowdown in writing/reading them can be made up by having more RAM available for the filesystem cache.

I don't know if this was improved in W8 or W10, but in W7 and before the paging algorithm in the NT kernel was definitely subpar, having a pagefile always reduced performance, because applications in the background would be swapped out even if plenty of RAM was available, so going back to an application meant that it was unresponsive until the kernel swapped it back in.

Windows 7 actually pages once you use HALF of your RAM. That's crazy. It's starting to page after I use only 8 GB! 8 GB is free and it's paging!

I ran windows xp without a pagefile for a while, no major issues, programs crashed if they ran out of ram.

Windows 10 has ram compression, but as I have an ssd now, I turned my pagefile back on

When I used windows, I would have a partition just for the page file, at a fixed size to avoid fragmentation.

No idea if this helped.

Try comparing framerates for Doom and Doom95, on then-current mid-spec machines. Installing 9x on a DOS machine made everything so much slower.

> R_Init: Init DOOM refresh daemon - ...

/me goes to make a coffee

I don't recall DOS + Win 3.11 being anywhere near as fast as the setup I use today, which is basically just Ubuntu and xmonad under a Gnome fallback session.

Plus I would say the productivity gains of being fluent with GNU tools, RESTful APIs and any scripting language save more time in the long run than whatever milliseconds get shaved off of a UI response.

I wonder if anyone still have a copy of the Global EMM Import specification.

Took the words right out of my mouth, we just became best friends.