(Also there was a period when a lot of laptops used non-Intel x86 implementations, which typically weren't very good. Cyrix, Via et al.)
So no, it's not really fair to compare a 'simple' text editor.
If you edit the same 1KB file on each computer side by side the 30 year old computer will be more responsive than the modern one.
That's what people are taking issue with.
A huge number of security related things are going on.
Also windows logs a ton of telemetry these days.
Notepad2 is my all-time favorite though. It supports key features like line numbers and directionless search, but is much closer to stock than Notepad++. [0]
I see similar sluggishness opening command prompt on my Ryzen 3700X with 64GB RAM on Windows 11 22H2 with an NVME SSD. First it draws the outline of the window then fills it in with content. And that's repeatable!
I'm not sure why Msft put that CPU and RAM combo in their own device when it's just barely past the minimum specs for Windows 10 let alone 11.
Bloat is intentional and fills Microsoft’s wallet.
Optimization drains Microsoft’s wallet.
But I think the reason that most modern software performs badly is because of optimization: we're optimizing to reduce production costs over increasing performance.
It's economic in nature. We minimize production costs by using frameworks and other labor-saving tools. The code produced using these tools tends to be poor, but hardware is cheap enough to make up for poorly performing software.
It's an intentional decision.
Well, all of that type of bloat is presumably useful to someone or it wouldn't have been written. That doesn't change the fact that there's a cost for including it.
> Windows indexes files in the background
But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.
Everything's a tradeoff.
Turn it off then?
I have a Windows 10 VM I use for some testing and such, and all these background things keep using up huge mount of resources, no matter what knobs I turn and regedit levers I pull I just can't get it to stop.
For comparison, I also have a macOS VM which certainly isn't fast, but nothing like the Windows one. And the BSD and illumos VMs work basically fine (although in fairness they also don't start X11; but I do just ssh in to all of these machines and never use the GUI for anything).
If bloat is useful, notepad in any form on any version of Windows is bloat by definition.
You've got CLI editors that are smaller.
Ships with a TCP/IP stack by default? Just bloat.
Mouse support out of the box? Who would want that?
For some reason even in fairly constrained subtrees it takes forever to find file names.
This was done also in Win 7. It didn't have such a performance hit, but it was the first thing to be disabled after installing windows.
Back then I would turn it off as I didn't find the search function that usable, and more than once I've had a "clean and build" process fail because some file was open and being indexed, and since Windows locks files on read, the build could not delete the file and just aborted. So, I turned it off.
I notice that I get completely different results on my home and work machines doing the "start button, type" search. for "Downloads", expecting C:\Users\Username\Downloads, the home machine figures it out after three characters. The work machine seems to have decided that I clearly want "File Explorer, not any particular directory" and "Change how I download updates in spite of it being a corporate-managed box where I probably can't push that button without asking IT to remote in and do so" are what I want, even when I spot it the whole directory name.
Two threads in !OpenAdatper12 spending ~1.5M cycles per second. Two threads in !recalloc spending ~256K cycles per second.
As shipped, this is no longer a single executable, it is a collection of 230 files, totaling 10.5MB, about half of which are bytewise duplicates, and another significant chunk have overlapping responsibilities, between the icon fonts and png icons.
"Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version, while making only dubious user-perceptible improvements or suffering from feature creep." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat
I'm not aware of any substantial new features. It uses a new renderer, but this does not produce a significant observable difference from the previous one beyond using more memory. It supports dark mode.
Don't forget what Notepad.exe truly is -- a testbed for new technologies. It's not "just a text editor" to Microsoft.
It also describes a very real thing.
While there are a lot of things that everyone would agree counts as "bloat", there are also areas of disagreement in the form of "one person's bloat is another's essential feature".
Maybe it is a spinning rust disk. Even then there's a world of difference between a period accurate drive and a late model IDE drive. The last IDE drives had more drive cache than most desktops had RAM when NT was new.
Microsoft has essentially turned the OS into one of those websites which show ads, news letter dialogs, cookie notices, location permission requests, notification requests and so on constantly.
Who knows what the Tweeter was talking about.
My memory is that my $5,500 Micron still took forever to do random stuff in Windows 98 SE.
Everything opens instantly on my Windows 2022 machines - desktop, background applications, whatever, on Zen3 and Zen4. Would it perform similarly well on older stuff? Probably.
Is the complaint about Windows 11? People have pointed to the bloat, which is certainly the biggest part of the story. Why does Windows 11 have so much bloat? There isn't one straight answer. It's bad for everyone, because the slow OS makes it harder to write software people will Just Pay For.
I'm not sure why Windows minimum hardware requirements are relevant at all. If they were, they could get massive performance improvements by raising the hardware requirements. "Sure it's slow, but it's running on literally 1% of minimum recommended RAM!"
I now use a Surface Go3 i3 with 8GB. It's enough for just about everything I need. Web browser, running script language web apps, Java IDE, StarCraft 2. Disabling a bunch of stuff on Win11 makes a big difference. Whenever it felt slow I looked at Task Manager CPU and googled the process name, tried disabling it and only re-enable if necessary. Oh I also have a Peltier cooler+fan that cools the back of the unit when gaming to prevent throttling.
The PS/2 NT machine was top spec at the time. The Go3 is utilitarian now though should be like a supercomputer.
Since the aggregate GHz and RAM on offer is more than 25x the minimum spec for windows 10.
Win10 min spec is 1GHz w/ 2GB of RAM - my machine is more than one hundred times faster, yet, everything TFA says is true.
Windows NT 3.51 minimum hardware requirements were a i386 or i486 processor at 25MHz or better and 12MB of RAM for the workstation version. So the 600MHz machine with 128MB RAM is exceeding the minimum requirement by (conservatively) 24x in CPU speed and 10x in RAM, along with all the architectural improvements from going from the i386 to what's presumably a Pentium III-class machine.
If that's actually a Surface Go 2 running Windows 11 - well, it doesn't have a quad-core i5 as the tweet claims - the Surface Go 2 came with a Pentium Gold or a Core m3; both with only two cores and of those is an ultra-low power variant.
As such, that exactly meets the minimum CPU specification for Windows 11 and only doubles the minimum 4GB RAM requirement.
I'm not trying to apologize for the difference here, but it's not an entirely like-for-like comparison.