But yes, Windows 95 to Windows 2000 were a huge jump in usability. From Windows 8 on and the “Metro” interface they threw it all away.
I get the same feeling from Google's android and Pixels. Lots of neat features keep getting added, but the SW and HW issues that end up in the final product make it seem like an incredibly amateurish effort for such a wealthy company hiring top talent.
In my tests it was 6-7x slower than on Linux (in VirtualBox on Windows). I assume by better you mean more features?
On a related note I used one of those system event monitor programs (I forget the name) and ran a 1 line Hello World C program, the result was windows doing hundreds of registry reads and writes before and after running my one line of code.
Granted it doesn't take much time but there's this recurring thing of "my computer being forced to do things I do not want it to do."
I also — and this is my favorite, or perhaps least favorite one — ran Windows XP inside VirtualBox (on Windows 10). When you press Win+E in XP, an Explorer window is shown to you. It is shown instantly, fully rendered, in the next video frame. There is no delay. Meanwhile on the host OS (10), there is about half a second of delay, at which point a window is drawn, but then you can enjoy a little old school powerpoint animation as you watch each UI control being painted one by one.
(Don't get me started on the start menu!)
Twenty years of progress!
I would guess better on current Windows than on Windows 95. I don't know about faster, but NTFS is most probably more reliable than FAT32. And also more features of course, and fewer limitations. At least the file size limit (4 Gb) and ownership / rights metadata (ACL).
If you are handling a stupendous number of small files (say doing an npm build) then metadata operations are terribly expensive on Windows because it is expensive to look up security credentials.
Maven is not too different from npm in how it works except instead of installing 70,000 small files it installs 70 moderate sized JAR files that are really ZIP files that encase the little files. It works better in Windows than npm. Npm got popular and they had to face down the problem that people would try building the Linux kernel under WSL and get awful times.
Microsoft knows it has to win the hearts and minds of developers and they believe in JS, TS and Visual Studio code so they’ve tried all sorts of half-baked things to speed up file I/O for developers.
There's a reason https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html , SquashFS, etc. are a thing, or why even Europe's fastestest supercomputer's admins admonish against lots of small files. https://docs.lumi-supercomputer.eu/storage/#about-the-number...
For instance, the 70,000 files in your node_modules do not need separate owner and group fields (they all belong to the same user under normal conditions) and are all +rw for the files and +rwx for the directories. If you have access to one you have access to all and if your OS is access checking each file you are paying in terms of battery life, time, etc.
On Windows it is the same story except the access control system is much more complex and is slower. (I hope that Linux is not wasting a lot of time processing the POSIX ACLs you aren’t using!)
Which shows that even if you don't want to call any filesystem great here, they differ vastly in just how bad they handle small files. Windows' filesystems (and more importantly it's virtual filesystem layer including filters) are on the extremely slow end of this spectrum.
Well, it does have more ports normally open and starts connecting to MS as soon as possible, so yes, it is a progress. /s
You were probably using Sysinternals process monitor. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...
Windows does a tonne of things in the background, yes. If I run that and let it monitor everything, things will happen even if I do nothing. It is an OS and complex.
>It is shown instantly, fully rendered, in the next video frame. There is no delay
THIS is true and also crazy to me. I forgot how fast XP was. Especially on modern hardware. I TeamViewer into a laptop with an i5 CPU and Windows XP (medical clients...) and it felt faster than my more powerful local machine!!
I have set my sysdm.cpl performance settings to this, and it does help a bit to get rid of the animations and crap.
Yea... I like the 10 start menu but they destroyed it in 11...
I remember being pulled into user surveys and usability studies while wandering the mall back in the day and being given series of tasks to accomplish on various iterations of a windows GUI (in the Windows 9x era) while they observed, and then paid $100 for my time for each one I participated in.
The problem, in my experience, is that when some manager really wants to do something, they'll find a way to justify that with a study. Pretty much every UX decision that ended up being universally panned later had some study or another backing it as the best thing since sliced bread.