For many people, Win 95 was paired with 486s with 8 MB RAM or early underpowered Pentiums with hardly any more. Opening the start menu would sometimes take seconds, like the computer had to ponder for a while. Applications frequently had to sit in waiting as the spinning rust slowly volunteered some data.
I use an overpowered (for my type of job) modern i7 computer with 32G of ram and modern 1TB ssd.
It still does take several seconds to open start menu, same for calculator. Explorer takes sometimes a minute so I have a different file manager open constantly.
The trick is to combine windows with any type of DLP enterprise software. It consistently delivers this horrible experience.
But aside from poor enterprise setups, try opening win11 start menu on a computer that has internet, just veeery slow. Suddenly you will miss those times of win95 loading start menu icons one by one, with a soundtrack of scrubbing HDD.
I don't miss those times purely because of huge stability differences. 20 years ago or so, systems crashed all the time and filesystems had to be repaired constantly. I even clearly recall how often was a kernel panic on random Linux distro, when you tried early docker.
it depends on the computer rather. The slowest I've experienced was a cheap laptop with Windows Vista where just right clicking on an icon to see the menu could take like 30 seconds. I'm now on an M1 macbook air where everything is pretty much instant. That said the other instant computer I had was a Psion 3 which came out 33 years ago so it's down to the individual design I guess. Windows has always been kind of bad to varying degrees.
I think something is very wrong when a Linux installation gets more responsive and Windows installation gets slower as time passes and software gets updated.
I can still run a Debian 12 with KDE on a standard SSD way faster than a Win 11 installation on a NVMe, and that installation is 8 years old, and runs tons of applications at any given time.
On Linux, the difference between a good SSD and an NVMe drive is noticeable if you pay attention, but not really important. I say that as someone who cares about performance and does pay attention.
I had a friend who supported a Windows desktop environment in the 90's. He would constantly complain about how rebooting a workstation would take over 20 minutes. The amount of scripts and other tooling was nutz.
My Macbook goes off when I shut the lid and right back on when I open it up. Try doing that on my early 90's Toshiba Satellite.
We live in a magical world now of high speed, multi-core and NVMe hardware. I have no desire to ever go back.
> My Macbook goes off when I shut the lid and right back on when I open it up. Try doing that on my early 90's Toshiba Satellite.
Even the first Mac Portable[1] had fast sleep/wake. As did the Radio Shack Model 100[2] from the early 1980s. Early Apple laptops could spin down the hard drive (vs. modern Macs where you can't easily shut off I/O-intensive background daemons like mdworker, syspolicyd, photoanalysisd, etc.; fortunately SSDs mitigate the issue somewhat.)
That reminds me that 10 years ago, I could close a (Windows, Linux) laptop and open it a couple of days later and it would instantly turn on, using the amazing S3 sleep. Doing the same these days and... the laptop doesn't turn on at all, because the battery is dead (caused by modern standby). Yay, progress!
It honestly gives me a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about how blazing fast personal computers are these days.
It's instantaneous compared to the 90s and even the 2000s. It wasn't until 2010-2012 that I remember switching to SSD, which is when I feel the turning point was.
When I upgraded my Windows laptop (running Windows NT) from something like 64 MB to 128 MB, it made a huge difference. Most of the benefit was that it stopped using swap. Sadly, I was borrowing the the DIMM from my boss and I had to give it back. It was like flying back on coach after getting there in first class.
Like literally, I have a Pentium MMX 200 Mhz (64 MB RAM, 8 GB CF Card) machine right next to my Surface Pro 9 (i5 1235U, 16GB RAM, 2 TB SSD). The Pentium (running Windows 98 SE) demolishes my Surface Pro 9 (running Windows 11) in opening applications, and UI latency. I can literally open about 30 copies of Windows Explorer before Windows 11 opens a single one. Honestly the only thing that's really slower is booting since it takes forever in the BIOS stage.
Modern software is just slow. We've given up all of the advantages of our orders of magnitude faster I/O.
Booting itself was several minutes. And I had one machine where Word took multiple minutes to start, never knew why. Maybe if I defrag for the umpteenth time.
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And significantly less reliable.
Remember how common crashes were? (Including BSoD!)
Like, you can solve 90% of memory crashes by using a memory managed language but that is course has costs.
The 386SX ran at 16 MHz, was seven years old at the release of Windows 95 and was slightly below the stated minimum system requirements. By contrast, I had a 166 MHz Pentium (released four months after Windows 95) and I remember it being slow enough that I would go do something else while it booted.
I see references that mention that installing fonts can significantly impact boot time. Maybe the installed software and devices had a significant impact.
There was a side by side comparision video (on twitter, cannot find) with Win11 with modern HW and Win98 with then-modern HW, cmd, explorer, notepad, paints, calculator all started instantly on older Windows, while on 11 every app has startup delay, and then also "paint UI so its all shown and responsive" delay.
Windows 95 running on a modern day computer would be bloody fast.
The fact of the matter is the hardware has gotten faster and the software has gotten slower, cancelling each other out at best and slowing down at worst.
For many people, Win 95 was paired with 486s with 8 MB RAM or early underpowered Pentiums with hardly any more. Opening the start menu would sometimes take seconds, like the computer had to ponder for a while. Applications frequently had to sit in waiting as the spinning rust slowly volunteered some data.
Things are much better now.