Why did it take such a long time for windows to boot up back in the day compared to today’s operating systems?

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I understand that processing power was lacking but surely the os of yore must have had much smaller requirements. Also let’s assume we are booting up offline and no updates are indicated. What was Windows doing for 3 – 5 minutes that my android phone manages to zip through in 15 seconds?

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17 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hard drives. Holy hell, hard drives have been one of the biggest advancements in even the last 20 years. Especially in older computers the OS was kinda bulky and took a bit to load everything up, it had to get it from a hard drive that used a physical disc and a reader arm to read the disc, along with being electronically bottlenecked

This is a really cool site that shows you the average speed of HDDs compared to the year [https://goughlui.com/the-hard-disk-corner/hard-drive-performance-over-the-years/](https://goughlui.com/the-hard-disk-corner/hard-drive-performance-over-the-years/)
Like in 2005, the average HDD in a computer would be maybe 30-60mb/s but now you have multi-TB sized HDDs and SSDs that are doing 500mb/s and even way higher

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