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?
In: Technology
Solid State Drives can read up to 7500 MB per second, where even the best Hard Disk Drives would barely reach 45 MB per second.
Loading an operating system is not like loading just another app, so that read speed made a huge difference.
As hardware technology advances, so does the bloat of Windows. Windows 10 and 11 are vastly more complex than windows XP, so it is doing more, but doing it faster with better hardware.
To be fair. My new Win 11 install starts slower then when it was Win 10
7 through 10 were all pretty snappy.
XP did take its time.
Everything before that naturally was on much slower hardware.
Processing power wasn’t that much of a bottleneck, storage was the main culprit, spinning drives are slow, that’s why you can take pretty much any decade old system put a ssd on it and suddenly it’s way better not only at boot but in general responsiveness
Biggest thing is storage. The biggest part of booting up an OS is moving a ton of data into memory aka RAM all at once so that the OS can function properly. Phones and newer computers use flash aka solid state storage of some sort which exponentially faster than Tradition disk based storage so that massively speeds up boot times. On top of that ram is a lot faster than it used to be and so are CPUs. The amount of work that needs be done to boot an OS has not increased all that much in the grand scheme of things either so you can get much better boot times than were possible say just decade ago.
Computers had a lot less memory (like 0.1% of what is common now), so they used something called ‘swap’ which took inactive data out of RAM and wrote it to a spinning-disk hard drive. As hard drives we’re super expensive (200 bucks for 1/2 gig) this was also the same drive the software and OS was loading from….
The hard drives of the 1990s (ATA/IDE) were massively slower both in rotational speed and data transfer bandwidth than current mechanical hard drives – let alone solid state storage …
And that limited bandwidth is being used both to load software and to economize RAM.
On top of that everything else was slower and had less bandwidth……
A lighter OS only goes so far….
Have you ever used a record player? You lay the needle down at the outside, and it follows a groove that runs in a spiral toward the center. If you want to skip a song, you have to pick the needle up and move it to the location of the spot you want to listen to.
Now imagine trying to listen to 1 second of thousands of different songs on a giant record. That’s similar to what an old computer is doing.
The hard drive in an old computer used metal plates that spin around as a little arm moves across the surface reading magnetic charges stored in concentric rings on the surface of the metal.
As the computer needs to access files in various locations, the little arm as to move around to each of these locations. This made accessing lots of tiny files *very* slow. Guess what’s needed when you start a computer? Access to lots of tiny files.
Modern computers use something called solid state memory for storage. This type of drive stores data in a series of tiny little binary switches that can be read by the circuitry directly. There’s no needle required, and no moving parts at all.
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