An operating system is a layer between the hardware and the user of the PC, what exactly makes such layer perform worse every generation and why it requires more and more power?
Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?
1–10 of 109 posts
Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?
#2There are a few reasons:
1. People expect more functionality, and that requires more processing power
2. Fancier eye candy
3. Spyware, or telemetry, or whatever else you want to call it
4. More background services are running by default
Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?
#3It's cheaper to make unoptimized software. Business is not interested in making it fast, as long as users don't complain.
And that's how we end up with software that's just fast enough to keep users from seeking alternatives.
Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?
#4There are a few reasons: 1. People expect more functionality, and that requires more processing power 2. Fancier eye candy 3. Spyware, or telemetry, or whatever else you want to call it 4. More background services are running by default
Added security layers as well.
Source: Worked on developer APIs for Windows Universal Apps. Those sandboxes don't come for free.
Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?
#5Do have any specific benchmark that shows declining performance?
One thing that comes to mind Windows XP was the last version without desktop composition. I don’t have hard numbers, but I would guess it adds more latency and requires more GPU memory than the Windows XP rendering system.
Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?
#6Reminds me of this blog post comparing modern Windows on a modern system to Windows NT 3.51: https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html
And the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983
Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?
#7There are actually a lot of factors here, although if I had to sum it up in one, it would be "the hardware can support it." But more seriously:
1. There are a lot of security mitigations in modern Windows that add sometimes substantial runtime overhead, but offer significant protection. Writing an exploit for modern Windows is hard compared to XP SP1 and below.
2. The graphics are a lot more sophisticated. Animation and transparency and lots of good stuff.
3. There are a ton more "features" in the OS. Modern Windows is continually running a bunch of things that XP didn't.
4. All software tends to bloat over time. It's really hard and expensive to optimize things, especially in a huge and long-lived OS where the scope is enormous and PMs are constantly wanting things added. When it runs sufficiently on modern hardware, there's also very little incentive to do so. (As an aside, this is one of the reasons I love Linux. There's lots of incentive to optimize there and thus it does happen).
Overall I really miss XP. Surely nostalgia is a powerful drug, but damn that was a great OS.
Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?
#8There are a few reasons: 1. People expect more functionality, and that requires more processing power 2. Fancier eye candy 3. Spyware, or telemetry, or whatever else you want to call it 4. More background services are running by default
Added security layers as well. Source: Worked on developer APIs for Windows Universal Apps. Those sandboxes don't come for free.
+1, sandboxes are really heavy performance-wise.
The telemetry gets bad rep, but its impact is almost non-existent. At least for the actual telemetry. There's some functionality crap, like Bing-search in Start menu, which slows user down, because it makes a web request. But that's an actual feature. Telemetry is just sent in the background, whenever CPU is not busy.
Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?
#9Answers will be about the same as if you had asked "What makes Windows XP perform so much worse than Windows 3.11?"
Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?
#10Answers will be about the same as if you had asked "What makes Windows XP perform so much worse than Windows 3.11?"
I don’t remember Windows 3.11 being that performant… do you?