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Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?

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Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?

#51

Post by userbinator »

RachelF wrote: post #47
ivanjermakov wrote: post #3

It'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.

Yes, take MS Teams for example. Takes around 1000MB or RAM. Older chat apps used way less. IRC used less than 1MB, sure it didn't do voice or video, but it could do things Teams still cannot do.

MSN Messenger could do voice and video, in a few tens of MB of RAM, on a single core CPU.

Here's some amusing threads 18-19 years ago when people were complaining that it was using over 20MB:

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/273565-msn-messenger-7-at...

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/442458-msn-messenger-75-e...

Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?

#52

Post by Wowfunhappy »

worewood wrote: post #45
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, because the kernel doesn't break userspace, you can use stuff like chroot to run old apps without a performance loss. I do wish the tooling to make this seamless was better.

Assuming you can go through the dependency hell, because you can't use old packages on a new distro - so in most cases you have to compile by source... I've tried to run XMMS and suffered a lot.

This should be a nonissue if you use chroot.

Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?

#53

Post by recursive »

actionfromafar wrote: post #13
recursive wrote: post #9

Answers 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 the difference being that large between them.

I haven't found the performance to be different between XP and 11, for what it's worth.

Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?

#54

Post by pcdoodle »

Windows 10 LTSC is about the same impact as Vista (2006).

XP ran pretty good on a PIII 500MHz / 512MB if you kept an eye on startup bloat via msconfig.exe / autoruns.exe

XP still had major flaws security wise until SP3 came out. The solution was to keep the flaws and try to code around it without touching the foundation.

It's gotten worse because more crap on the PC to capture you as a consumer. That's why they don't call it "My Computer" anymore.

Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?

#55

Post by freedomben »

JojoFatsani wrote: post #18
freedomben wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The system ends up booting from a cold start in a few seconds and can get to the desktop before the monitor is fully on and displaying something. Are you exaggerating or is it really that fast? If so, that is amazing. I'd love to read a blog post or something to see what your hardware is and how you got it that fast.

One word: nvme

I am fairly certain you're right about there being an nvme, but GP did also mention disabling a number of services.

Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?

#56

Post by freedomben »

fbdab103 wrote: post #48
ip26 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a ton more "features" in the OS Including things you like quite a bit, such as WiFi support, thread scheduling, and suspend modes that are worth a damn. XP could be snappy, but I haven't forgotten how poorly my old XP two-thread laptop multitasked, how the battery didn't last more than an hour, and so on. Also worth remembering everyone always has a browser open today. In the XP days, you were running Firef…

Sleep has become significantly worse in Windows. Many complaints of how a supposedly sleeping laptop cooked itself to death in a backpack overnight. I also think it would be worth considering changes in underlying hardware. A modern laptop no longer has a spinning HDD, probably a much bigger battery, and a CPU that is better at entering low power modes when possible.

Indeed. My understanding is that it's a hardware issue with (largely) Intel. Sleep is really bad on Linux too and that is the reason given.

Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?

#57

Post by snvzz »

RachelF wrote: post #42
wepple wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus backward compatibility. They add code but never take it away.

Windows 11 won't run most DOS or Windows 3.1 or Win16 Windows 95/98/ME programs. XP does.

It will, but using different methods.

Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?

#58

Post by ssl-3 »

wepple wrote: post #21
freedomben wrote: post #7

There 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…

Plus backward compatibility. They add code but never take it away.

Eh? A lot of things have been lost ("taken away") on Windows.

I can think of a few off the top of my head:

64-bit versions can't run 16-bit applications (including MS-DOS software), for instance, which broke all kinds of stuff for people who never knew that they still needed this.

Ye Olde Windows Help system disappeared starting with Vista, which broke a huge amount of the online documentation that still-functional software had been using (including, maddeningly, my own bought-and-paid-for copy of QuickBooks).

Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications is gone. It used to be a thing, and now it is not.

32-bit hardware compatibility: Gone in Windows 11 (and Windows 10 EOLs in about a year and a half).

OS/2 binary compatibility: Windows included the ability to run [some] OS/2 software in NT-based versions, up to (and including) 32-bit XP.

And that's just some stuff that me, a complete non-expert, can think of straight-away.

Maybe it was all cruft, or maybe it was useful. Maybe it's better that these things are gone, or maybe it is not.

But these are all things that used to be present, and that are now no longer present.

Re: Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?

#59

Post by freedomben »

userbinator wrote: post #41
freedomben wrote: post #7

There 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…

2. The graphics are a lot more sophisticated. Animation and transparency and lots of good stuff. Strong disagree. Borderless icons floating in a sea of flatness is not "more sophisticated" by any means than the fully-customisable UI which was common in the XP era, and the huge amount of "skinning" that was also very popular. Transparent/translucent effects became common with Vista and that was run on the GPU, which w…

Fair point, it does seem like the modern graphics are less sophisticated than the transparent/translucent of the Vista era.

And yes, I would very much agree regarding the quality of the average developer. To devs nowadays who might feel sad about that, I don't think it's most developers fault, rather they/we are the product of a system (such as a scrum) that only cares about quality and performance when it's bad enough to be noticed by many users. Beyond that, you get promoted and good annual reviews by shipping features, regardless of whether they are actually quality/performant or not.

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