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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?

#91

Post by userbinator »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #83
userbinator wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. That is a hardware issue. XP can use far more cores, and I bet if you had the drivers, it would run much better than 10 or 11 on a recent laptop and give even better battery life.

>XP can use far more cores Only for the 64-bit version, which was very uncommon for most of the XP lifetime. Almost everybody on XP was using a 32-bit version, which only uses two cores at the most. Using select 2014 PC's which are about the newest you could get that still supported XP and where proper XP drivers were easily available, a lot can still be done to make direct performance comparisons. These would be the…

Almost everybody on XP was using a 32-bit version, which only uses two cores at the most.

Where did that misinformation come from? In the late 2000s, quad-core Q6600s were very common at the time and they certainly had all 4 cores active under 32-bit XP.

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

#92

Post by icedchai »

M95D wrote: post #86
jeffbee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

16MB for a WfW 3.11 machine was a hell of a lot at the time 3.11 was launched. Most PCs in the installed base would have had 3-4MB. New systems in 1993 were coming with 4-8MB.

I ran Win310 on a Am496DX4 (100MHz) with 4MB FPM memory. I don't remember ever complaining it was slow. The first time I remember complaining something was slow was Win98 start menu. Win95 kept it all in memory. Win98 read all the .lnk files every time the user clicked Start. First opening was atrociously slow because the files were not in cache. It was something like 2-3 seconds delay, while Win95 was instantaneous.

Yep, Win98 definitely seemed sluggish... Win95, on the other hand, was basically targeting the same hardware requirements as Win 3.x. By the time Win 98 came out, we were well into the Pentium II era. Systems with 64 - 128 megs of RAM were becoming common.

I worked at a "startup" in the 98 to 99 (I put that in quotes since it was actually a subsidiary of a mid-sized corp pretending to be a startup.) The requirements for our app was Windows 98 with 64 megs of RAM minimum. We had a bunch of systems like that in our test lab and they basically were barely adequate. As developers, we were running NT 4 with 128 megs RAM on Xeon desktops. Those were pretty snappy boxes.

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

#93

Post by toast0 »

userbinator wrote: post #91
fuzzfactor wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>XP can use far more cores Only for the 64-bit version, which was very uncommon for most of the XP lifetime. Almost everybody on XP was using a 32-bit version, which only uses two cores at the most. Using select 2014 PC's which are about the newest you could get that still supported XP and where proper XP drivers were easily available, a lot can still be done to make direct performance comparisons. These would be the…

Almost everybody on XP was using a 32-bit version, which only uses two cores at the most. Where did that misinformation come from? In the late 2000s, quad-core Q6600s were very common at the time and they certainly had all 4 cores active under 32-bit XP.

I think there's a misunderstanding about the processor limits. I can't find an official doc because everyone links to a KB article that must have showed them in the past, but now talks about virtual memory...

But XP docs talk about a limit on the number of processors that is a limit on the number of sockets. If you've got an old quad pentium 2 system, with four slotted processors, XP Pro is only going to run on two of them, because it has a 2 processor limit. But multiple cores/threads are subject to a different limit that I can't find. Home may have been single socket?

Some people might have tried to run it in virtualization, and not been careful to setup virtualized cpus as cores in a single socket rather than multiple sockets.

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

#94

Post by toast0 »

pants2 wrote: post #64
fbdab103 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was around the third time that my laptop overheated itself while "asleep" in my backpack that I decided to return it and get a MacBook.

My work mac never seemed to overheat itself, but it would routinely be warm and out of battery when I took it out of my bag if I wasn't very careful about what was running when it went to sleep. If Outlook was left running, look out.

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

#95

Post by StuffMaster »

cookiengineer wrote: post #77

I wanted to add to this discussion that there's a whole Windows 7 scene that's live and kicking. They focus on a lot of extra set of tools like the former classic shell that has been forked to make it more maintainable, or the former windows internals tools and their integrations. They also backport a lot of drivers (and there's HUGE bundles of drivers available) to make it run on modern Ryzen hardware. Ironically, a…

I'd like to hear more...

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

#96

Post by NoGravitas »

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.

"Modern sleep" is such a scam. The only way to safely suspend a Windows machine now is to go into the registry and re-enable hibernation.

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

#97

Post by philomath_mn »

pants2 wrote: post #64
fbdab103 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was around the third time that my laptop overheated itself while "asleep" in my backpack that I decided to return it and get a MacBook.

It is amazing that "goes to sleep properly when I close the lid" is a competitive advantage for a laptop in 2024. My X1 Carbon would bake itself in my backpack all the time but my new work mac has been perfect so far.

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

#98

Post by freedomben »

LeFantome wrote: post #72
lolinder wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are technically correct, that turns it into a bit of an apples to oranges comparison with Windows because most of what we consider to be the Windows operating system would in the Linux world live in userspace. Which means that when we're comparing the user's experience of an average Linux distribution with Windows it's definitely fair to say that Linux doesn't prioritize backwards compatibility.

It depends. First, I think the kernel point is a powerful one. Second, until Wayland, X11 also created crazy backwards compatibility. You can take run X apps that are decades old. Where backwards compatibility is poor is in the desktop libraries like those in the GNOME and KDE ecosystems. Even there though, the old libraries still work. You can keep them around if you want.

Indeed, and with tools like Distrobox nowadays, it really is realistic to have a Fedora 40 host system running apps compiled for Fedora 17. In related news, being stuck with RHEL on the host has gotten a lot less painful. Desktops are finally really benefitting from containers (including flatpak)!

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

#99

Post by freedomben »

jasomill wrote: post #78
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be a nonissue if you use chroot.

Better yet, use a container. Distrobox[1] automates the process of installing popular distros released in the past decade or so in containers. For games in particular, Proton[2] (a game-specific Wine fork) or one of the Steam container runtimes[3] (for native Linux games) might also be worth a try. For a non-Steam game: 1. Install and run the Linux Steam client (Steam account required). 2. Add the game to the Steam l…

Why was this downvoted? IMHO containers, especially now that distrobox is here, are a great way to solve this problem. I use it all the time and it's wonderful!

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

#100

Post by johnea »

"Perform", for whom?

I'm sure it's performing much better than XP as far as M$ is concerned...

One shouldn't look to M$ for a performant computer in general. The black box nature makes it largely untunable, and it's top priority will always be to provide maximum benefit to M$, not to the user...

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