Because you're even more impatient now, you brusque fool!

Buy an SSD drive, huge improvement, traditional drives are a huge bottleneck.

Subby should try running SimCopter side by side on a Windows 2000 machine versus a Windows 95 machine.

/I literally lol'd the first time I did it

LineNoise: because it isn't just running one tiny application anymore.

Likewise because of the advances in memory\cpu\storage, people don't need to code as tight as they used to.

This

"Obvious" tag still loading?

bigpete53: Hyperbolic Hyperbole: umm.. were you even AROUND back in the days of dialup BBSes? seven minutes to download a single sexy jpg? squee'd your pants creamy when mom bought you a 28.8 modem? i mean that shiat was awesome but DON'T pretend it isn't any better than it was in '95.

Pfft. I squeed when we got a 4800. Finally, the lines of text didn't scroll across on the BBS, but popped up line by line.

I'm not sure there was a 4800 baud modem. It went from 2400 baud to 9600 baud when you could spend $1000 on a US Robotics or a Hayes, and they weren't compatible with each other because they had competing specs. USR sold them really cheaply to BBSs to encourage their spec to spread, and then eventually a spec for formed and they both would talk to each other.

I started out on a 300 baud Zoom modem for the Apple 2e. It was $99 on sale (from $129) and it was a manual dial (you would have to dial it with a phone, and then flip a switch to send it to 'send' or 'receive' mode.

Because programmers are sloppy and because your computer is doing 50 things at once. Run 10-year-old software and you'll see the difference.

Also, your internet connection is not significantly faster than it was 10 years ago.

Hey submitter,

Stop using your slow spinning hard drive as your operating system drive and get a Solid State Disk (SSD).

Most operating system actions (including on startup) involve random access IO. Spinning hard drives are terrible at random access. SSD's are a huge improvement in random access time (from milliseconds in HDD to single digit microsecond).

Getting an SSD will be the biggest improvement in your computer's responsiveness. The improvement is so big it's not funny.

Here's a good SSD disk:

Crucial M4 256GB SATA3 6Gbps (newegg)

Fractool used to take days to process a screen on a 386.
Hours to process on a 486.
Minutes to process on a first generation Pentium.
Nowadays you can pretty much process them on the fly.

Open up your task manager and look at how many process and services are running.
The open up your system tray and uninstall all that BS.
Use the windows drivers for your HP Printer (if you can) instead of the bloated crap HP gives you.
Quit downloading every freebie toolbar on the internet.
And turn off all the goddamn Adobe and Apple services they installed behind your back.

ozone: because you used to touch yourself at night. now you can't keep your hands off your junk.



Have you checked your vagina for centipedes?

It's fairly likely.

Most programmers are incompetent and downright dangerous.

Almost all software is very poorly written these days.

In the 'old days' poorly written code would cause almost an immediate crash. Now, poorly written code is considered the standard. The most popular operating system is riddled with memory leaks.

/ And, yes, I do have a doctorate in computer science.

Because you weren't using a web browser on that machine?

labman: discgolfguru: This was my first system. You Commodore folks were barbarians.

You got the disc drive? I was stuck with the tape drive.

A commodore. PET. With a cassette drive. Uphill both ways. In snow. We ate dirt.

/and we were thankful!

Here's a corollary question.

Why does it take 100+Mb of memory for a program to display a 150kb file that I could have opened on my 486 with 16Mb of ram?

I'm thinking of browsers and word processors.

offmymeds: 1. Wipe drive

2. Reload OS

3. Install decent anti-virus/spyware (e.g. AVG)

4. Get Adblock Plus

AVG is soooo 2010. Microsoft Security Essentials is where it's at now.

paygun: Every year hardware gets faster and software gets slower.

I've been writing a system to create videos from still photos at work. I bought a 6 core server and my vendor laughed when I called it high performance. It is high performance when you put Slackware on it.

A slideshow?

LineNoise: because it isn't just running one tiny application anymore.

Likewise because of the advances in memory\cpu\storage, people don't need to code as tight as they used to.

This.

In short: OS bloat.

As power and capability has increased, the OS has expanded to use up those resources.

FreeDos is very speedy.
DamnSmall Linux is very fast.

Eye candy, like arm candy, is expensive to get, keep, and maintain.

Because the scroll bars don't work until the farking double-click ads load.

/off to sort 708,000 rows of 25,000 column wide data in excel

LineNoise: I remember leaving the room to go take a dump or make a sandwich while wing commander loaded missions. Like, seriously, it would sit there and crunch stuff for 5 or 10 minutes for every farking level.

I loaded DOS and Wing Commander onto a relatively new computer about a year ago. I even bought an AWE32 so I could have some sound. Turns out Wing Commander doesn't use the real time clock to throttle itself. It's tuned for the specific CPU rate that all computers ran at when it was released (8MHz?). Natrually, it runs a tad faster than real time now. I loaded the first mission, I saw a couple of things whiz by on the screen, and then I was dead.

My first computer was a Compaq DX2 50 mhz with I believe 2 mbs of ram. The additional 2 mbs I bought to put in cost me almost 500 bucks at the time. I thought that was top of the line shiat.

THEN: It used to take 70 minutes to burn an audio CD from .wav files (any faster and you'd get buffer underruns which would corrupt the audio).
NOW: An audio CD takes 3 minutes (or less) to burn. And the buffers were huge.

THEN: a 640x480 picture took up your ENTIRE SCREEN, why the hell did you make your images that big.
NOW: 640x480 pictures (of chicks in bikinis) aren't even worth downloading (does this come in a larger size).

THEN: Holy shiat, 3D


NOW: Holy shiat, 3D


THEN: that 640x480 picture would take you a second to download (like that 640x464 image I posted above, which is 49KB)
NOW: that 640x480 picture ... will still take you a second to download (because TCP overhead that's why) but you can download about 50+ other 640x480 pictures in that same second.

THEN: No tabbed browsing, not much in the way of plugins, barely any javascript, etc.


NOW:

something something Linux something Micro$oft.

/got nothin that hasn't already been said

All you guys calling for SSDs why not more RAM? Win7 Pro 192GB

With an SSD, I haven't timed it but I would guess I can get on the internet within 10-15 seconds of powering my PC on.

this thread makes me want to go look for old copies for Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, King's Quest and Archon!
Those are pretty awesome games!

Slu: A slideshow?

That's what it amounts to. Grab a bunch of stills, narration, background music, data from mysql, and create an intro and outro. The photos do the ken burns thing in the middle with dissolves in between.

Aliens.

Lol, I remember when the og Warcraft updates cAme out. 36 hours of dial up download to finish.

Goldfish theory.

Now that everyone has high speed processors, developers no longer need to write programs or code that can run on older slower machines.
For example, a typical website in 1997 would open instantly on a modern machine because it had to be useable on a 56k line. Try opening a modern website on a machine from 1997 and you might get it to load eventually but likely all the background scripts would prevent it from ever fully loading.

However that said, my copy of SimCity 2000 still makes my laptop struggle to keep it going.

NickelP: akula: Quasar: Your computer has more to do now.

This.

The first PC I ever used was a 286 running DOS. It doesn't take too much to run a command line interface, text based everything, and 256 color graphics at 640x480 resolution.

It takes quite a bit more to push a full graphical interface with transparent elements at high resolution while running several other programs at once while also maintaining constant connectivity with various outside servers.

If you could manage to run JUST what that first computer did (assuming the OS and programs are even compatible), it would farking FLY.

Someone should do this on speed tests/reviews. It would be fun to see how many fps the new video cards can push Doom or Wolfenstein 3d to.

Some of those older games are impossible to play due to the fact they were keyed to the processor speed. So the faster the processor the faster they ran. Scale up the processor by 200-400 times and push the forward arrow one time and your guy will cross an entire map. Generally the emulators fix this behavior.

WOW! that question made every geek nergasam. None of them own an enhaler big enough to weez out a proper answer.

It doesn't.

1. Your perception has changed. Example: When I was going to film school, DVD Authoring was just becoming a 'thing', they talked about how it was determined that people didn't want to wait for a menu on their DVD any longer than they wanted to wait for a webpage. "acceptable' web page loading at the time(About 2002-2003)? 17 seconds. Now? Abut 2 seconds before we move on.

2. Everything is doing more. Webpages aren't a few lines of text, a banner, a few ads and nothing more, they contain embedded videos, popup animations, like RSS feeds, etc. Your games and apps are about a billion times more productive, multitasking, working between apps, and doing a thousand times more in the process.

3. You have too much crap like toolbars installed, or Google desktop search. Also, if you're running Norton for your A/V solution, that's an issue.

4. You're building wrong? I have Win 7 on a 7 year old computer(With 5 year old hard drives). It boots in 55 seconds to the login screen, and your desktop is up about 5 seconds after that. I have 4 GB of RAM and a dual core 3 GHz processor, nothing amazing, but I have a hard drive config that makes all of the difference. 3 drives, 1 each for scratch disk/downloads/movies/music, 1 for installed apps, and 1 for the OS. This minimizes the heads on the hard drive jumping around any more than absolutely necessary. These are also 10,000 rpm drives. As a result, my computer is markedly different from all of the previous ones I've owned, yet the only expensive part right now if the hard drives.

Adventure House is nice and fast on my new computer.

discgolfguru: labman: discgolfguru: This was my first system. You Commodore folks were barbarians.

You got the disc drive? I was stuck with the tape drive.

I had the tape drive as well, briefly. I played Zaxxon on it.

Add me to the Atari 400/800/XL club. I too had only the tape drive at first, got the Floppy Disk Drive as a HS Grad present (awesome gift!!!).

I remember I got some animation where it demoed the Atari slaughtering the Commodore with some apps, with the C64 finally exploding trying to solve a math problem the Atari instantly spit out the solution to. Good times.

/farking Tramiel ruined the company

brianbankerus: thejoyofpi: The weirdness with Windows 7 is that it takes freaking forever to shut down.

Used to be computers would take a long time to boot up, they solved that, now most computers boot up quickly. But shutting down is like a 20 minute process.

Mine doesn't do this. Normal shut off time, like under a minute. Boot is probably 2 (but it feels like 20).

And can we stop forcing reboots every time there's an update? I had stuff I was working on, man, let me reboot when I'm ready!

Read before you click. Windows Update asks if you want to reboot now or wait.

OT:

Software bloat isn't only due to lazy programmers. A theoretical 1 line program could do its task very well. But then you get people looking for exploits and exploit the hell out of your 1 line program. You need to patch that and your 1 line program turns into a 5 line program, which might need patching later on. Now apply that to your OS.

Nadie_AZ: Wish I could fire up some of the 90s Lucas Arts games ....

Ah 90s Star Wars games. You were awesome.

[www.ibiblio.org image 640x480]

I love that I can still play all the Lucasarts adventure games in ScummVM. Hell, they even ported it to PSP.

Then: 1GB was a shiatload of drive space.

NOW:


This screenshot is a year or two old, and those drives are practically filled (one or two more photoshoots and they're done).

// need drive prices to come back down because I need three and I want to avoid paying a $50x3 premium if possible.

A friend's system was slow at the weirdest things, even though she had an SSD. Turns out the SSD was almost full and was old enough the firmware was unable to maintain speed. Upgraded her SSD for size reasons and was astonished to see how much faster things were!

Moral: Don't let your SSD fill up, especially if it's from 2009 or 2010.