Comment by fuzzfactor

I had a comment a few days ago about my freshly installing, configuring, and A/B testing W10 and W11 on a not-too-old HP laptop, using both HDD and NVMe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358

That was then.

Now last night my partner comes back from the dumpster with a Toshiba laptop that's in great shape, its 20 full years old, came with Windows Vista, had been upgraded to Windows 7, has 1GB of memory, 120GB SATA2 HDD (slower than modern SATA), dual-core 1.73GHz CPU.

Seems to work perfectly and With W7 it's snappier than the 2019 HP booted to old or new Windows 10 or Windows 11 even more. All comparisons at baseline without the internet.

When you try W11 on a HDD it really emphasizes the difference from W10 on the same hardware.

But when this kind of W7 thing just falls in your lap, it really hits you how much better performance could have been available by now from Windows if they really tried.

Or didn't drop the ball every time they were at bat, depending on the general manager ;)