[zlynx]

LOL! No, the HDD never was reasonably fast. Our expectations changed.

I booted up an old Windows XP box about two years ago before recycling it. It took almost TWO MINUTES to finish booting to the desktop. Some kind of fairly standard 500 GB Western Digital Blue drive. No, I don't know if it had ever been defragmented or had its TEMP files cleared or had old driver modules removed... It was just slow.

[Wowfunhappy]

I just don't buy it. Sure, SSDs have always been faster—I remember how exciting they were when they were new—but HDDs were always "fine". Not fast, maybe, but nothing ever felt broken. I never waited multiple seconds to open a search box, for example.

And more broadly... have you ever tried running Windows XP in a VM, on modern hardware? Even virtualized, if you feed it anything approaching the resources of a typical 2021 machine, it absolutely flies compared to Windows 10.

[CogitoCogito]

> LOL! No, the HDD never was reasonably fast. Our expectations changed.

If the anecdotes of this thread are to be believed, it's not that our expectations changed but that the software has changed.