I still had spinning rust when I upgraded. Win7 was fine. UI wasn't quite as snappy as XP, but it still felt pretty responsive.
After upgrading? EVERYTHING took forever. The friggin' start menu lagged noticeably on almost every interaction.
Upgrading to a solid state disk mostly fixed it, so they had clearly done something foundational that'd radically increased disk IO system wide. Solid state's fast, but it's not fast enough, if they'd kept going down that road. Eventually it'd start to show up there, too.
Windows 7 with spinning rust microsoft did ReadyBoost, where something could have incredibly fast seek times but mediocre throughput.
Vista was the worst windows, other than 8 and ME.
Suffice to say if windows was actually slow when i used it, i would not use it. I didn't use ME, XP, Vista, or 8. There's a pattern here. I did use Xp x64 edition, but that came out ~2 years after XP, and did not have the pre-service-pack issues XP did.
I still had spinning rust when I upgraded. Win7 was fine. UI wasn't quite as snappy as XP, but it still felt pretty responsive.
After upgrading? EVERYTHING took forever. The friggin' start menu lagged noticeably on almost every interaction.
Upgrading to a solid state disk mostly fixed it, so they had clearly done something foundational that'd radically increased disk IO system wide. Solid state's fast, but it's not fast enough, if they'd kept going down that road. Eventually it'd start to show up there, too.