The system requirements are significantly different between 95 and 98, 98 and XP, XP and 10, and 10 and 11 (extremely speaking, between 98 and 11).
Why are the requirements so different when the functionality hasn’t changed much?
The system requirements are significantly different between 95 and 98, 98 and XP, XP and 10, and 10 and 11 (extremely speaking, between 98 and 11).
Why are the requirements so different when the functionality hasn’t changed much?
Comments
Bloat. They gave up on writing good code and just insert a browser engine into everything.
They first tried this with Active Desktop back in Win98 days and it sucked just as much.
Functionality also improved, try using Win98 and you will be missing a lot of stuff. But it has not improved by that much.
Win2k is probably the closest to modern OSes with no significant bloat.
windows does so much more now though. When is the last time you had to find drivers to connect to a peripheral? Windows defender actually works. The OS is a lot more stable, in the old days I’d get BSOD every couple of years.
Money. Microsoft wants you to buy new hardware from their partners.
The nature of computer programming has changed in the past 20 years. There’s also A LOT of functionality that’s been added to OS’s, you just aren’t aware of them because it’s all in the background to support other apps.
RAM, hard drive space, and CPU power is vastly greater than in the days of Windows XP and Windows 98 and programmers have taken advantage of this.
Modern OS’s use a lot of virtualization and abstraction. Much of the programs you use in an OS these days are similar to what you would use in a web browser and these are notorious inefficient on resources.
The System panel in Windows 11 for example is built on a WebUI concept and uses far more resources than the old Control Panel that was built in C++. The problem is that few developers at Microsoft even code in C++ anymore and barely understand that old code bank that keeps being re-imported into subsequent versions of Windows. So they have to slowly replace all of that code with something modern.
There’s also a lot of visual processing and graphics that they didn’t do back in the day.
You also have to consider that programmers aren’t nearly as efficient with code as they used to be.
RAM and hard drive is so cheap these days that they don’t slim down libraries and programs like they use to, so the OS is very VERY bloated with garbage.
The name of the game is adding new features and functions, not trimming down and being efficient. Microsoft spends far more time fixing issues, and security bugs in particular, these days vs making the OS lean and efficient.
There’s also the phenomenon of change for change sake. Windows re-does its UI with every version, not to improve on anything but to change it because psychologically if it doesn’t look any different people are less likely to buy the new version.
So instead of making the UI more efficient and easier to use, the UI designers keep chasing trends instead and arguably keep making it worse.
The newer the system, usually speaking, have many more integrated features that use up available resources. Windows Xp doesn’t have integrated cloud or artificial intelligence running in the background like Windows 11 has.
The newer the system, usually speaking, hardware performance has increased so much it makes software optimization less of a necessity. It wasn’t that long ago when multitasking was seen as extremely complex for consumer computers but these days even a basic 500 dollar laptop will beat a higher end 1000 dollar desktop from 15 years ago in plenty of practical and theoretical benchmarks.
Modern software is often made to work on different systems so the underlying code is more expansive with extra translation layers. There are games from 20 years ago that were written with specific hardware in mind and whilst they can be run on any basic computer these days due to large hardware resources at their disposal, it was written with target code that still exists on following generations of the original hardware so it’ll run better on it.
It does a lot more now than it did then. A lot more stuff is loaded behind the scenes that you don’t see to provide a better experience. You do a lot more now than was possible then. Playing a 1080p video would have been unplayable in in early XP. Now you play a 1080p video while playing a 4k game while being in a discord server while streaming your game with a video overlay. They need to support all of that, so it takes more resources.
Also, because modern hardware can handle it they don’t have to limit themselves and spend as much resources optimizing stuff, they instead spend time on providing more features or fixing issues.
Bill Gates told his employees back in the 1990s to disregard efficient code, expect Moore’s Law to continue adding more hardware capabilities like CPU and RAM, and just make code.
So Windows just layered on top of layers.
Their wake up really came around 2010 when the ARM processors came out and small Linux laptops were 1/5th the typical laptop running Windows. And phones were launching. Suddenly Windows needed to slim down to meet the market. But then hardware came through and Windows could continue on layering bloat into the system.
If you want to see the other side of the spectrum for efficiency, swap out to a new SSD drive and install Linux
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major
Or at least start using Libreoffice, Brave/Firefox, Gimp, Inkscape, Blender as these run on Windows as well as core Linux.
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Simply put, the jump from 98 to XP was massive, a jump from the old 16 bit CPUs to the shiny 32 and 64 bit CPUs, and the code shows that. Drivers, USB devices, the internet growing bigger, and 98 being quite feature-poor compared to what you expect of a computer. There were also similar jumps from XP to 7, and 7 to 10.
Try and go back to XP or 95 today, and even what’s still supported will feel empty since the ‘surface functionality’ has massively been upgraded. Web browsers bloated, sure, but now they support 8k 60fps video out of the box. Colour depth has changed from 16 bit pallets to whatever depth your monitor has (or at least 32 bit).
Open up your Task Manager and you can see just what has to run in the background now for ‘normal’ functionalty. Bluetooth, Wifi, Remote Desktop, Dial-up, and I see 60 more.
Win 11 has a requirement for Trusted Platform Module 2 (TPM 2). Which is only available on newer CPUs and motherboards. There were some pre 2020 that had it or could be upgraded to it with a motherboard add on but it’s really 2020 when NEW CPUs and mobos across the board had it.
It is currently possible to “hack” Windows to turn off the TPM 2 requirement but an MS update at any time could render that work around void and you might not even know what the core issue is. Unless you see a load of posts about the same issue. Even then it could take the community days, weeks, months, maybe even never, to bypass it again.
There is a minor chance that because your older CPU hasn’t been tested by MS on Win 11 that it won’t work or may do something funny. As well as MS blocking say Intel drivers designed for your CPU on Win 10 from working on Win 11.
You can run virtual machines inside your physical machine. And the virtual machine runs as well as your physical machine.
You can attach multiple monitors. Think of how much RAM and processing that takes.
If you think the requirements haven’t changed, try booting up an old Windows XP-era computer, try to do all your usual work and gaming and web browsing on it, and see how long it takes before you go insane.
A lot has changed, but much of it is subtle enough that you don’t notice it until it’s gone.
As an example, look at your monitor. 25 years ago, when XP was hot, that might have had a native resolution of 1600×1200 (or quite possibly less than that). That’s 2 million pixels, redrawn 60 times a second.
Now? Your monitor probably has around 8 million pixels, and it might redraw 100 or 120 times a second. And that’s when the computer is not doing anything, just keeping the screen alive.
Webpages have gotten vastly more complex, and you probably have more tabs open. Again, that comes with a cost.