Are aged computers more swift compared to modern ones?

Do you own or know anyone that has an old PC, about 15 years or more old or any library or school computer lab with older computers and compare it a computer that has been consistently used for about 5-7 years and has about 4gb ram and 500gb internal storage roughly? One thing you are likely to notice is that the older PC will work way better than the “more recent” PC.

You may be wondering why would a modern computer with supposedly much better hardware run slower than a PC that’s over 15 years old?

You’d think today’s hardware would be a lot faster than those older machines. Why aren’t they?

But the truth is that it isn’t really running faster than your new Dell laptop. In all truth, it’s running slower, a LOT slower. Modern CPUs and other modern internal computer components run at much faster speeds than their predecessors.

What’s more, they have larger address and data buses, plus multiple processor cores and a lot of RAM that allow the hardware to run the software that’s on them a LOT faster than older machines.

it’s actually the software running on modern computers that makes them appear to run slow.

Take the Windows operating system for example. The Windows 10 operating system itself consists of an amazing 50 million lines of code and all that code adds up to several Gigabytes of data for a PC’s CPU to manage.

Compare that to the early versions of MS-DOS which actually contained less code than a single modern multimedia web page.

Of course Windows 3.1 added a lot of code to a DOS machine’s overhead, but even then the amount of code running on one of those early machines was tiny compared to what’s running on even the simplest Windows 10 machine.

And that’s before we even load any programs into memory…And speaking of loading programs, those early Windows machines rarely had more than two or three programs loaded at any given time.

Today’s computers typically have a dozen or more programs running at all times, each which is probably several times larger than even the largest DOS/Windows 3.1 program.

In conclusion, while it definitely seems that today’s computers run slower than many of their ancient counterparts, that’s simply a perspective instead of facts. If you were to try to load even one modern Windows program onto an old Windows 3.1 PC (that is if the hardware could even run it, which it can’t), it would completely overwhelm the computer, possibly crashing it too.

On the other hand, if you could install DOS and Windows 3.1 on your new Dell laptop and run some of your largest old programs everything would run lightning fast.