I was curious, so did a quick web search, which claims that 300ms is the *averag...

refulgentis · 2026-01-16T03:29:36 1768534176

300 ms is way longer than they budgeted; separately, I was alive then and it's a ridiculous claim, like, it takes a general bias we all have towards seeing the past with rose-colored glasses and takes it farcically far.

Don't want to clutter too much, I'm already eating downvotes, so I'll link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642003

chungy · 2026-01-16T06:53:44 1768546424

I have Windows 95 on a Pentium 120 MHz and calc.exe is instantaneous enough that it's probably much less than 300ms to launch.

XP's calculator is hardly any different than 95. It's easy to believe that launching it on a Core 2 Duo of all things is also instant.

hnlmorg · 2026-01-16T08:39:54 1768552794

You’re both kind of right.

On the average consumer hardware at launch, 95 and XP were slow, memory hungry bloats. In fact everything that people say about Windows 11 now was even more true of Windows back then.

By the end of the life of Windows 95 and XP, hardware had overtook and Windows felt snappier.

There was a reason I stuck with Windows 2000 for years after the release of XP and it wasn’t because I was too cheep to buy XP.