But they aren't. I'm pretty sure I've owned multiple machines that couldn't POST in the time it takes my current desktop to be at a usable state, and I have more on-die L2 cache than my first desktop had RAM.
The past was full of a lot more paging to disk and it was awful. I mean, sure, things haven't progressed as much as they could I suppose, but I also don't know the last time I had to wait 5-10 minutes for a computer to shut down.
My first XT clone could would POST in less than 3 seconds if I skipped the memory test (all 640K of it), and I stayed with DOS 2 much longer than everyone else because it run almost all software at the time, and properly configured (big BUFFERS in CONFIG.SYS, for example), it would boot from floppy in 3 more.
I've recently managed to get an ubuntu server to boot as quickly (with preconfigured network interfaces and a few other things), but for years I could find the magic combination that would boot a usable system that quickly.
And I haven't seen a Windows machine that boots to usable state in less than 15 seconds (SSD, 30 seconds on magnetic hard drive) in a long time. "Usable" means you double click on something and it responds, btw - not that it shows the desktop.
The past was full of a lot more paging to disk and it was awful.
Those sounds just went through my head. That noise hurts just to think about.
but I also don't know the last time I had to wait 5-10 minutes for a computer to shut down.
Windows 7 seems to take 5 minutes to shut down, even if I give it a head-start by explicitly closing all applications I can see or understand.
There are 137 "processes" and over 200 "services" running right now on the Windows 7 machine I am at. I can't watch them go away when I shut down, because if I leave the task manager running, Windows 7 complains about the Task Manager still running when I want to shut down.
There are many things that are much better today, but it seems that some things are getting worse.
In theory you could install Windows Performance Toolkit from Windows SDK and then trace shutdown with xbootmgr command, then try to analyse resulting .etl file (xbootmgr will save it to the current folder) with xperf. In practice that will probably take more time than you could save by optimizing shutdown.
It's not that we don't have the ability to be responsive, and somethings are. My desktop is still laggy at times, (though it's gotten a lot better when I switched to a lighter DE (for obvious reasons)) and my phone still has issues just loading text messages without me having to wait multiple seconds.
That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. A Text Messaging app shouldn't have perceivable load time. My phone shouldn't freeze doing a transition between desktops. Computer desktops shouldn't take time to open up a menu.
We've come a long way, and have tons more raw performance, but I just feel that we squander it on things that don't add any value.
The past was full of a lot more paging to disk and it was awful. I mean, sure, things haven't progressed as much as they could I suppose, but I also don't know the last time I had to wait 5-10 minutes for a computer to shut down.