The pursuit of a fast-booting PC has been one of the core tenets of PC enthusiasm for many years. From CPU overclocking to hard drive defragging and removing every unnecessary software feature from startup, the aim is to get to your desktop as quickly as possible. One Redditor has taken that pursuit to something of an extreme by creating a gaming PC that can boot to Windows in just six seconds, but there is a catch.
To achieve this impressive feat, user O_MORES has relied on a configuration worthy of the best gaming PC, with a Ryzen 9 9900X and 64GB of DDR5-6400. However, we’re also not talking about booting to the bloated mess that is Windows 11, here. No, we’re talking about Windows 95.
Yes, the Windows version that really started it all for the late 20th-century PC explosion has been modified and mollycoddled into a state where it can actually work on the very latest PC hardware. And, as a result, it delivers the sort of performance that would blow the mind of a ’90s kid like me.
The heart of the build is the use of a PCIe to PCI adapter box that allowed O_MORES to connect Windows 95-era PCI expansion cards to the system, allowing for support of old sound cards and more. Use of an old Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS was also required, so that drivers that would run on such an old version of Windows could be found.
Otherwise, the system uses a modern CPU, motherboard, RAM, and even an NVMe M.2 SSD, all of which combine to allow for a lightning-fast six-second boot time. For comparison, that sort of hardware booting Windows 11, well it wouldn’t actually take that much longer. Somewhere in the region of ten to 20 seconds might be expected, as although Windows 11 is bloated with AI and other annoyances, it’s quite well optimized for getting you to your desktop quickly.
As for comparison to a typical PC at the time of Windows 95’s release, well, they would have relied on hard drives rather than SSDs, and these were largely the limiting factor for slow boot times. As such, you could be waiting several minutes, and sometimes much longer.
O_MORES actually created this PC over nine months ago, posting a video about the whole build to YouTube (embedded above). However, they took to Reddit early today, with a post highlighting the six-second boot time, and it certainly caught my attention. Also of note is that the setup can run Half-Life and the original Unreal, the latter at a cool 1300fps. I’d have taken that back in the day, even if my old CRT topped out at 85Hz.
It’s also striking to see just how much has and hasn’t changed with Windows. So many of the fundamentals are still there, showing just how much the if-it-ain’t-broke approach should have applied to designing future versions of Windows, but was sometimes ignored along the way (looking at you Windows 8, et al). There are probably a few lessons Microsoft can continue to learn from looking back at that OS.
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