NT3.5 was noticeably different to Win3.11 because dragging windows dragged the contents; on Win3.11, you got an XOR stipple outline indicating where the window was going to end up.
NT4 ran very well on 64MB. I used it as a daily driver shortly before switching to Win2k. I never ran Windows ME, I went from 95->98->NT4->Win2k->XP. NT4 correlated with me going all in on Win32 API programming.
The biggest slowness for start menu popup back then was disk. Random access loading icons for the entries, I suspect. Things would be faster the second time around. Disk was the general direct reason for slowness in usual use. Insufficient memory -> paging -> more slow disk accesses.
Context menus would be slow (and still are) if you had badly written shell extensions installed. Getting rid of those (sometimes requiring registry edits if you wanted to keep the related app) made a big difference.
Those were the days when you'd generally want to upgrade your PC every year, or at least every couple of years, if you wanted to be able to continue running the latest software.
NT4 ran very well on 64MB. I used it as a daily driver shortly before switching to Win2k. I never ran Windows ME, I went from 95->98->NT4->Win2k->XP. NT4 correlated with me going all in on Win32 API programming.
The biggest slowness for start menu popup back then was disk. Random access loading icons for the entries, I suspect. Things would be faster the second time around. Disk was the general direct reason for slowness in usual use. Insufficient memory -> paging -> more slow disk accesses.
Context menus would be slow (and still are) if you had badly written shell extensions installed. Getting rid of those (sometimes requiring registry edits if you wanted to keep the related app) made a big difference.
Those were the days when you'd generally want to upgrade your PC every year, or at least every couple of years, if you wanted to be able to continue running the latest software.