I recently came across a CRT monitor similar to the one I had growing up, which led me to reviving my grandfather's old Windows XP machine that has an AMD Semperon 2200+ processor with 2gb of ram, a 128mb video card, and a 100gb, 5200rpm IDE HDD (not even SATA!). It's slow, but consistently slow. Despite this, it is way more responsive than my windows 10 machine. This is a PC with a Ryzen 9 3600x, 32gb ram, RTX 3060 TI, and a 1tb Samsung SSD (can't remember what exact model, it's one of the high-end ones) for the OS and some games (I also have several terabytes in 5200 and 7200rpm drives, mainly for general storage and smaller/older games that don't benefit as much from an SSD).
When I tell that slow-ass XP machine to jump, it immediately jumps. It doesn't jump very high and it stutters a bit while it's in the air, but it doesn't sit there for a moment figuring out how how to jump, how high it should jump and if it should jump. It just jumps. This is a PC that was low-end when it was new, compared to a modern PC that's somewhere between a mid-range/high-end PC.
It took four tries to get it to boot when I started it for the first time in like, 10 years, and the OS desperately needs to be reloaded as it keeps forgetting drivers, but holy shit despite being slow and in bad shape, it is infinitly more responsive than my "gaming rig". I had forgotten how much fun it can be to just use a PC. The dopamine rush I got from a combination of nostalgia and using a PC that did what I wanted it to, when I wanted it to, was euphoric.
I'm sooo happy that PCs are regressing.
^inb4 ^just ^use ^linux