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It seems to run relatively smoothly, but what's keeping it from running lag-free? Opening up "My Computer" takes 3-4 seconds. Why doesn't it open instantly?

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It's the disk access. In order to open My Computer, Windows reads 6399 disk sectors, which are read using ~150 http requests.

It is considerably faster than any Windows 2000 installation I ever used.

You must be kidding, right? W2k had a very long startup time by today's standards, but after that the basic utilities felt very snappy, just like most software of the pre-web era:

https://youtu.be/iwmquxVmRj8?t=95

Why would I be kidding about any Windows installation I ever used? I was on a computer with a CPU measured in the low hundreds of megahertz and RAM measured in the low hundreds of megabytes. It was paging like crazy trying to do anything non-trivial.

Perhaps, judging by the downvotes of the grandparent comment some folks thought I was casting aspersions on Windows 2000 itself.

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