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I could tell what phase my desktop was in the boot process by listening to the HDD. Being familiar with autoexec.bat and config.sys, I could even isolate which command was being run. And then Windows begun loading and everything was just a blur of clicks for a while.

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Yup, the pause loading HIMEM.SYS was always distinctive. The blur of clicks loading Windows also got faster when switching from the loading screen to the desktop and startup items.

I don't know if I was that attuned to my system, but I really miss having an audible way of knowing when a process was blocked by disk access.

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