so is LTSC 2021 that one runs fine (and nearly fast) on my old HP pavilion desktop pc using a 500Gb Hitachi SATA HDD
Please note that 4 different type HDD speed is 4900rpm, 5400rpm, 7200rpm, 10k rpm and 15k rpm... SDD is completely different than HDD.. Also NVMe is damn quickest than SDD and HDD! ATGPUD2003
That's a captain obvious like sentence, which is valid for practically everything, from pizza to nuclear missiles... Well, no. NVMEs are better than SATA (or PATA) SSDs, but hardly you spot the difference in the everyday usage. Only moving very large files between two NVMEs drives makes a difference. Which is a corner case scenario, because most people are not used to deal with very large files, AND because most people has only a single NVME, and when you copy from two different drives, you copy at the speed of the slowest one (obviously).
Windows 8.1 still by far the best lightweight windows to date. The best OS for laptops and old pc. 8 was trash but 8.1 was perfect, many people hated the 8 and they didn't even give 8.1 a chance.
Well, no. The tilte of lightest belongs to Win8, not Win8.1 No again. The main reason to hate Win8 was the lack of the start menu button. People like me who used Classic Shell since the days of Vista, didn't even notice. Win8.1 has surely some improvements over Win8, but those are unknown to the vast majority of the users, (lack of resetbase for one) while the system become more bloated, slower, and introduced some annoyances, like the useless start button that interferes with the good one from classic shell (start is back, start 8 and alike)
I've used Win8 on a old pentium T3200 laptop with a dual platter 5400rpm hdd. It worked just as fine if not better than win7. The start menu thingy is no big deal with third party software. win8.1 also worked fine, but got worse with each update. Win10 I remember that the first versions were acceptable. I've done probably thousands of installations of windows as part of my job with all kinds of configurations. Recent windows are like recent macOS: you need an SSD because of the crap ton of libraries and dlls and mini craps that you have to load just to open a single application
Indeed Win8 was (and still is) way faster than win7. In part because a lot of UI cruft was removed, in part because kernel and drivers improvements Win 10 1511/Server TP4 were (and still are, given are still perfectly usable) likely the fastest versions, then a lot of things happened, mostly related to the mandatory defender cancer, the spectre/meltdown mitigations the virtualization based security, the extensive use of Hyper-V based features and so on.. Which means that the basic system isn't that slower, and with a bit of patience and competence even Win11 can be used on any machine capable of running vista. The problem is that most of the people have no idea about how tame Windows, and many people works actively on forums to scare the users to learn what to do to accomplish that (not so complicated) goal.