They found web browsing, email, Office, dvd playback, mp3 and divx playback, banking, youtube was not that different on the old machine. And Win98Se was just as responsive as Vista if not more so.
web browsing?? youtube?? email?? banking?? these are influenced more by connection speed not os performance.
dvd playback?? divx?? these are dependent on vid card drivers/codecs moreso than anything else.
mp3?? this is dependent on the efficiency of the codec.
Thats most of the stuff people do.
most?? i don't think so.
it is just a portion of what people use a computer for. i myself use mine as a video recording system as well as dvd playback.
i have another system for gaming, vid editing, web browsing, database operations etc.
I would have thought on an Amiga forum, people might question why things on the PC are still the way they are.
because they aren't in the realm of being fixed by an os. sure you can optimize some of these and make it better but there will never be a fix per se.
ie is made my microsoft they have full control over the software but not the internet.
codecs are made by third parties and are limited by the available hardware. microsoft has tweaked the interface to improve performance but the actual codec/hardware problem remains.
as for loading times windows(as i said before) has deliberate timers that slow down it's operation to give a consistant feel with previous versions of the os. also the added features in the os also slow down loading time.
aos has no timers of this sort so it feels faster despite slower hardware.
like i said before try playing the pc version of a D&D gold box game in windows if you want to see why timers were implemented in windows.
this game was dos based iirc and uses no timers either internal or in windows. tho using dosbox may slow it down enough to be playable(with animations at proper speed.