Windows 8.1 may be the best OS for mechanical HDDs

[dcfbf]

I recently got my hands on a T520 4240-49U with a missing keyboard in exchange for the FHD TN panel from my dead W530.
Say what you will about the trade but I think it was a good deal.
When I got it, I dropped in 4 gigs of ram (upping to a total of 8gb) and a 6 row from my T430 that I swapped a 7 row into.
But since I was cheap, I didn't want to buy a SSD for this machine and I kept the original 500gb HDD.

That lead me to try out 4 different OSes on this thing, all of which but one disappointed me with sluggish performance and long wait times.
Windows 10 was constantly freezing whenever I multi-tasked as it struggled to take background programs in and out of the slow swap of the mechanical hard drive. Boot times were also atrocious.
Arch Linux, while better, still ran poorly with occasional freezes as I tried to use the internet such as watching youtube. This was not helped by the Nvidia GPU whose drivers, whether the outdated closed source Nvidia ones or the open source nouveau drivers, didn't utilize the GPU to it's fullest potential (The closed source drivers acting poorly were probably my fault)
Windows 7, the hailed OS that many still think of as the best, still reported undesirable freezing when trying to multitask.

It seemed, other than Windows 7, all modern OSes were poorly optimized for mechanical hard drives. Most likely stemming from highly fragmented writes that slow down read times drastically.
I had given up hope. But then, I stumbled upon a video by TrigrZolt: Windows XP vs Vista vs 7 vs 8.1 vs 10 vs 11 | Speed Test

So I tried out 8.1 and it was almost magical.
Windows 8.1 seemed to allow the T520 to glide through multitasking with large PDF documents, multiple youtube videos, discord, and all sorts of programs in the background, all without any slowdown.
Sure the start menu was awful and it's not even supported by Macrohard anymore, but openshell exists, there's a huge backlog of programs available for 8.1, and Firefox 115 ESR is still a perfectly fine web browser free of all the AI bullcrap in modern versions.
Funnily enough, this T520 running 8.1 on an HDD starts up faster than even my W520 running windows 10 on an SSD (I think it's a fair comparison given I barely have any startup programs and when I put my machines to sleep, it is with minimal programs). If that doesn't speak volumes for the greatness of Windows 8.1, I don't know what will.

Truly, Windows 8.1 is one of if not THE BEST operating system for use with mechanical hard drives.


Let's ignore OSes like XP and 2000 for this statement because those can hardly be used in the modern day