TIL that Windows 9x's "found new hardware" process has a hardcoded artificial delay of EIGHT seconds. It waits 3 seconds before displaying the device name and type it got from the driver, and then another 5 seconds before proceeding. I want hours of my life back. 😭
Birbsite link: https://x.com/oerg866/status/1853402804297118197?t=w7xrwry7Rzhc5TN5gmHF_A&s=19
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@dosnostalgic Could it have had a real reason? Like, maybe it was waiting for some BIOS/IRQ/whatever funniness to finish that it didn't have good visibility into, and that was, like, double the max amount of time they measured that process taking? Would hardly be the weirdest hardcoded value in the world in that case.
@b4ux1t3 @dosnostalgic I did a lot of work on and with W95. It crashed a lot. Especially during hardware detection. My guess is that this was enough time for a disk cache somewhere to flush, so that a log file contained what it was probing when it crashed and it could avoid probing the same address again the next time.
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