Not too long ago, I revived an old 2012 HP Pavilion m6 with Puppy Linux, an OS that runs entirely in RAM. It felt fast, but “feels fast” is cheap talk. So this time I grabbed a stopwatch and raced it head-to-head against my modern gaming laptop, an MSI Cyborg 15 running Windows 11, for four everyday tasks. The 14-year-old laptop won two of them.
The match up and the ground rules
Four tasks, three runs each, medians reported
The old machine is an HP Pavilion m6 from 2012: a dual-core, four-thread Core i5-3210M, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB SATA SSD. It runs Debian-based BookwormPup64, a member of the Puppy Linux family, as a frugal install that loads the whole OS into memory at boot. The new machine is my MSI Cyborg 15: a 10-core i7-13620H, an RTX 4050, 16GB of RAM, and an NVMe SSD running Windows 11.
I timed every task three times and used the median result. Both laptops stayed plugged in and on the same Wi-Fi network. Boot timing started at the Enter key on each machine’s boot menu, which skips POST variance. I also confirmed Fast Startup, Windows’ partial-hibernation trick, was off, so the MSI’s numbers reflect a true cold boot. The browser runs used Firefox on both sides (140.2.0 ESR on Puppy, 152.0.5 on Windows), pointed at the same homepage, with caches cleared before the first run. The document and file-copy tests used the same .docx and the same 1.93GB folder of video and photos, copied to each machine’s internal drive beforehand.
Here’s how it shook out:
Task | HP + Puppy (2012) | MSI + Windows 11 (2023) |
|---|---|---|
Cold boot to usable desktop | 20.82s | 25.47s |
Firefox launch to loaded page | 3.63s | 3.15s |
Open a .docx to editable | 1.18s (AbiWord) | 2.70s (Word) |
Copy a 1.93GB folder | 5.68s | 3.51s |
The 2012 laptop wins the boot race outright
Nearly five seconds ahead, with no PIN to type
My HP landed a usable desktop in 20.82 seconds, with all three runs landing within 7/10s of a second from each other. The MSI’s median came in at 25.47 seconds, and I even paused the timer to enter my PIN. That’s a close number, which seems absurd for an old laptop to get so close to a modern one. Both machines have an SSD, so that might help, but running the whole OS in RAM is definitely a speed winner here.
It comes down to what each OS does after the drive hands over the files. Puppy copies a few hundred megabytes of compressed OS into RAM, and then it’s done. Windows spends its boot spinning up services, telemetry, indexing, and everything else that makes a modern desktop a modern desktop. The HP wins because it has dramatically less to do.
The browser race was embarrassingly close
Half a second separates 11 years of hardware
I set MakeUseOf’s homepage to the Home page in Firefox on each machine, so one click on the Firefox (or Browser icon on the HP) timed the launch and page load together. The MSI won, but only by 0.48 seconds: 3.15 versus 3.63. Once a browser is running, page loads are mostly network-bound, and my Wi-Fi doesn’t care what year either laptop was built.
This result focused the whole experiment for me. If most of your computing is a browser, a 2012 machine with a RAM-based OS delivers that experience roughly half a second behind a gaming laptop. It’s a pattern I keep seeing in lightweight-distro land, whether it’s antiX making a 2009 laptop feel faster than a Chromebook or minimal distros carrying a 4GB MacBook Air: the software diet matters more than the silicon.
File copy is where the new machine won easily
NVMe does what NVMe does
Copying the 1.93GB folder to another location on the same internal drive took the MSI 3.51 seconds and the HP 5.68 seconds. No RAM trickery helps here; the bits have to physically land on the drive. Full credit to the HP machine for even being in the race: it’s running an aftermarket SATA SSD, which is the single best upgrade an old laptop can get. But SATA tops out around 550MB/s after overhead, while NVMe drives talk directly to the PCIe bus and move multiple gigabytes per second. This test mostly measures storage interfaces rather than operating systems, and it’s a decent counterweight: when raw throughput is the whole job, the newer machine’s tech wins.
Headroom, not speed, is what a newer machine gets you
The final score was two wins each, and the HP’s losses weren’t that big. For booting, browsing, and writing — the stuff we do every day — the old laptop kept pace with a machine that costs at least 10 times what the m6 would be worth today. The MSI earns its keep on heavy processes like big file operations, gaming, and anything else that uses that RTX 4050. If your daily computing is a browser and a document, the laptop in your drawer, old business, or local thrift store, plus a RAM-based OS, is closer to a new machine than you might guess. My HP is staying out of the drawer for now, at least.
