On Windows Vista and every subsequent version of Windows, if I search for a file and include the entire C:\ drive, I might very well have time to make tea or a sandwich while the search results come in. On Windows XP, using the search dialog with the animated dog, I can search the entire C:\ drive and expect it to be done in a minute or two, if not in seconds.
It can’t just be nostalgia; I can replicate these results on period-accurate hardware today. What changed with Vista to make file searching so much slower, even with indexing enabled?
8 was designed terribly, but the engineering was unbelievably good. It was more streamlined and stable than it had ever been, it was just skinned by a tablet-obsessed moron.
10 was a huge step back in technical quality, but it undid a lot of the stupid mistakes on the front-end.