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Is Windows 7 Faster Or Just Smarter?
Barence writes "The Windows 7 unveiling garnered largely positive coverage, with many hands-on testers praising it for being faster than Vista. But is it actually? To find out, this blogger ran a suite of benchmarks to see just how much quicker Windows 7 really is — and the results weren't quite what he expected. 'The actual performance gap between Vista and Windows 7 is ... nada. Absolutely nothing. Our Office benchmarks and video encoding tests complete in precisely the same time regardless of which OS is installed. [...] It's tempting to see this as a bit of a con. They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista."
Is Windows 7 Faster Or Just Smarter?
I don't like either of those options, how about "just more of the same Microsoft software?"
I understand the article points out that they went with simply a "more responsive interface" paradigm (Web 2.0/AJAX, anyone?) and probably didn't really fix any serious problems. But at the same time this headline reeks of either marketing or hilarious lawyer type questions. Examples:
My work here is dung.
Can I play mp3 *and* copy files on Windows 7 ? I have old Quad-Core system only.
839*929
The productivity would actually increase if the front end speed increased since it would allow the user to interact faster etc. The other tests such as encoding etc are really CPU and application dependent and not very much OS dependent, so it's not really a fair test.
To quote the pointy haired boss "Work smarter not harder".
Personally I'll stick with Homer Simpson's motto: "If something is hard to do, then it is not worth doing." Which is my rule regarding installing new Microsoft Operating Systems.
Just to throw out one more gem; "If it isn't broken it doesn't have enough features yet." Which seems to be Microsoft's golden rule.
The Long Now Foundation
You can't polish a turd. But you can paint it a pretty color.
another kdawson artic... oh wait!
The answer is no.
"There can be little doubt that union activities lead to continuous and progressive inflation." F. A. Hayek
Video encoding is a terrible metric for "productivity" since it's something the computer can do on it's on while you go get tea. It's pretty much CPU and memory bound. The underlying OS shouldn't be doing anything but getting out of the way.
But UI "tricks" are an improvement. If find it easier to start your video encoder, or can do other resource-light things while the video encoder is running at a small cost to the actual encoding speed, then you're making better use of your meat co-processor. Which really is a "productivity" gain.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I don't see the big deal about this. More Apple fanboys who are trying to make Microsoft look bad? I wouldn't really expect any applications to run faster on Windows 7 unless the hardware was upgraded.
I was under the impression that W7 would have a modified kernel , but if it is nothing more than the Vista kernel warmed over with the same core libraries then nothing much will change so I guess no surprise there.
As is the way with MS , they update all the eye candy first to get the drooling masses interested , then they get down to the core stuff where it really matters later on - ie the exact opposite way round to the way it should be done.
All you "Windows 7 is so much better than Vista" dimwits have been 0wn3d.
FTA:
For comparison, the PC Pro benchmarks complete around 22% more quickly on XP than on Vista, as detailed in my feature "Memory Laid Bare" (issue 169, p122).
-sigh-
Wouldn't suppose they'll have an "LTS" version of XP, supporting it past the already-stated cutoff....
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I really wouldn't expect significantly different scores for something like an office suite or media encoding. Once the OS gives the process all the memory and CPU time it needs, that's basically it. Maybe for games where there could be significant differences in the DirectX flow, but not in general.
But as the article notes, throughput isn't everything. The "up front" speed and how long it takes for a button push to result in action is equally important if not more so. The responsiveness of applications is something an OS can have a significant impact on, and is probably the most important thing for making the computer -feel- fast, and thus giving a better user experience. Hell I've long considered responsiveness to be justification enough for dual-core processors even when a user isn't multi-tasking or running multi-threading apps. So if it's a good enough reason to get a whole second core, it's a good enough reason for an OS upgrade.
It does sound kinda cagey that they're making this one of the main reasons to get 7, rather than improving Vista. But whatever, it's all academic to me.
The enemies of Democracy are
They don't define "faster" to include the response time of the interface.
But most users DO include the interface response time in their opinion of which is "faster".
I think Microsoft made a big mistake with the "fade in" menus. Just turning them off gives the user the impression that you've made their machine "faster". Even though email works at the same speed as before. As does Word. As do their games.
I'm no fan of Windows. But improving UI responsiveness, does greatly improve user throughput when using a system - partly because the user can do what they need to do more quickly, but also because there are fewer jarring moments where you are brought out of the process of creation to have to wait on the computer to finish something. These small interruptions can add up to a big loss of focus over a day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it SEEMS faster, what does it matter what the actual internal speed is? As long as it passes the "God damned piece of shit just give me my web page!" test (as long as you don't say that it's ok) why does a benchmark matter?
I'd rather have a slow app that felt fast than a fast app that felt slow. Our work connection is slug-slow, the annoyance is much more of a productivity drain than the actual (lack of) speed.
Free Martian Whores!
I dunno about most of you, but I do consider a nippier interface to be an improvement in productivity. For the vast majority of Windows users, the thing they want to see improved is those moments lost "when they click a button and nothing seems to happen", as the article author puts it. That is time that has been taken from me. If I get those moments back, and the performance of the trivial CPU tasks involved in actually reading and writing files are kept the same, then yes, my productivity has improved.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
considering the biggest complaints that users have about vista is that it is SO SLOW (read: responds slowly), i think microsoft may be going in the right direction (if i understand their changes correctly).
the biggest issues with vista haven't been it's performance in crunching numbers, the problems have related to how fast it seems to be. which brings up an interesting question, was much work really needed when consumer computers are quickly becoming powerful enough to actually run vista smoothly?
at the risk of being modded down... i think vista is a good os, with some tweaking. BUT, only if it's the 64bit version, 32bit is crap. furthermore, microsoft has done a great job combining 64 and 32bit functionality, i applaud that
So let me get this straight: Windows 7 is only faster than Vista. It doesn't manage to also make third party programs written for Vista magically faster as well.
Since 1995 I've had a chance to play with each beta and RC release of Windows, from 98 to Vista. They always run faster than the final release. I've no idea why.
Most recently, I played with Vista at the RC stage on a very modest notebook computer (1.6GHz Celeron, 512MB memory) and it ran like a dream. I then switched back to Linux, my personal OS, and then read all the reports upon the release of Vista criticizing it for being slow and cranky.
Upon buying a new notebook complete with Windows tax, I was able to see that -- sure enough -- Vista (even SP1) was pretty slow.
I just don't know what microsoft do to their software before boxing it. Maybe they pour molasses into it.
For the average user, a lot of time is wasted waiting for the UI, or being afraid or unable to do other tasks while something "heavy" is going on (like reading email, surfing, etc.).
If the system still has the same horsepower, but I'm better able to actually multi-task without slogging through a molasses interface, then it's a huge improvement.
It's just not worth trying to type an email sometimes when it takes 6 seconds to update the UI after each keypress... maybe doing so will slow down your build in the background, but only marginally compared to the time wasted if you can't do anything at all during that time.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
I would argue that the speed and responsiveness of the interface is increasing productivity in some way. Having a responsive interface is not just nice window dressing, particularly if I'm doing several things at once.
It is also possible that it is faster instead of just appearing faster. What might have been sped up is the constant factors, the smaller functions, that are usually dwarfed by the time it takes to complete an "actual" task. That is, you might not be able to encode video any faster, because while the act of opening and writing to the video file on the filesystem could have been sped up, the limiting factor is encoding speed. (I'm not saying that's necessarily true about Windows 7, but it could be.
They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista
I take exception to this. Obviously, if the video encoding tests were written well, there will be little speedup. But if a window environment "feels" faster, you actually DO get more done. There is less frustration in waiting, and you can generally multi-task much easier.
There was recently a discussion of a faster X server. Frankly, I get plenty done on the old "slow" X server, but if one feels faster, it will actually eliminate a lot of brainpower consumed by waiting on a context switch.
There was recently a discussion on a faster Linux boot-up, which preloaded your configuration as you're typing your password, and had lots of other fast features... But that doesn't actually speed up Linux, in terms of encoding video. It just makes it "feel" faster.
I like OSS, but I see lots of bad tags being made. Unfair comparisons are simply unfair comparisons. You can't hail a nice feature in one OS, and discount exactly the same feature on a different OS. Without being hypocritical, anyway.
At this point it probably IS Vista!
Do you think Microsoft re-writes the OS from scratch every time? No, they just incrementally change the previous version, and this happens slowly over the course of development. Since 7 is still a year or so away at this point they're just showing you mostly user interface changes with little or no changes to the core underlying os. By the time it releases there will probably be some significant changes, but right now I suspect you're mostly looking at a UI demo running on top of plain old Vista.
I keep seeing posts like "I tried out Windows 7 and it looks like all my software is 100% compatible and runs great!". Well duh, since it's the same OS you're running now.
Wait six months or so before passing judgement on this thing.
G.
Okay here is the big question.
Do many users need a faster PC?
On a clean Windows box when are you waiting on the computer?
I am not talking about games, scientist, or people using CAD/CAM.
I am talking about the average user?
Now when you are waiting how often is it an IO bottle neck?
Waiting for a program to start, waiting for a file to download or some other function like that.
The real answer is that for the most part PCs are quick enough.
Video encoding isn't something that the average users does yet. It will be in the future but right now not so much.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What is this knucklehead smoking?
Yeah, the signal it sends is that you're a blithering idiot, a chump, and an easy mark. What a jackass...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Though the last time I ran a true benchmark of Windows operating systems was when I compared NT 3.51 to Windows 95 to OS/2 Warp on identical 386 DX/33 machines back in '94 - I fail to see why Vista is considered "slow".
From my own SOTP evaluation of using Vista over the past two years - in beta and production - it runs way better than the bloated XP ever did. In fact, I consider it a worthwhile upgrade for those looking to to from Win2K (which my wife still runs) to a newer MS product. (Assuming you don't upgrade from Vista to openSUSE or Ubuntu or another distro.)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Improving the front end is overdue and welcome.
Under Windows 2000/XP (have not touched Vista yet) I have often wondered why the Windows Explorer takes ages to show a directory, even if the actual content at the displayed directory level is only a few dozen elements. Maybe it scans all subdirectories for whatever arcane reason?
I strongly suspect there is a lot that can be optimized there, and if Windows 7 finally got around to it, this would be a good thing.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Perhaps, instead of qualifying windows 7 as nothing above vista, we can say that fundamentally vista is probably not that bad, but needs a tweak or two to get noticeable improvements.
If the UI is now snappier and more responsive so that the user feels more happy with his user experience, isn't that still good progress even if in reality the speedup is only subjective? Everything that makes the user more content using the product is good, right?
Of course a snappy UI is a huge deal. Users spend a lot of time navigating before they actually run anything. And, keeping the UI snappy even when the CPU is under heavy load is an especially important user experience requirement.
There's nothing illegitimate or sneaky about optimizing the hardware to better serve the user.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
'the actual performance gap between Vista and Windows 7 is... nada. Absolutely nothing. Our Office benchmarks and video encoding tests complete in precisely the same time regardless of which OS in installed. [...] It's tempting to see this as a bit of a con.
Well, you wouldn't expect the OS to have a substantial effect on video encoding. I mean, the video encoding software is going to work with the OS to open one file and write another, and to update a GUI every so often, but the bottleneck is the video encoding code which you wouldn't expect to interact with the OS at all.
To use a car analogy, it's like saying "Third design of car dashboard doesn't improve vehicle speed over unpopular second design of car dashboard" - the dashboard shouldn't have anything to do with the car's speed!
I agree that Vista might have slower OS calls, driver support and/or OpenGL support - but video encoding doesn't test any of those things!
Now, if they had included XP in this test, and found that Vista was slower than XP and Windows 7 was no better, that would be news.
...And you'll realize that this is actually pretty impressive (you know, for MSFT). At this point in its life Windows 7 is already performing *better* than SP1 Vista. Vista was hamstrung by drivers and incompatible apps even for months after its release. If 7 can already out perform it then I'd say we can look forward to a decent new OS.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
... to get real change in the MS OS? What it has always taken: Apple Innovation.
Nothing against MS here. I use and enjoy their products, and I can't blame them for improving their OS's when there are improvements in the industry. But it's like having a girlfriend with fake boobs - sure they look and feel great, but in the back of your mind, you know they're not her's.
was much work really needed when consumer computers are quickly becoming powerful enough to actually run vista smoothly?
We can thank Nicholas Negroponte for this. His One Laptop Per Child project inspired the mainstream PC industry to develop similarly low-powered, low-priced subnotebook computers called "netbooks". Windows XP and Ubuntu run better than Windows Vista on the small CPU and small RAM of these computers.
That would cut MS any kind of slack. I hate their ugly guts (and boy, all guts are ugly, but theirs...: just imagine winnt's kernel code).
That being said, if the thing is faster in the iface, its a faster experience and that is that.
Those are seconds saved.
Its just stupid to hit them for doing something better, especially if you see what they are coming from: i mean, it cant be that hard to make something feel better than, for christ sakes, VISTA.
NO SIG
They did a smart thing then, by improving responsiveness. If something feels faster, then it is :) And you get more stuff done. Yay! Bravo Microsoft for doing the proper thing and not rewriting everything!
Anyone find it funny that the headline and summary is clearly biased, and not in Microsoft's favor, yet the article referenced is actually very complimentary? Stay classy slashdot editors, stay classy. I sense a bit of saltiness now that Microsoft is actually releasing good software.
Similes are like metaphors
I am not talking about games, scientist, or people using CAD/CAM.
I am talking about the average user?
Since when does the average home user not play games? What am I misunderstanding?
Video encoding isn't something that the average users does yet.
Unless your PC has a webcam. These are popular in (for example) the Deaf community, as they allow people to chat in a sign language.
I despise Microsoft, and I doubt the conclusions from the article will change, but lets let them get it past BETA before we burn them as witches.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
Vista is only really slower in a few areas, like 3D games. This useless assertion that "Windows 7 isn't faster" would only have meaning if they had concrete numbers comparing Windows XP, Vista, and 7.
Or - why would I _expect_ Windows 7 to be faster in Office or in media encoding? Answer - I wouldn't.
One of the problems with Vista was hardware upgrades. Every new cycle of Windows requires some hardware upgrades for the new version. Unfortunately for MS, the 5 year gap between XP and Vista hurt them. Combined with MS not defining the real requirements of Vista meant that most people trying to upgrade their 5 year old machine would end up in disaster.
These are MS recommended hardware for Vista Ultimate/Business:
Compared to XP Pro requirements:
Now both requirements are really inadequate to use the OS fully. The difference is with only 3 years between 98/XP, it was easy for users to upgrade their CPU, motherboards, video cards without much infrastructure changes. For the 98/XP upgrade it was only 3 years and most users only needed more RAM. If users did require hardware upgrades (CPU, video card), these were readily available. Need a faster Pentium/Athlon in 2001? Go down to BestBuy. The 5 year gap between XP and Vista meant that some hardware upgrades were not easy or even possible. Need a faster Pentium/Athlon in 2007? They don't make them anymore. Ebay is your only real source and even if you upgrade to the fastest one, your system will be slow.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Whenever you initially launch an app. If you can cut that time down so that the apps APPEAR to launch instantaneously then you're a GOD!
It isn't about actual time spent typing or whatever.
It's about the perception of waiting for the machine to do what you just told it to do.
How many times do you launch an app ... wait a bit ... hourglass ... only to wait while a splash screen comes up telling you the name of the app you just launched ... wait a bit ... the app appears ... wait a bit ... okay, now you can type something in that app.
Click save ... save where ... wait a bit ... okay, save complete and you can get back to work.
If I were a windows user and was duped into purchasing Vista, I'd request a refund as soon as Windows 7 hits the streets. Not that $bill would give it to them obviously.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Neither.
And there's no CowboyNeal option either.
My UID is prime. Hah!
Go into the registry and lower the value for MenuShowDelay. Tada! Faster Windows!
many hands-on testers praised Sue for being faster than Betty.
so what exactly do you lose at this point moving to linux? For any given tie-in, can't you run cygwin for it now?
I'll be happy with "No worse". After all, don't forget that the speed of hardware will dramatically improve before it hits the market.
Not that I've ever used Vista...
Can someone tell me why Slashdot's tags overlap with the summary? I mean do the site maintainers even check their work on more than 1 web browser? It's pretty annoying trying to read the last few sentences of the summary only to have it overlapped with tags. Also what is this metric-fuck-ton of javascript that has started plaguing the front page. I thought this was a news blog not the forefront of web 3.0. Between those 2 fuck ups, Flash ads, and that stupid survey popup, and these new slew of pointless articles (Stupid useless VIM tricks? c'mon) this site is quickly going into the shitty and not even because of comments. Fix your shit slashdot. Please
If they've sped up the front end consistently, then I would be very happy.
My primary complaint with Vista is how long UI operations take. Opening windows, dragging them around, launching applications etc. all seem to take place in something approximating geologic time.
Once I have a high-performance app open (say a game), the game itself runs pretty quickly. It's the getting there that's a problem.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Windows Vista -> Windows 7 is another facelift. MicroSoft has been mostly honest about this. Yes, there have been conflicting rumors, some of which originated with MicroSoft personnel, but the source doesn't necessarily guarantee the accuracy of the information. MicroSoft's official line on Windows 7 is to quietly admit that it isn't a major code revision - in fact, I heard one rumor that they were planning to release it under the name "Windows 6.3" instead of the codename "Windows 7", to explicitly make it (sort of) clear that this is a minor revision, not a major one.
Not that I think Windows Vista is worth the DVD's it ships on, but the folks here might consider giving MicroSoft a break. My opinion of MicroSoft remains pretty low, but in this I think they're actually trying to do something right. They're not claiming to have invented a new paradigm or anything stupid like that, they're just saying that there's a new version of the Windows operating system coming soon.
If a computer takes a fraction of as second to respond, I'm not going to be any less productive. It doesn't feel as nice though. If there's a trick to make it feel more responsive I don't care that it's a trick. It still works.
... XP?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This conjures up images of a puzzled Justin Long watching John Hodgman running haphazardly on treadmill while simultaneously wolfing down cheesburgers.
The specs you casually throw out are just astounding.
Granted I don't try to run it on crap systems
To use Dell as the brand, you mean I can't run it on a Dimension/Vostro?? I've GOT to spec Precision boxes?
with less than 2GB of RAM, either.
Granted 64-bit is *the* future, WTF is consuming all those resources? I'd guess it's some DRM/crypto nightmare, but I don't know.
Although my 7 test box only has 1GB of RAM.
Only? I've got a Thinkpad T42 running Debian Lenny and KDE4 will ALL of the eye candy on 512MB RAM with no problems. Disclaimer: 1/2 my mobile work is telnet/serial interface, so my productivity gains are faster CLI-fu and good systems topography.
All of this is to conclusively state that something is seriously wrong at Microsoft when a machine is a dog with only 1GB RAM.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Of course video encoding and the same old office build won't be affected by the OS.
What people want to be faster is booting up, logging in, connecting to networks, detecting hardware and installing drivers, and running those damn .msi installers.
There are apparently 2000 developers working on this project - and they are committing the cardinal sin of software development, they are letting the marketing department develop their systems.
The problem with Windows is that it tightly coupled across all its subsystems - and the only system that is a pure client of all this coupling is the front end. Everyone knows about the "Mythical Man Month" - but there is a certain point, up to which you can throw developers at a large system and still reap benefits - this point is very much dependent on how modular your system is. Windows is not modular at all, and a such Microsoft is crippled by these limitations and always will be.
So what are they doing? Focussing on the only point that appears modular (because nothing depends on it) and doing precious little else. Why? Because they know that doing anything else will tie them up in knots - and no-one has the balls to suggest dumping the whole thing and starting again. They are painting their fence while their house burns to the ground.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
The reason Windows 7 is getting good reviews is because Microsoft is bribing reviewers with free high-end laptops. If a software company handed you a $2,000 computer, wouldn't you have a few nice things to say about the operating system preloaded on it?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Or maybe it's that Office didn't get any faster (real probability, since he ran the same version on both OPERATING systems) and his graphics adapter (which would interface with either DX or GL, neither of which was updated in either OPERATING system release).
IOW, this guy is an idiot, who thinks applications are the operating system.
No shit, sherlock. Opera didn't get any faster on it, neither did Calc.exe
--Toll_Free
Yet another attempt of /. trying to trash Microsoft at every opportunity.
Sorry but no matter how many stories you send to the front page trashing Microsoft and all of their OS's it will continue to be the preferred OS and application vendor for end users.
What the article goes on to say, in more words, is that the trivial response time on certain actions is much faster, and that this is good. As long as its correct, it certainly is good! You want to know when you press a button or click on an icon, and rapid feedback on that is very very important. You don't want to open a window 10 times because you didn't think you opened it the first 9 you tried.
Let's also not forget that the beta versions on which the tests were done were probably compiled in debug mode with symbols loaded, and probably has tracing code and other stuff in it that slows it down.
I know many others have said that when they did tests on Vista beta and RTM, there was a significant speed difference between the two.
Plus, I'm sure they'll do some optimization before the OS is released. After all, they just came out of alpha not too long ago... so I find it silly that people would benchmark a beta version of an OS that's not even feature-complete to a release version of another OS.
Serious question. Are there any studies on this?
For me, I reboot my computer maybe once a month (suspending often). After I reboot, I start up the half dozen applications that I use and then my only interaction with the GUI is to task switch or maybe start up a less often used application.
How long it takes to encode video, or process some data... whatever. That isn't the issue I'm having. For the past several years, things are pretty damned fast in that regard.
What I still have problems with is applications which think they are the only apps you are running, so they pop up modal boxes that take over your screen while you think you are typing in another app. (which is lovely when it's an OK dialog box and it accepts a space as an answer, and you're going... oops, what did I just agree to?) This has been a long standing problem with Windows. In XP they tried to address this, and then clever programmers found a way around it. Vista they tightened it down even more, and I believe solved it entirely, but I'm not going to say that uniequivocally... I just know it's a lot better.
So the responsiveness of the UI is key. When I have an app lock up, I don't want the explorer task bar locking up, etc. Vista is just a lot better at this than XP. If Windows 7 makes this seamless so much the better.
In which case, as long as it can do it in real time, you haven't got any problems. Making it faster isn't going to help because the bottleneck is the outside world.
For example, making video encoding faster will allow a given PC to encode at a higher resolution in real time. Not all of us want to be stuck in the LDTV formats typical of VCD, PlayStation 1, and YouTube.
More to the point, try adding more "it"s. Think of the reason that most of us upgraded from MS-DOS, as nschubach pointed out above: multitasking. Encoding video faster would allow a single PC to encode from more than one camera at once, or allow the e-mail program to run downloaded messages' attachments through antivirus at the same time, or allow the user in front of the webcam to play a video game at the same time, etc.
If people really agreed with you on that, everyone would still be using Amigas. The people voted with their wallets on this issue in the early/mid 1990s.
I understand the article points out that they went with simply a "more responsive interface" paradigm (Web 2.0/AJAX, anyone?) and probably didn't really fix any serious problems.
I can't believe that no one here has made the obvious connection yet: Microsoft is copying yet another Mac OS feature: *TEH SNAPPY*!!!
Is neither an acceptable response?
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
It's a special combination of hardware and a very streamlined windows ce operating system. It works pretty good too.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unsurprisingly, the German magazine C't has just compared XP, Vista and the new one.
They came to a different conclusion - W7 is noticeably faster than Vista and roughly the same as XP.
They found no difference on laptop Battery life between Vista and W7 though.
When it comes down to C't and some blogger, sorry - I'll take C't. Those guys take independence very seriously.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
If users really wanted quick responses, they would use a command line and memorize countless arcane switch settings. Or learn countless arcane Alt/Ctrl/Shift key sequences in the various programs which have no correlation to each other. Or learn how to use the quicklaunch folder. Or many other 'productivity' tools that MS provides but few use. They don't really want quick responses, they just want quick enough. Which, in reality, is all that is needed.
.. I could use cmd for the same thing. But I prefer a real command line interface that has a full featured editor/search functions built in.
For some of the click-happy people I run into, a slower interface might be more helpful!
I always install Cygwin on all my systems. It's just easier to keep it running, Alt-Tab to it, and type 'calc' then to try and find the calculator with my mouse. And I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard to do it. (Setting up a keyboard shortcut requires you to create a shortcut on your desktop, and mine is messy enough already. Personal choice.)
I know
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Linux goes one direction, Windows goes another. Linux would tend towards minimalism, and you have to add services manually. Windows caters more to the "regular user", and Microsoft's interpretation of that is "automate everything, and run a lot in the background of the OS". 95 ran fine on 32MB of RAM, 98 ran on 64 or 128....XP, you'd better have 512, and I guess Vista is best with at least 2048. Somehow, it doesn't surprise me that the requirements have gone up.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Windows 7 isn't even in beta yet and people already think it could be faster than it's production older brother.
It's not a huge kernel overhaul or anything, but I still remember how terribly Vista, even upto public beta 2, really crawled compared to even the RTM release.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Dude, I'm surprised anything works. I can't get Ubuntu to load with 64Megs. I'd bet that machine is thrashing like mad!
Remember kids, this is Mojave we're talking about. Wake me up when they pull the tilt bit.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
My god, color me surprised (not) - they had the celebrities and commercials and write ups by the usual media whores saying how great Vista was and any objective person, indeed most all of us not being paid by Microsoft smelled that turd a long ways off and so they took the same turd (euphemistically speaking) and are wrapping it up in the same DRM filled, user raping package and saying it's sunshine in the box. The usual paid celebrities and media whores are saying wow, this time Microsoft did it right and everything is hunky dory now and it's okay you can switch over! And it's still a turd with a new ribbon around it. Great. Thanks Microsoft, remember when you innovated and didn't completely screw over the customers? I guess not.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Microsoft is all about speeding up rare but high visibility operations (like precaching programs, and shortcutting reboot time) regardless of whether it actually makes the user more productive (yeh, Word starts up faster, but it doesn't run faster, and that video mastering you were running in the background is swapping to death because it's got to compete with copies of a dozen apps you haven't used in a week reserving space in RAM).
Reminds me of Colbert: George W. Bush: Great president or the greatest president
They'd fix Windows so it didn't need a reboot after every freakin' update. Even if you have a fast boot time (which Windows does not even come close to either) it still leaves workers twiddling their thumbs while it does it's thang. It makes it even more insulting when you keep getting the annoying reminders which eventually have the "reboot later" option greyed out, giving you no choice but to stop what you're doing for a few minutes. Even then, what happens if that latest "critical update to IE" breaks a driver and your system won't boot?
As I said though, it just feels like it is. I'm not sure whether it's actually faster as I've not benchmarked it but apps seem to fire up quicker and menus appear faster. File operations seem to not take as long either.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
I recently installed ten Vostros for a local charitable organization, set them up with Vista Home Premium. There was no crapware, interestingly. Partitioned the drive into two chunks, installed Windows SteadyState and put the primary user directory on the unfrozen partition.
Didn't notice any problems. I think even the low end Vostros now come with 2GB of RAM.
Only the "front end", not the programs run under it?
You mean, Windows 7 is only faster as an Operating System, and doesn't magically make arbitrary applications run any faster!?!? OUTRAGE!!
How exactly is changing operating systems supposed to improve video encoding performance?
Yes, I did RTFA. I see that their tests ran faster on XP. WTF?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I saw some of the testing going on on vista at MS. It looked like they moved all their unmanaged system code to managed code, and then loaded it in the GAC to speed up performance. I suspect that this is the reason that vista's memory footprint being so much larger that XP. The question I have, is why are they loading everything in managed code? Sure, you get some more stability but these are the low level assemblies that we are talking about.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
When you can buy 2GB Ram upgrades for existing systems for $30, or brand new PCs with Dual Core CPUs and 2-3GB of ram for $400 (incl. MS Tax), Yes, less than that is generally crap.
I first put a gig of RAM in my old PIII system I had in college. That was 6-7 years ago. Believe it or not, computers get more powerful and cheaper as time goes on. A computer is not a refrigerator or similar appliance you should expect to perform well for over five years.
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If you run a faster shell, you get more done, even if it takes just as long to calculate pi to 1 million digits.
Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't seem to understand that they should not design eye candy that slows down the user (e.g. Animated menus, minimization, fade-in, animated paperclip).
I have a question for any of you that have installed the windows 7 beta.
Does it still have all the blue ray / hd-dvd DRM baked in? Are there still tilt bits and all the code required to support them?
If there are, I'm still not buying it.
Thanks.
Windows caters more to the "regular user", and Microsoft's interpretation of that is "automate everything, and run a lot in the background of the OS"
There are Linux distributions that have at least as many services running as Vista, and in my (somewhat limited) experience, they still manage to run faster. For example, I installed Kubuntu on a PC for a friend last week, and its Task Manager-equivalent had a list about as long as a Vista machine. It also has a UI that seems in the same general category of graphics complexity as Vista. The difference is that I was running Kubuntu on a 1.5GHz P4 with 768MB of RAM instead of a Core 2 with 4GB of RAM and it was performing very well.
Vista doesn't really have a lot of unnecessary services running, but even with those disabled it is still very slow (at actual work like copying files, not the UI responsiveness). I tend to side with those who blame the new DRM layer.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Don't use the eye-candy effects.
Then you'll have no effects which you've already stated are why modern UI's are all slow.
You so very nearly managed the solution.
Window key + R type calc hit enter. I use it all the time.
Also hot key apps have to have an entry somewhere in the start menu not be on the desktop. And yes this can get pretty cluttered.
In Republican America phones tap you.
Software that is still pre-Beta is getting compared to software that is already at sp1. That's a *really* fair test.
"Freedom Through Vigilance"
The file copying slowness was actually related to something new in their networking stack which I believe was fixed in SP1. If I wasn't lasy I would try to look it up and find links for you. I use a Vista box for copying large numbers of files between servers because the copy dialog actually provides useful information, doesn't cancel on simple errors and the speed seems the same to me. (If it's a LOT of information I use a backup utility).
Ah, wait 5 minutes before posting a comment....so I got a link for you:
http://mytechweblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/slow-file-copymove-in-vista-here-is_05.html
It mainly talks about the fix and not the cause, and I remeber reading somewhere that SP1 flips that off by default.
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Yes.
Dude, I'm surprised anything works. I can't get Ubuntu to load with 64Megs. I'd bet that machine is thrashing like mad!
Use the alternate installer ISO.
Ubuntu runs on 64MB RAM, but the "normal" installer doesn't...
Our test deployment system still has this problem despite being up to date. This office moves *big* files around. Which is one reason why I can't make the technical recommendation to upgrade. If management wants to upgrade despite my findings, then that's fine. Any professional system admin should take the same line. I have no such hope that the next version of Windows will be any better.
I still find it mind boggling that an OS can be so resource intensive, take so long to release, and yet have no increase in perceived value. It reminds me of a few big companies I work with.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Q: How do you like how much faster the DRM is in Windows 7?
A: I don't know because I'll never use another OS that has DRM built in.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I've tried it on a 1GB RAM virtual machine (VMWare 6.5 with 2 CPUs), it feels very much better and quicker than Vista in the same VM. Whether it actually is quicker I dunno, but it seems much more responsive...
The Windows 7 unveiling garnered largely positive coverage, with many hands-on testers praising it for being faster than Vista.
Had M$ provided me a free notebook I would praise it too!
Here is informed RTFM on the topic.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Really? I've got an HP tx2000z with 3GB RAM that has issues with the eye candy in KDE4.1. Might be the crappy integrated GPU, but then I doubt your thinkpad has a much better one. I'll blame the drivers I guess.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Both our senior pontificators were struck by how nimble Windows 7 feels after you're used to its predecessor.
And for those of us who've not gotten desensitized to clunky unresponsive interfaces... it will also feel faster for us too?
On the other hand, this is nothing but a service pack fix to Vista. M$ should give every Vista licensee a free upgrade to Win 7.
Meanwhile, I'll stay on XP for as long as I can, and my next laptop will likely run some form of Windows only in a virtual machine.
The summary does not make any sense. The author says that Microsoft sped up the front-end but that the OS isn't any faster. By front-end I'm assuming that they are talking about the UI. By sped up I imagine that they are saying that the windows open faster, that alt-tabbing between applications brings them up faster and things along those lines. If they have truly reduced UI latency then the OS is faster. I've only used Vista a couple of times on friend's laptops but my impression was that the UI was a dog. These were machine with dual-core processors, 3+ GB of RAM and decent video cards. It took FOREVER for screens to load. If Microsoft has improved that aspect of the OS then they are moving in the right direction.
I've heard initial reviewers say that 7 uses less memory and runs better on slower machines, like the Atom CPU.
If your test machine has a high-end 4-core CPU and 4G RAM, maybe there won't be a difference. But if you're running on a Netbook with 1G of RAM, maybe there is an actual difference?
.. not because people are laughing with you, but because they are laughing AT you.
Obvious old troll was obvious, how could you not have seen it?!
I have been evaluating a pre-release version and what I like about it is the smaller foot print. It seems to do well with 512Mb of memory and takes up about 8-9Gb on the disk.
Note: Installed on Virtual Machine without all the "whiz-bang" UI stuff turned on... you mileage may vary.
George Bush; great president or greatest president?
Yes, Vista and 7 run just as fast, but in the footnote at the bottom of the page, they mention that XP was 22% faster.
You mean to say Windows 7 does not actually upgrade your CPU? Ye gods! Whatever will they discover next?
sudo ergo sum
"Itâ(TM)s generally suspected that Vista was a rush release ... "
Um.. six years is a rush release?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I mean, most of the complaints about Vista focused on stability, and we later found out those were due to bad Nvidia drivers. I've never had much to complain about regarding Vista -- though I didn't start using it until long after the bad device driver debacle had ended.
I found a really old laptop with a version of Windows that's 91 versions newer than this, it boots really fast and it consumes a lot less resources. But strangely enough, the desktop graphics aren't as pretty as anything on the current market. (They're almost like retro 8-bit or something theme wise.) Also it's missing drivers that all the modern games and some devices look for.
*** Our Office benchmarks and video encoding tests complete in precisely the same time regardless of which OS in installed. [...] It's tempting to see this as a bit of a con. They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista." ***
Of course the blogger makes no mention to the extra debug code ALWAYS present in EVERY piece of software pre-release.
Noooo...that couldn't affect anything...
*yawn*
95 ran fine on 32MB of RAM, 98 ran on 64 or 128....XP, you'd better have 512, and I guess Vista is best with at least 2048. Somehow, it doesn't surprise me that the requirements have gone up.
I ran XP fine on 224MB RAM, no slowdown at all, but I've seen Vista hang for a few seconds every couple of minutes using nothing but notepad and 2 firefox tabs (without flash or Java) on 2GB RAM, that is a serious problem
A computer is not a refrigerator or similar appliance you should expect to perform well for over five years.
But I don't see the point upgrading when I don't need a faster or newer computer, since I can do anything I need to on this old 512MB RAM computer I got in a sale years ago and it runs fine with latest version of any Linux distro (with desktop effects) or Windows XP.
To says Vista's demands are reasonable is stupid, and I'd ask you to point out why it's acceptable that it eats so much resources
I have been using Windows 7 for 6 days. I hated vista after the second day of using it (in beta) Gave it another shot a month after it came out (still hated it), tried after sp1 (still hated it). So when I went to try Win 7 I was really hoping I wasn't going to hate it, and I didn't ... for about 3 maybe 3.5 days. It was so much faster, full motion thumbnails in the taskbar even if the app was a movie or 3d game (imagine browsing around the intarwebs with WoW in the background and not worrying to check back to the window every 30 seconds to make sure you haven't died.
Then it happened. It would often lag while there wasn't anything really running, the hard drive would chug non stop as if it was defraging (doesn't stop unless you restart). Media center wouldn't work with my 360 (wtf MS?).
I was often left wondering what in the world my computer was doing and why it wasn't doing only the things I wanted it to do.
Finally about 30 minutes ago it happened. I rebooted after installing andlinux and I got a black screen of no boot death.
I'll be going back to a custom iso of Winxp SP3 thank you very much.
I've said for years now that Microsoft does not sell software - it sells lies.
Windows 7 is Windows Vista with a cosmetic upgrade, some fixes, and a couple new, totally uninteresting features (yeah, I'm really waiting for touchscreen so I can act like Tom Cruise!)
They couldn't sell you Vista so now they're making you wait another two years or so so they can - sell you Vista - because you don't want to keep using XP for the next ten years.
It's that simple.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Has windows 7 been released to the consumer masses already? Didn't they just finish announcing its name a couple of weeks ago? Wow, that's fast. I thought Vista was still the flagship product on the market.
Oh, it's not out yet? Then why the hell are we talking about what windows 7 "is", if nobody can buy and use it TODAY? Obviously it won't be the same by whenever it eventually comes out. You guys are just playing into Microsoft's marketing desires by speaking about a pipe dream as though it were already present reality.
b
myselfmusic
Wait, so it's the same speed as Vista with all the debugging code active?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that mean there *are* performance increases under the hood? If it's beating their old OS while debug code is on I take that as a *very good* sign.
There not even done tweaking the kernel yet, which you can tell if you watch the PDC videos.
No, sorry. I had it on 2 new systems, different makes, different hardware. Sucked on both, BIG time. Putting it on a decenet box is the equivalent of buying the latest Porsche and putting a foot worth of concrete in it, removing all gears but 3rd and fueling it with a 50/50 mix of diesel and petrol.
"You moved the mouse - Accept/Deny?" was really NOT a joke. Whoever allowed that out on the market ought to be hung by his gonads with some extra weight around his ankles.
While I'm at it, same treatment for the jerk who decided we need a whole new UI for Office 2007- WTF? They changed it ALL, including keyboard shortcuts (oh nooo, we can't have anyone actually "productive" now - they won't buy the upgrade). No wonder the uptake of OOo 3 went through the roof - I installed it myself to get some work done.
I don't need DRM, I don't need sounds when I log on/off (the first to go when I get a new setup) because I'm not employed to advertise for them, I don't need animated cursors, I don't need fancy graphics if they get in the way of. simply. getting. my. work. done.
Will someone PLEASE come up with a suitable Outlook/Exchange replacement that does calendaring (don't mention Evolution, please), and PDQ? It's the whole reason "management" has decided it needs MS - the rest of our stuff runs on either Unix or Linux and simply works..
Why the hell isn't IBM doing something with Lotus? The interface sucks seven ways to Sunday but the damn thing works and is so secure that banks still prefer to use it. If someone could actually get serious about the interface (or maybe code a decent API so open code could use the platform as core) I'm sure there would be interest, it's IMHO the one thing from stopping Linux becoming a business desktop. All IMHO, of course.
Sigh.
MS sells hope - someone said this already. Hope that maybe the next version is better, and we're so addicted to this hope that we blindly buy new hardware and waste a fortune in productivity. Yet they have not delivered since Worries for Workgroups - so from a track record perspective you shouldn't have gone near them. Yet we do. Weird.
Unbelievable.
Insert
...but experience has shown that whenever someone starts a sentence with the word "Umm", odds are 96.3% they will be a total asshole in the rest of the post.
I see you are no exception. Kudos for making a good point, but you still come off like a total douche.
And why do people type out the word "umm"? Are you trying to compose your thoughts but your backspace key is broken?
And no 'defective by design' tag yet?
Can someone explain to me why this is Version 7?
The first usable Windows version was 3, then 3.1, then 3.11, then NT, then 95, then 98 ((both first and second edition), ME, 2000, XP (various flavors), 2003, Vista, then finally, Version 7? Did they use old Pentium chips to do the counting? In actuality, aren't they up to 12?
Since when is improving interface speed and responsiveness not an improvement in interaction efficiency? Sounds like a necessary change.
...especialy when the bloggers comparison of OS performance is based on a video encoding benchmark. I'm suprised that I havent seen anyone call this bloger a clown yet. You shouldn't be allowed to publish benchmark results if you rode to school on the short bus, even if you happened to be the smartest kid on it.
"His name was James Damore."
I remember installing XP, wiping Windows ME then complaining in forums about the performance of XP, even on up-to-date 2001 hardware and 256mb of ram.
This is why the anti-vista backlash makes me laugh. We went through this with NT5, but nobody seems to remember.
The problem is (and this is more than a hunch) is with vista is it has shitty disk i/o (Of course file copy performance is a clue) and this causes most of the lag that users are experiencing. I'd like to point out Linux distributions that are slower on identical hardware (points finger at ubunutu) as both the distro and the kernel get more complex. Because the speed of your storage devices seems to have a huge impact. I've just moved my Vista SP1 disk image to on a fast ssd and suddenly it's booting as fast as XP, and there is no noticeable delay for anything.
I wonder if Windows 7 is getting up to sneaky tricks, like more prefetch/superfetch trickery: Perhaps it is precaching the target of a link when you mouseover it, to make it load instantly? I have long had a suspicion that Teh Snappy(tm) is a prefetch illusion, but this would top that!
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
.
64 Bit Vista Premium at $1000
15" Screen
2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB RAM
320 GB HDD
256 MB NVIDA 9200M Graphics
LightScribe DVD Burner
Integrated webcam, HDMI, Firewire, etc. HP 15.4'' Pavilion
64 Bit Vista Premium at $1600
18" screen
2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB RAM
2 250 GB HDDs
Combo Blu-Ray BD Play and DVD Burner
512 MB NVIDIA 9600M Graphics
Integrated fingerprint reader, etc. HP 18.4'' Pavilion
The point to this exercise being that the "high end" hardware demanded by a Windows OS does not remain high end for very long.
If you are serious about testing Win 7 - as a consumer OS - you should be looking at realistic projections for the OEM hardware and software bundle.
Or is it "Mojave?"
Then quite simply....don't upgrade your operating system. No one is forcing you to buy Vista or upgrade to the latest version of . If something comes out that requires a new operating system, you have a simple choice...do without that something, or upgrade that beige hunk of junk under the desk.
I'll be the first to admit there is plenty of fat in need of trimming in Vista. For what it is, it could run better on 1GB of RAM. (And from what I have seen in 7, some of that fat has actually been trimmed). I still think the demaands are fairly reasonable.
Offhand, I can think of 3 major resource hogs that justify the need for more resources: Search Indexing, Sidebar, and Aero. All of which can be quite useful (Aero is a *little* more than eye candy, and has potential to be very useful if properly utilized by applications), and all of which consume a decent amount of resources, even if they are optimized a bit better. I'm no expert, and I'm guessing you aren't either, so I can only speculate here. Search Indexing will add a pretty constant CPU and memory tax...and it could probably be better, when I have Google Desktop installed it's definately less noticable than Window's indexing...but not by a large margin. Side bar is a collection of small applications which is like having a bunch of extra crap open, which is simply more resources used...there may be some optimization that can go on there, but how much? Aero has the most obvious performance implications, but since 7 has trimmed it down to about a third, I would say there is plenty of bloat there.
So there are 3 major justifications for the extra resources needed. Then there is all the background stuff that gets changed, enhanced, added, etc. Some of which is not necessary for most people, but some is, and some of it is very useful.
So that's why I think it's fairly reasonable that it needs so many resources. I've used several recent Linux distros and OS X, and comparing what they all offer for the performance, they are relatively close in line, with Windows having a bit of flab around the midsection.. You can agree or disagree and call me crazy all you want.
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Offhand, I can think of 3 major resource hogs that justify the need for more resources: Search Indexing, Sidebar, and Aero. All of which can be quite useful (Aero is a *little* more than eye candy, and has potential to be very useful if properly utilized by applications), and all of which consume a decent amount of resources, even if they are optimized a bit better.
But I can have search indexing, desktop widgets (a lot of them) and desktop effects (I can't say whether they're the same par as Aero since I haven't used Vista too much) all run fine on 512MB RAM with Linux. I don't see the justification for the extra 1 and a half GB to make it run acceptably (Yes, I've seen it run on 1GB, it runs but is very slow).
Side bar is a collection of small applications which is like having a bunch of extra crap open, which is simply more resources used...there may be some optimization that can go on there, but how much?
The widgets in sidebar are basically equivalent to desktop widgets (Or screenlets, plasmoids, whatever the individual implementation is called) on Linux or OS X, not a new or novel idea, or something that can't be done without using too much resources.
That said, I'm obviously no expert, I've not even used Vista that much, (Although when I did use it I was amazed by the bloat), really I'm just glad that Windows 7 should be an improvement on it. It's beginning to look like Windows 7 is turning out to be what Windows Vista should have been.
it is good enough to keep it. I had tested Vista /w sp1 on the same computer but generally uninstalled it the same day. I just couldn't live with all that bloat and 30+ windows in networking. But I have this pre-beta on the wind for 10 days now.
Windows 7 (build 6801) is completely another animal. I'll concede right away its not windows xp. But it is no worse either.
Firstly, most of the bloat is gone. Networking has at least half of the windows cut down and selecting a wireless network is much more simpler now (almost like os x). Still there are problems which are carried over from vista (not xp, evidence that 7 is based on vista). For example: 60sec lag spike is still present which makes web browsing less pleasant than on the xp and online gaming impossible which isn't a small deal. I just cannot fathom why still they haven't fixed it. The problem was present at least from Vista RC1, and today it thrives in 7 too. There are other issues too (including major ones) but its late and I want to write about other stuff.
Windows explorer has some new features which is nothing but bloat unfortunately. Almost all the new gains in UI are offset with this. Why on earth there is Favorites, Libraries and Homegroup in the folder list (left part of explorer)? They cannot be removed and all of them are placed above (My) Computer and your local disks which are used the most. And every time you open explorer, Libraries are open by default. This is completely unacceptable.
Task bar is new and by default it is two rows high and only shows icons. This is a bad decision to have this by default. You can switch to normal windows information display (icon + app title text) and then it looks and handles nicely. Hats off to the guy who designed that cool mouse tracking effect on the taskbar. There are minor aesthetical issues with other taskbar features but this is not a place to expand on it.
They added some new features like creating a recovery disk (which can be used for reimaging from a backup, finally!), new backup and restore application (to make backups/images), character editor, keyboard shortcut to connect a projector or an external display (pretty slick and useful actually, win-p), new calculator (I like xp power toy one better though) etc.
Other than that, stability is great in this 10 days. Haven't had one single problem. All hardware devices were recognized and drivers automatically installed once you connected to the internet. Battery lasts at least as long on the xp, maybe even more because the indicator says that at full charge battery will last for 2:20 (vs 2:00 with xp). And yes, power management was streamlined, but that could be done even further though. And finally, yes, it runs very very well on Wind, just as xp. Contrary to Vista which feels very slow most of the time, and extremely slow some of the time.
Just to conclude the post. Win 7 is windows on the right track. Vista definitely was like Me, but 7 is not to Vista as xp was to 98. It is something in between. It is not bad at all (even this early, but as a sidenote, I don't think they will change much after this pre-beta), but it is not game changing like xp was to 98. At the same time one could say that 7 will be a good replacement for aged xp. It will be what vista should have been from day one. But I still long for a real desktop mac, more customizable os x, and lower prices in europe at least...
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
And you're a niche market that Microsoft and Apple do not care about. Why is it not acceptable? I have a ton of resources and I like my OS to be shiny, thats right I like it! So do millions of other users.
What is unreasonable here is geeks running Linux on 8 year old PCs claiming the whole world of software engineering should cater to them only.
So clearly the sizzle is more important than the steak.
The Aero effects are probably the biggest difference. They are considerably more 'heavy' than the effects I've seen in desktop Linux. Much more on par with OS X with the amount of manipulation, shading, etc. (and OS X generally has a fairly well-specced system behind it). I can't give a complexity comparison for the gadget/widget apps on Linux, but from what I've seen Sidebar gadgets do, I can say it's significantly more robust than what I've seen Google Desktop do.
And then you get into the background stuff...as others have mentioned, Windows runs a lot of extra services many people do not need, where Linux generally does not generally even install them until you get an application that needs them (And fortunately the prerequsite checking in Linux is very nice and effective, otherwise this could be disasterous to a regular user).
I do think you will see some of the improvements you are looking for in Windows 7. I can personally verify that Aero (dwm.exe) uses a lot less RAM and seems more responsive. I have also heard discussion about 7 coming pre-loaded with fewer services and applications. (Unfortuantely that is just Windows, not the manufacturers loating less crapware on them).
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Windows 7 is just Win Vista with some changes, most notably a new task bar. We don't buy an upgrade PC's OS for a new task bar.
Vista is still as problematic as it ever was. Nothing so far from any modifications to Vista has it cleared up issues that everyone has been having. Most of the updates appear to be around the WGA (Windows Genuine Agony) and were adjusted to give Microsoft even more control over your computer.
There is no need for Windows 7 at this point. Essentially the brand is dying as it rightly should considering that Microsoft got into their position as a monopoly using illegal practices.
As long as Vista contains 47+ programs and a massive DRM infection it is a no go for anyone. Your computer is an extension of your home and there's no reason, no need, to provide Microsoft with a hidden camera view into what you are doing.
As long as Microsoft doesn't understand this they'll loose. There are options. Ubuntu is a solid well designed OS with all the necessary features necessary to take full advantage of your computer for every day (day in and day out) use.
People need to be made aware of the choices and the simplification of Linux. We all benefit, we all win, when you use the resources provided by the community instead of using an OS that is riddled with lock-in technologies meant to deny you choice. Windows is designed to deny you choice due to the vendor lock in. Choose that which gives you choice.
Windows 7 is Vista with tweaks. There's no need to purchase it as Vista is simply a pig with lipstick.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
...because it's fast.
It's the standard of what fast should be.
I think if Microsoft spent a little more time on helping Windows control its programs, a great deal of the bottleneck would vanish.
even as much as vista sucks the majority of new pc and laptop buyers still find it more desirable than linsux.
that just goes to show how shitty that faggot linsux is.
Since Windows 95, I've been repeatedly trained by M$ that "faster" really means "a few tricks to seem faster but actually slower on the same hardware". I'm a little surprised that anyone listens anymore, let alone wants to test it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
And if you run Vista that is just: Windows key, type calc, enter.
The new start menu is brilliant, you can't deny that.
In time, you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love.
I hate to say this, but it could just be that Vista might not be all that bad. It has been markedly improved since its buggy release, after all. I'd be interested to see how Wista 7 compares to XP.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
I don't know why I'm posting my whines here, because it's not going to solve the problem unfortunately no matter how passionate I am about it,.. anyhow on to my post.
I'm a dork / nerd / geek, when I use a computer it is abso-freaking-loutely paramount to me that the machine is responsive, infact the best description I have is that I want the ONLY thing slowing me down when using a computer, to be me, not the machine, period.
I'm a keyboard freak, I'm fast navigating Windows, very fast, I'll have no modesty here, other colleagues refer to me as 'freak'.
Now I'm also a gamer, I'm a guy who torrents his TV shows and I do all kinds of use that I figure most of us 'nerds' do on here.
I'm always in Windows explorer, I'm extracting files, I'm moving my porn from one drive to another, I'm sorting my TV shows, I'm downloading something, I'm helping fix a mates machine and backing up his drive to mine, formatting, copying back etc
Ultimately, my point is that I need my machine to help me do my stuff, be it work or pleasure.
I always always use Windows classic interface, in the most basic of possible views, it's details view, classic UI, classic start menu and although some of you may hate it, my windows are always always maximised.
The point to all this is that when I do use the mouse or the keyboard, my functions are in identical places, my windows explorer windows are always the same size and shape and all my controls are always where I want them, it's consistency and with consistency comes my ability to rely upon the system.
I adore Windows XP now, it's not flawless but fully patched on a monster machine it's a fairly damned responsive system.
Will Windows 7 be as good for people like me? There still is a lot of us geeks out there, in desktop admin, desktop SOE designer, windows server admin positions etc.
The majority of my colleagues also use classic UI, a vast majority of people I work with dislike XP's Luna theme, let alone Vista's Aero interface.
So with most of these flashy operating systems, increasing the speed of an animation isn't going to really help us, if it's fluid or not what we need is smart design and consistency.
I tried Mac OSX a while back on my Dell laptop and I was very, very impressed with the 'file | edit | view' menu, or whatever it's called being in a consistent position up the top, for all applications, this is what Windows needs.
Also, as for animations, if you want to have an animation, I want it so I can perform the action on the animated item before the animation is even complete. (example fade in / out start menu)
Windows Vista added breadcrumbs, removed the green 'up' arrow and removed the 'folders' button, it also cluttered up the interface.
All in classic mode, frankly it's appalling, I couldn't hack it, I tried 3 times but it's just not good enough.
So, what will Windows 7 do which is actually FASTER and easier than XP? I think it's going to be difficult to do almost anything quicker as long as stuff is all animated, to some extent it's hindering you.
If you want to compare apples-to-apples, why don't you compare the Windows 7 pre-beta to the Vista pre-beta.
Oh, Yeah. There it is.
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If they named the different editions after Clippy avatars. That way they'd be collectible. You know, like Pokemon cards.
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Well, I'm fine with it. Your gripes don't seem to be performance related, at least the specific ones, and those are all things you can change if you don't like them. I'm not gonna shill for Vista here, but it's tolerable. I have no major gripes. It runs stable (for me anyways) and performance seems fine. I rarely find myself having to accept/deny actions, and that entire safety feature can be turned off if it bugs you.
As for the new office UI, I could do without that myself -- but that's not *exactly* a vista issue.
But Joe User is going to use Windows 7 on his quad core to type emails. You want to increase his productivity? Score him a few grams of Columbian marching powder. He'll babble incoherently five times as fast as before. That's more "productive", right?
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Most versions of Vista come with an upgrade license that lets you step up to a more responsive, highly evolved system with a more optimized front end. It's called "XP". It lacks some of Vista's fancy DRM features, but I hear it has better compatibility with legacy applications and hardware.
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All operating systems configured from the default installer are bad. They all contain software that's vulnerable, excess services, excess features, apps you won't use.
All operating systems purchased pre-installed from OEMs are bad. They contain all of the above, plus all the applications that anybody was willing to pay on the disk.
What an average user needs in the real world is somebody between him and the vendors to cut out the extraneous, useless and outright harmful stuff they include, build in all of the latest patches and his required software, mount his documents folders in a separate partition or network share, and create a reliable system image for quick restore in case of disaster (one on the machine for quick restore, one on offline storage for redundancy).
This is a service. Enterprises do it. We need it for the common man and we need to educate the common man that it's worth the expense. An installer even an idiot can use is an installer only an idiot would want to.
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I think I have something in my eye.
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Look at what his technology leadership has done to influence hardware and software purchases in Brazil... and Peru... And Russian Schools... and Africa... and China...
We need the guy. I say let him stay. We can afford a few thousand bucks a year for new chairs. The kind of influence that can turn entire countries to open source in a single contact cannot be replaced.
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Since they're still selling XP on netbooks for the forseeable future (throughout the life of W7, and maybe beyond), it seems likely they'll be providing patches, well, forever in PC terms.
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I think you'll find that for a lot of these metrics, IOPS count for a lot. The number of times you can ask a disk for information and get it in a second varies right now between 30 and 80. The new flash media up that figure by a factor of 1000 without resorting to high end bleeding edge hardware. That's the advantage of "solid state" in "Solid State Disk".
When we move to SSD, the Vista Disadvantage may go away. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they're about two years ahead of the production and price/volume curve here. Maybe they should delay it.
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Let's hope they also worked on the "won't run my critical apps", "won't work the the hardware I own" and "Won't connect to my server" problems. When they solve those, then it'll be as good as XP!
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So by the new criteria an old OS with a new desktop theme is a new OS. Especially if it runs much slower and requires 4x the processor power and RAM. We can't have the new technology give us cool new stuff that's screaming fast. That would go against 20 years of industry practice.
Wait six months or so before passing judgement on this thing.
You're not from around here, are you?
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It makes it even more insulting when you keep getting the annoying reminders which eventually have the "reboot later" option greyed out, giving you no choice but to stop what you're doing for a few minutes.
This is a configuration option your IT department made. Windows Vista doesnt ship that way. Your complaint is with your company.
Even then, what happens if that latest "critical update to IE" breaks a driver and your system won't boot?
This is extraordinaly rare. Extremely, extremely rare.
And even then, its your IT department making the choice of balance between risk and time-to-patch.
Given that this has been happening (ie, patches) monthly for years now, if your IT folks dont have a quick-response plan to the very rare failure like this, then they're not doing a very good job.
Your first complaint is absolutely right though. It's ridiculous they havent fixed that issue yet, considering how many other operating systems have figured it out.
I rarely find myself having to accept/deny actions, and that entire safety feature can be turned off if it bugs you.
Vista strikes me as worse from a security perspective than XP. There is more going on in the background that I don't know of, and more of *MY* data is accessed when I'm not using it than is warranted or I would like to permit. Switching off the above "features" is digging a deeper hole.
Another thing I intensely disliked (past tense - I ripped it out) was that Vista would literally "disappear" on me, I'd have no reaction from the system for seconds at the time, both on quite powerful more-than-ready-for-Vista systems. After a few secs it would catch up, but I question a system that I have to wait for when it is so fast it has a gazillion cycles spare between each keystroke.
Anyway, good for you. I have a sysadmin who can also get it to work to a reasonable degree (at which point we hit the UI changes in Vista :-) but he does have to work for it. Out of the box performance is crap. We've left most of our systems in XP, and quite a few desktops in dev don't even use Windows anymore. What they need they'll do in Wine, and the rest is Linux, as is almost everything in production..
And I've got OOo 3 installed now which works for me. May not work for everyone but I prefer that over having to waste hours finding where the hell they stuck the stuff I really need without an option to restore the previous interface. I'm all for change that is gradual and not in a way that it impedes me..
Insert
oh?
For how long?
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They are doing the wrong benchmarks. As usual.
The speed of an operating system is not benchmarked with a "video encoding test". Video encoding is a CPU intensive task, and all operating systems but the very worst (hmmmm. I've got a point there...) will be able to give say 95% plus of the CPU to a CPU intensive task.
Video encoding is a benchmark to compare different CPUs. Or possibly different compilers.
The "feel-speed" of an operating system is important. And this IS very difficult to benchmark.
Priceless... The thread is titled "Is Windows 7 Faster Just Smarter?" and people are talking about Apple.
Poor Microsoft just can't get any attention!
Said it...
I cant believe its 2008 and Slashdot is still debating the importance of a fast responsive UI.
Are you kidding me?
I totally agree. Two things have always plagued my Windows experience since 3.1:
Windows popping up and stealing focus. This can be as innocent as Windows Live Messenger belatedly signing in after some lag and stealing focus from my current window, or as malicious as taskbar/update harassment.
User Interface lag due to terrible resource priorities. Then after Windows decides it's done grinding, all of those commands you made go off nearly all at once after being queued up. It's not like Windows didn't recognize the users clicks and button presses, it just flat out ignored them. Ever been typing in Word when Windows is suddenly seized with a fit of hard drive grinding and lag? Then everything you typed for the last 5 seconds comes flying onto the page? Yeah.
The FIRST rule of a good UI should be that almost nothing takes priority over user commands and their current window focus.
Germans take everything seriously.
Seriously.
In my experience, the truth is halfway between your and GP's views:
If you pick somewhat reputable vendors, outright defects are rare. In particular, the Kingston modules GP complains about have always worked fine for me. But having to update BIOSes and drivers to work around bugs is not unusual.
Finally, there are cases where components are out of spec by design and you need to know about it. Consider overclocker DDR3 memory (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3448&p=7) for instance. If you use these components as advertised, you may end up with a fried CPU. In that case, I do think it is fault of the aftermarket parts producers unless they include a big fat warning about known problems (in this case, Intel CPUs that may not survive the higher memory voltage).
C - the footgun of programming languages
I'm serious about wanting the vendors to point out the pitfalls. After all, they market their stuff for a wide audience, not just through typical business-to-business channels. In that situation, I think they have a responsibility to try and warn people about side effects.
In my example, a half-educated person might be led to believe the increased voltage for the overclocker parts is normal. So you have Joe Sixpack who has some experience with overclocking but is not a real engineer. His reasoning goes as follows:
-OK, these Corsair modules are specified for clock speeds over the standard. Should be fine.
-The CPU is known to handle higher clock speeds well, let's go ahead.
But what he does not know is the little detail that the voltage specified for the memory is outside the spec for DDR3 and the memory controller of the Intel CPU might be killed by it.
In case of BIOS and driver updates, I had one case where it was definitely necessary. Several years ago, I bought a cheap mainboard with VIA chipset to replace a broken one in an older PC. Unfortunately, that particular chipset tended to lose data on the PCI bus under high load (got some publicity back then). Fortunately, there was a software workaround in form of a new driver.
C - the footgun of programming languages
You shouldn't be encoding your video as you stream it anyway, because you're probably going to want to edit it before packing it up.
Not all video is tape-delayed for editing. Some is actually live.
Further, the hardware these days generally does the encoding
As far as I know, hardware can usually encode a given feed at only one point on the rate/distortion curve at once. If you want to provide live streams for low- and high-bandwidth viewers, you have to transcode.
You just proved my point for me -- in this case, you are knowingly using parts designed to be out of spec. I happen to feel the manufacturers should be disallowed from doing such stupid things, but that's just me, and this still shouldn't be held as a negative against a "PC" (as this thread was originally about).
As for the BIOS update issue, I have a feeling (from 13 years of building computers as a profession, not just a hobby) that having to do so for such an error is rather rare. A quick google search did not turn up any hits about the specific issue you're talking about so I can't tell if it was limited to "bargain basement" type parts or something higher-end.
bork bork bork!
What is unreasonable here is geeks running Linux on 8 year old PCs claiming the whole world of software engineering should cater to them only.
Yeah, way to totally mis-state the issue.
The issue is, that there appears to be *no* functional justification for Vista being so sluggish. If it was getting much more functionality and /or speed running with 2Gb RAM than Linux with 512M then that would be fine. But it's not getting either. So it's not making the best of *current* hardware.
A quote from a few posts bach:
My point is that some out-of-spec parts are marketed without explicit (enough) hints that they are out of spec and that the vendors bear some responsibility for the resulting mess.
But if we assume that you know what you're doing and take the time to read the reviews, then I agree that a self-assembled PC can be quite reliable. The same goes for pre-assembled PCs where the vendor knows what he is doing. Unfortunately, you rarely get to look at the parts list, so you don't know what mainboard, RAM and power supply are included (IMHO the three hardware parts most likely to cause trouble).
C - the footgun of programming languages
Windows 7 is, in fact staggeringly fast and responsive. The testing that these people have done is just incredibly irrelevant. In Vista x64, it takes about 4 seconds to launch Firefox, on a clean install for me. In windows 7 Build 6801 for me, it is INSTANT. Same with every other application I have launched from Windows 7. This is not to mention the fantastic new taskbar and much improved and "cleaned" explorer, as well as the new tray and window management, which is extremely useful. So what if you don't shave time off your encodes? Prove to me that Linux or Mac OS are faster in this area. I find launching applications and the UI much snappier in Win7 Build 6801 x64 than Ubuntu 8.10 x64 or any previous release of any linux distro, unless it is like DSL or Puppy or something, but they don't really count, do they? I'm sick of the hate. This is a fantastic release.
Vista isn't sluggish, that is why you have missed the point. If you throw the hardware at it, Vista runs like a champ. Vista is only sluggish if you have less than 2gig of ram, and less than a reasonably new dual core cpu, neither of which is a very costly upgrade.
Face it, Vista and osx, and ubuntu for that matter (to a lesser extent) all have a very intensive overhead... If your expectation is that you shouldn't need an upgrade to run them. They have high overhead because they do lots of things, its debatable whether they need to or not but millions of users out there say they like it this way. If you want modular go with linux, I'm sure you already do.
Examples:
I see no trickiness here:
-- dnl
this is an old MS trick -- they publish and document it when writing software for their platform -- you need to give the user feedback 'action' -- so they think the computer is doing something -- this is part of the reason why progress bars on windows jump all over the place -- they don't really indicate %done, often, but often crude estimations like trying to decide how much of your file system you've done a find through by only looking at the TLD's. Well when it gets to the "W"'s, it might take a bit longer to enumerate the Windows dir unless they build-in a pre-fudge.
The point is that Vista-V7 (aka Vista v2, windows 7) isn't going to get faster unless the hardware speeds up. MS has added some new layers of mis^h^h^hindirection between the HW and SW -- mostly for DRM purposes. They needed to secure -- and not screw it up or hollywood wouldn't trust them as a distribution platform. Just like several months back... the auto-record features built-in to media player and the Win-Media player versions -- they needed to ensure that they would properly NOT record digital broadcast programs off the air when NBC(of MSNBC) "accidently" turned on the do not allow local time-shifting or recording "flag". They want to prove the superiority of the Windows platform to deliver content by having superior DRM controls on windows which will be slow enabled over time -- but to do all that they had to totally change the driver layer -- disallowing all old XP drivers (except maybe in some degraded compat mode), and get HW manufacturers to only release MS certified drivers. Only drivers certified by MS to conform to MS's security standard will get a signature -- so only signed drivers can be used in a trusted path. It might be the case that if *any* untrusted drivers are loaded, some content providers my disallow playback. It's all about control and prying more rights away from consumers.
We are living a world with mostly fixed resources. The only way for companies to 'grow' (a requirement for businesses in the real world or die -- stagnation isn't good enough) is to further subdivide the rights you already have and and get you(the consumer) used to paying for smaller and smaller portions --
It's like in the US-NorCal region, at least, both Pepsi and Coke (thus virtually all soft drinks) switch from a common 12-pack (advertised to fit perfectly in the fridge -- it did), to an 8-pack (which doesn't, to fill up the same space you need to buy 3 packs and put one sideways in the back. Less ideal, more packaging, more waste). But it allows them to raise the price the per-unit price by 25%, while reducing the package cost by 8% (approx). You can't have major packs of food going for more than certain 'magic amounts' people are used to -- the magic amounts go up slowly, but the other way is to reduce size, and charge near the same...then slowly inch up the price again...repeat.
Perhaps it's just me, but have you ever noticed when some cracker or chip company releases a new flavor of chips or crackers or similar, they'll be bursting with flavor -- then after a promotion period where the advertiser has touted the ALL NEW EXPLOSIVELY INTENSE FLAVOR of NEW XXYZ, the stop adding as much flavoring...and slowly over a 6-12 month period the amount of flavoring drops off till you almost need a an unflavored variety eaten side-by-side to the flavored variety to detect any difference at all.
The effects on this are 'two-fold'. 1), For the consumer who craves the new taste -- they slowly need to start taking more and more of the drug, er, food, to get the same 'taste-fix'. This goes on until the new product is 'cut' too much with non-flavor stuff (white-bread cracker filler - empty carbs and unhealthy (saturated or trans) oils).
The unhealthy oils are used because because the 'healthy oils' (like hemp oil, flax-seed oil, evening primrose, some fish oils, that have Essential Daily Fatty Acids (just as "Essential" as vitamins) have short shelf-lives (on the orde
link. Peru gets xp.
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