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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."
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
Not just those moments... but the moments following it that involve Ctrl-Alt-Del and a lot of cursing at your machine.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I agree. I would like to see the same tests run on XP and see how much of an improvement it offers. I would imagine some, but not a whole lot.
I installed a leaked copy of Windows 7 on a test box and the UI is definately more responsive...not a huge difference but noticable. The dwm.exe (Dreaded Windows Manager, is what I call it) for the UI uses a hell of a lot less memory than it did before. But aside from that, some minor dialog box changes, it just seems like Vista to me. Which is fine, I haven't had any real issues with Vista in the last year now that stable hardware drivers exist for pretty much everything. Granted I don't try to run it on crap systems with less than 2GB of RAM, either. Although my 7 test box only has 1GB of RAM.
I'm waiting for a version with the new taskbar to come out, to see if it's actually worth a squat or not. Oh, they did put the fancy ribbon UI on paint, wordpad, etc. Updated calculator, too. I guess they figured it was time to update them since they remained pretty much the same since 3.1....
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Try installing Ubuntu or OpenSuSE sometime. I'll admit the Windows Vista installer is pretty good, but if and ONLY if your system has one hard drive installed. If you have multiple hard drives it'll barf until you disconnect the others. The problem is it only wants to see one possible install target on one interface. I've seen this on multiple systems and the first time I ran into it I thought I did something wrong until I queried google and found many other folks had run into the same issue.
Nothing particularly unusual. Ran into this on the Asus P5Q3 Deluxe WiFi (ICH10 and Silicon Image), P5B Deluxe WiFi (ICH8R and Marvell), and the Foxconn 945P7AA-8EKRS2 (ICH7R and ITE).
Ubuntu, Centos, OpenSuSE, Win2k3, and heck, even Windows XP doesn't have this problem of choking when multiple mass storage devices are installed on multiple interfaces. Only Vista.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Err... which Window Manager are you using? One of Linux's greatest strengths is it's plethora of options. If your running compiz-fusion on top of gnome, then yes there may be some slow down. Try something like openbox and then try to tell me with a straight face that the interface isn't responsive.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Unfortunately, in some cases, UI responsiveness directly affects actual performance.
I was surprised to discover one day that running builds with lots of compiler output in a gnome-terminal (I believe KDE's terminal was the same) was significantly slower than running it in a text console. (Actually it was a Windows friend who was pointing out one of the deficiencies in Linux, but that's another story).
Anyway, turns out xterm is still probably one of the best X terminal programs out there, especially in terms of performance. I think one of the ways it's able to get this speed is with something it calls "jump scroll". Though if I recall correctly, even with jump scroll off xterm outperformed many of the other terminals.
What I think is happening in the other terminals is that they're actually causing the main application to block as their writing to the screen. If that's the case... well it's very dumb. Sorry I don't have actual performance numbers anymore... it's been a while since I've looked at it. In fact it was probably around the FC2 or FC3 days, so who knows maybe it's been fixed since then?
I'm using Gnome with Metacity. The problem isn't the window manager itself though. That effects the general menu system and window decorations and such. For instance just opening/closing tabs in Firefox (an operation independent of your window manager) feels much slower in Linux because you hit close and there's a bit of "clunky" period for a fraction of a second where you see everything happen that you shouldn't. The tab lingers for a brief instant after pressing the button, then disappears, the tab listing blinks out for a split second and updates, and the window content blinks quickly and then updates again. In Windows or Mac the same operation is much more seamless. I hit close, and everything instantly appears right. While there probably isn't much appreciable time difference involved between the start and finish of the operation, there's a clunkiness that gives the appearance of a slower system.
BTW, I've used fast window managers before. My favorite used to be WindowMaker which I programmed in heavily. However, I've gotten past that phase. My computer is many times faster, and Windows and Mac give me a fairly responsive UI with all the menus and such of a modern system. Shaving off that functionality (which I do want) to supposedly regain performance that I'd already have with another platform isn't a viable option.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You're very right there. I always use xterm or rxvt (which is also very fast) for my terminal windows. Konsole and the Gnome Terminal are both much, much slower.
As a side note though, it's the screen updates that kill your performance. I get similar problems when compiling over an SSH session where network latency limits how much can be written out at a time. My little fix there is to simply redirect the output to /dev/null. That way the regular text doesn't have to be sent back (speeding up the process), but error text (which is written to a different buffer) is still shown. emerge --sync on my Gentoo boxes runs noticeably faster when doing this.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I have always stripped out all the "enhancements" except shadows under the fonts on the desktop, and always used "classic" gui for this exact reason. I also configure NO system sounds. It isn't about "faster", it is about "more responsive". My XP looks like 95. As for Vista, never bought it, never will. The wife has it on a laptop with modest amounts of eye candy settings, and I can't stand to use it. The OS is supposed to run applications, it isn't supposed to be k3wL. ~~~~
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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
Y'know, having briefly been part of the freebie-grabbing online reviewing circuit, I've got to say that it just does not matter. Serious journos are so saturated in free tat that it becomes utterly meaningless, while the half-rate bloggers running home excited at their free laptop are unlikely to make much of a PR impact anyway. Ultimately free stuff just devalues the product in the reviewer's mind. It's the all-expenses-paid promo junkets that worry me more.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
That's the thing - modern UI's AREN'T all slow.
It's not the effects - I generally keep those off anyways (why I'm using Metacity rather than Compiz/Fusion). Apple's OS X for example uses tons of effects and doesn't have the same slow feel to it. It's the smoothness and rendering that's an issue. When I do something on Windows or Mac, it either happens instantly, or there's a very smooth transition from one state to the other. On Linux it's often a bunch of blips where crazy things happen in that area and it all ends up correct at the end, but it had a klunkyness to it that created the perception of slowness.
For example, if I maximize a window: I consider it fine if the window either instantly appears at the new size (no effects), or does a smooth transition from one size to another (effects). What I don't like though is when I hit the maximize button, and I catch a brief glimpse of the window frame jump to the new size, after which the window background color expands to fill the window, and then the icons and other widgets all expand out to fill the new size of the frame.
All that stuff might occur in the same timeframe as a smooth effect would have (most LCD displays these days run at 60hz, so with 60 frames sent out to the display every second it's pretty easy to notice multiple frames doing odd things even if the actual time of the operation occurs very quickly), or on a no effects system it might have just delayed that long before updating. On the Linux system though, I'm subject to a constantly plethora of such displays.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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 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.
Can you give some examples of OS X being "slow" and unable to be turned off? Windows aggravates me to no end, but I can't think of any graphics "gimmicks" in OS X then get in the way (or at least that I still have enabled)
And yes Macs cost more and are of higher quality than bargain bin PCs. This has nothing to do with the article or the quality of the OS. If you had a real point you just killed it by trolling.
I much prefer using SSH or an SSH tunnel personally, I only use remote desktop as a "last resort".
Also, I fully expect a full-desktop GUI to be slow and somewhat bandwidth heavy and unresponsive. Remote Desktop is like this, but I don't hold that against it.
The problem with Remote Desktop is that (at least in Vista) the Windows key regularly gets 'stuck' down on the remote machine. This is apparently a known and ignored yet huge bug. The only way I can un-stick the key is using the Accessories->On-Screen Keyboard. And because I use virtual desktops (windows+up/down/left/right) I had to do this almost every time I went to the screen with Remote Desktop on it.
It also dropped the connection frequently, but I'm 99% sure that was the spotty internet connection at that job, not a windows problem.
True story:
I worked at a place once where they had a bunch of Macs running System 7. People used to complain that they were dog slow, and indeed they were compared to the Win95 boxes we had because, hey, they were about three years older.
In an effort to at least show willing when asked to "do something" - I'd turn off extensions and stuff in an effort to get them to run a bit better. One day, I turned off the default menu "flashing" on a couple of machines to see if that made any difference. That was the only change I made.
You guessed it: the next day, the users of those machines thanked me for how fast their workstations were now running, and when I applied the "fix" for everyone, the Mac users bought me pizza for lunch.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"