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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.
Oh... we know what happens. Scroll down to the bit about SimCity.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
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
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
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.