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."

Comments

Re:Perhaps this alpha releases uses Vistas kernel?

[jcr]

they update all the eye candy first to get the drooling masses interested

Frankly, I don't believe the drooling masses exist. The only people I see pretending to be drooling over MS's second-rate eye candy are the pundits that they're bribing with cash and free equipment, and they really don't sound convincing.

-jcr

Re:Worse than that.

[MBGMorden]

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.