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Performance Tests Show Early Windows 7 Build Beats Vista
The Other A.N. Other writes "How does the latest build of Windows 7 stack up against Windows Vista? The answer seems to be very well if the benchmarks run by ZDNet are anything to go by. If Microsoft keeps up the good then Windows 7 should be head and shoulders better than Vista. 'What we have here is one set of data points for one particular system, but I think that the results are very promising. The fact that Windows 7 comes out on top in three out of four of these tests at this early stage is very promising indeed. The boot time and PCMark Vantage results are particularly good.'"
From my tests, not all Vista drivers were 100% compatible with 6.1 (I refuse to call it "7"). I tested some "Vista certified" graphics drivers, and they were real edgy in the latest (leaked) Vista beta. I wonder if the new !backwardscompatible DirectX has anything to do with it, or if Microsoft plans on doing the same to the new WDM.
Then again, it was a beta, and other than that most of my personal kernel code ran fine. Maybe the big-time driver overlords just need more time to catch up with 6.1.
I've been running it x64 for a few weeks and the reports are true. Even when you turn on the aero services and attempt to run it in the more bloated desktop vista config, it is faster.
Just like 2003 ran faster than XP. XP later got 2003's new heap manager, etc, in SP3.
I'd bet Windows 7 performs like 2008 server.
This additional test by the same guy shows that it performs better than XP.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Buy volume licenses of Windows Vista. You will have downgrade rights to legally put WindowsXP on machines that need it. Another part of the problem you may encounter is the lack of device drivers for WindowsXP made available by the computer's maker/seller. I had a problem like this once but was able to get around the problem by downloading drivers for a very similar machine that did have WindowsXP support. But we cannot depend on this to always work. The doors on XP are being forcibly shut... and it is a very unpleasant situation for IT professionals everywhere.
NTFS is supposed to be more resistant to fragmentation than FAT, and I'm not sure it actively needs defragmented. However people have become so used to it from previous versions of Windows that it's something Microsoft have to provide - there was even an outcry over the fact that Vista's defrag utility didn't provide a detailed progress dialog to let people see how much improvement was being made.
Man, I just don't get this. ME really sucked. Vista is stable, has some nice eye candy, and seems to avoid infection better than XP. The only thing against it is a performance hit and driver issues that even a die hard Linux guy will say is not the fault of MS. One of our engineers rants about how much he hates Vista, but it is all silly things like the changed start menu and control panel. We heard the same stuff when XP came out. I can accept someone saying Vista is not a large improvement over XP (and agree) but I really don't get the hate. We run Vista on about 50 PC's, and another 70 have XP, and the Vista machines do not give us any headaches. Maybe I'm doing it wrong? Or is it all UAC? The UAC you can just turn off?
Let's not forget that MS provided RC versions of Vista to manufacturers well in advance of it's commercial release, and yet most of them could not get reasonable drivers for hardware that was made before Vista in time for the launch. IIRC, the launch was even pushed back due to a lack of a good driver base.
For light use, with certain types of workloads, it is really not a big deal. It's certainly not as bad as FAT16 under Windows 95 was. 7200 RPM drives are now common, so seek times are less of an issue than they were with the 5400/4200 RPM drives of yore. NTFS is inherently a better file system than FAT16/32 ever was. And, the specific NTFS implementation in Windows has been carefully tuned by tons of experts over the years such that Windows Vista's NTFS implementation is lightyears ahead of NT4's.
That said, it can still be extremely beneficial to defragment. If you consistently run your drive nearly full, with a high turnover rate for your files, things can become quite badly fragmented. And, depending on what you are doing, that came mean a horrible performance hit. Start a big application with tons of plugins that has to read over a thousand files to start, and the difference can be amazingly noticeable. Try to play a video with a reasonably large buffer, and you may never see the fragmentation issues be bad enough to make the video skip.
So, yes, NTFS is resistant to bad fragmentation. No, it isn't immune.
And, yes, referencing 4200 RPM hard drives is a bit extreme. I know a lot of people were still using FAT by the time that 7200 RPM drives were common. OTOH, they should have known better. In the 21st century, the only justification for FAT was either as a filesystem of last resort for data interchange because so many things could read it, or for running legacy systems where performance wasn't a significant issue.
You can't compare 9x with the NT code line. The only similarity is that they both share the Windows API.
If you want to do a comparison, it would be more interesting to ask why WinNT4 would run on 12MB RAM (128MB really) and 110MB disk, Win2000 ran on 32MB (128MB really) and 650MB disk, XP ran on 64MB (128MB really and 512MB best) and 1.5GB disk, and Vista needs 512MB (1GB really and 2GB+ best) and 15GB disk.
You could run WinNT on 64MB RAM from 3.51 - XP. You could actually *use* WinNT on 128MB, even on XP. You can't really use Vista at all with under 1GB.
Vista Premium Ready: 1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 128MB video, 15GB HD.
Personally, I stopped using 2000 when I was able to a) remove activation/genuine advantage crap and b) get it as fast as 2000. Now it's faster than 2000. With Vista, I can get rid of activation/genuine advantage easier than on XP, but it's slower than XP is.
Vista seriously offers me a single benefit: the x86-64 build is better than XP-64. The 64-bit drivers are just more stable on my hardware.
Businesses dragged their feet on XP because it was upgrades and retesting for no perceived benefit over 2000. Now almost everyone is on XP due to hardware and MS support agreements.
Your UI improvements are subjective. I just hate the new start menu. I hated the XP start menu. I set it back to the 2000 style one every time. I don't use it much, and I don't want toys and widgets getting in my way. I want to click the program and start it running, and nothing more.
Desktop compositing provides some nice graphics toys and a solid useful features (window previews), but the glitches are obnoxious. Many games still make the UI get all screwy and cause DWM to restart.
I do run Vista when I'm in Windows, myself. I turned off all the new UI features, disabled all of the new filesystem services, a good number of background jobs, killed Messenger, the sidebar, the start menu, defender, security center, UAC, etc. I'd turn off Aero, but it makes most of places MS changed kind of hard to use if I do that.
On Ubuntu, I leave everything pretty stock. I change the color scheme and turn off the logon sounds. It doesn't get in my way.
When 7 comes out, I will consider trying it, but I'll do the same wait and see. It almost took two years before Vista was usable for me. I don't expect to be using it Win7 before 2010. That will make it 10 years since a version of Windows was released that I used because I *wanted* to, and not because I didn't really have a choice.
If they are lucky, it might be the first time since Win95 that I'll purposefully pay for the copy. 2000 was a gift from MS when I was in school, and Vista came with my laptop.
While its good these tests are better, that can be a bit misleading.
Windows7 is Vista at its core - its not different in the way XP/Vista was. With that in mind, it'd be pretty absurd if the work they are doing managed to actually make Windows7 worse yet.
Just wanted to be clear - its not as though they created a considerably different new system that beats Vista, they have just made improvements upon the Vista codebase.
Overclockers
Name one commercial game available for Linux but not OS X.
I can name one: Hopkins FBI.
But that's quibbling; your basic point is 100% correct. Hopkins FBI isn't exactly up there with Doom or WoW, and I don't think any new games are coming out for Linux but not OS X.
This is honestly insightful, because the more they work on it, the more it will suffer from the heavy weight of feature creep. I hope their claim of 'modular' is still in the plans.
The entire mechanism for building the OS is based on it being modular. Also, 7 is already feature complete. Beta 1 is in escrow right now.
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Right because Apple's so good about offering support for anything legacy? Give me a break.
Uh...yeah. They are. You can run Leopard just fine on a 6 year old Mac just fine...why don't you try doing the same with Vista and a 6 year old PC, and get back to us.
Vista is FAR FAR FAR more compatible with legacy windows than anything else on the market.
Except XP, of course.
Try to find mac/linux software designed to run an optometrists office.
Macs and Linux also have applications that only run on those operating systems. Yawn.
Right because Apple's so good about offering support for anything legacy? Give me a break.
Like I said, since I'd have to be installing all new applications anyway, they'd hardly be legacy. Macs are not a one-solution-fits-all system, I know that. However, there are some of my customers that would be able to run Macs - as there is software for them that would suffice as a replacement for what they currently have. There are other customers which wouldn't be able to run it at all. A lot of my customers are already running completely on FOSS - I'm just going to have to expand that base. This is the perfect time for it - as everyone and their Aunt Mary is fed up with all things Microsoft. Office 2007 installations were met with anger and frustration due to the changed GUI and performance issues, and Vista was another nail in the coffin.
Sounds like you have a lot of situations where you do system administration for optometrists. I've got a few customers in the optometry/eyecare field - and you're right, their apps are pretty much all provided them by their equipment vendors and distributors. These would be situations where I'd be forced to either make them work on Ubuntu somehow, or just roll out Vista anyway. Problem is - as you may already know - a lot of those apps from the opto vendors don't even work on Vista.
Now is the perfect opportunity for change - and to give all those customers griping about Microsoft fresh alternatives. In a world where everything's made for Windows, change has got to start somewhere.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
I only use defrag on the box that builds the code for our ERP system because it can significantly reduce build times. On the other ~150 servers there isn't any real performance gain to be had because they are either not I/O bound or like Oracle they have their own way of dealing with scattered I/O.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Ok, at first glance it looks good. It won 75% of the tests right? Looking over the pretty charts, its not so great:
1. Boot time: Windows 7 is slightly better (by 10 seconds "woo") and WTF on Vista SP1 being slower than Vista RTM? (I thought it was suppose to offer huge performance gains?)
2. Passmark Test: Only slightly beats out Vista (and again, SP1 is slower?)
3. PCmark: 500 points higher than Vista(s) (about a 10% gain, not bad.)
4. Cinebench10: 500 points worse. and *again* Vista RTM is faster than SP1.
so it seem to balance out. and at the current rate is Microsoft going to keep slowing down Vista with each service pack to make the jump to 7 seem even more promising? "Looks its 700% Faster than Vista SP3!" (and about the same as Vista RTM, and would have been slower then the 'evil' XP that we had to kill off...)
I'll wait till 7 RTMs before I make my final call, but after all the games they played with Vista, it had better make serious strides in usability ...
OK first thing first legacy is not 3 year old software. Legacy used to mean over 10 years.
Second I don't need the new and improved quickbooks which supports less that the old and "legacy" Quickbooks of 2007. The fact of the matter is that most software that we are discussing is not even 10 years old. Everyone is heading into this software as a service that they forgot that most people don't really care. They just want their business to run.
I don't care about apple or ms or any hair brained company that thinks it will make money off products that don't even work or lock in the users to a one size fits all solution. There are solutions out there that do not require this lock in even on windows and mac. It is a choice that we make to buy into this fad. People don't want the "new" ACCPAC at $15,000 they are willing to pay for the old reliable one that only cost them $1,500. They want a Quickbooks that doesn't loose features over time, ie multicurrency. They don't care about the newfangled DRM that slows down the network because they are viewing the company marketing material or a tutorial.
Lets be honest, my optometrist does not need windows to run his office. I wonder why HP started to support linux on the desktop? Could it be that that people like me no longer buy equipment that is not supported by linux even if we intend to run windows on them. When you spend hundreds of thousands on equipment and you study what you buy and do not even consider suppliers that do not support linux it starts to hurt. Not you but them. The fact of the matter is if you are running an office and you need someone soooo bad that there are no other options it means you have done a poor job as an IT professional. Phone/flash/sync/update, why? why would I ever need such sh!t? I need standards and access and I have Linux support, Mac support, FreeBSD support and Windows support. Give me any Mac and almost any phone and I can sync more in just minutes out of the box than I would be able to with an off the shelf windows box.
STOP these stupid lies. If you don't know how just say it. Any Mac of the shelf has at least bluetooth and WiFi, iCal, Address book. Thats a lot more than any Windows box that's off the shelf. Use some standards and some common sense and you have your own cloud computing and you don't even need a fixed IP and you can make it as secure as you choose. Activesync????? Does it support Mac, Linux, FreeBSD? Can it sync the whole OS? The whole disk? I have clients where there whole systems are synced over the net and could go live on their backup by a change of a DNS entry, and this solution is over 10 years old, and we don't even care what OS it runs. It's called standards. /rant
I'm not here to teach or preach but if you open your mind you will see that the only obstacle is this proprietary lock in that most people get themselves into.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Umm, that's nearly two years old. Initially Vista performance was worse primarily because of crappy driver support, especially on the part of nVidia, which has been well documented. Benchmarks done a year after release found Vista and XP roughly equal, with Vista occasionally beating XP.
All your base are belong to Wii.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3187
This may be worth keeping an eye on...
Umm, actually Microsoft requires 64 bit drivers for WHQL certification. I should know, I've been running Vista x64 for over a year and I've had no problems with drivers. That might be because I built the computer from new hardware last year, but I don't think anyone should be installing Vista, let alone Vista x64, on hardware from before Vista was released.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Sadly you are probably right TFA shows that Vista SP1 was worse than RTM.
Vista SP1 has a slower boot time by 4 seconds, 14.7 fewer points on the PassMark, 45 Fewer points on PCmark, and 503 fewer in Cinebench from the RTM.
No, I am not just making things up.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Apple fanboys piss me off because they make shit up.
The typical 6-year old Mac:
500-700MHz PowerPC G3 or G4 processor
256MB SDR Memory
ATI Rage or Radeon 7500 graphics
Leopard WILL NOT INSTALL on a system with a G3 processor or a G4 clocked at less than 867MHz. That rules out Apple's ENTIRE 2002 lineup except for some Power Macintosh G4 models and the PowerBook G4 released in November.
So, no, Leopard won't even run install on most 6-year-old Macs (iMac, eMac, iBook, most PowerBook G4s) and many 5-year-old Macs. Let alone run 'well'.
Oh, and Snow Leopard? It won't even work with PowerPC Macs, which includes EVERY Mac made before 2006. Bought a Mac in November 2005? Leopard is the last version of Mac OS X you'll ever be able to run with your current hardware.
Oh, by the way. I typed this on an EEE PC 900HA. It has 1GB of DDR2 and a 1.6GHz Atom. And it runs Vista fine. Even Aero glass.
Don't ever dare compare the OS X operating system to windows or even Linux with WINE in terms of gaming ever again.
You do realise that WINE is available for OSX? It's working pretty well so actually OSX has parity with Linux plus the advantage of quite a few native titles being available.
Still, the fact that Windows 7 internal version number is 6.1 (Vista was 6.0) is quite telling.
MS lost me when they came out with VISTA. Before Vista you had to have MS product to work and play in the electronic world.
Yah performance was an issue with VISTA. But so many more things are wrong. Performance in the case of a successor to Windows is actually a bit of a 3rd tier issue.
- Blatant lies when it came to VISTA capable
- DRM infection to the point where my own videos were crippled in rez and sound
- UAC nag from hell. Essentially made the Windows experience equate to cat sitting on the key board demanding my attention CONSTANTLY. And as such rendered my time on the computer less productive.
- Next to nothing when it came to 64 bit drivers
- Still very few safety and repair products run under 64 bit. At launch there was NOTHING for 32 or 64 bit.
- File operations over network painfully slow.
Vista was a marketing nightmare. As a result the competition has gained advantage on so many fronts. This is a good thing.
- Linux is actually usable by the common man. Thank you Conical. Ubuntu and all of the new Debian variants are really rather good.
- Apple leveraging on the success of the iPod product line came out with some killer product specifically in the lap top range. A laptop that fits into an envelope is a killer product.
- Open Office matured and is now easier to use than MS Office. ( I'm speaking from the perspective of bloat )
- Firefox/Mozila showed the world that you can create a browser that works really really well. This soon followed by all the webKit browsers, Safari / Chrome.
- Sigma systems created a chip that is used in most PVR's and media players. So no longer do you need a PC to play computer files. AKA MS media center is now swiftly becoming an expensive after thought.
- Google has done amazing things with the browser. maps / gmail / docs etc. Basically this opened the door for the onslaught of micro sub $500 PC's.
I have to say MS is going to have to pull out of there A$$ the killer product of the 21st century to save them from a slow painful demise. Lets face it, Microsoft just doesn't have that cool hip tag that Apple / Google / any kid on the street has or has had. A killer product Demands a degree of brand Nike Swoosh-stika coolness to get it off the ground.
So. Woop Dee Doo if Windows 7 is currently performing well. It's only got 1,000,000 other things to fix before it will succeed.
( Thank you all for listening / reading this old mans rant )
Microsoft never implemented Winsock 1.0. The first winsock implementations were from third parties, i.e., Trumpet Winsock. They got to the game late, that's why they ended up basing IE on Spyglass Mosaic -- poorly -- instead of rolling their own browser. Go into IE and do a Help | About. You'll find the following verbiage:
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.
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How will it perform after they add back the error checking code?
IBM and Microsoft had a competition to build the fastest implementation of the HPFS file system for OS/2. They brought the two implementation into a room and ran some benchmarks. Microsoft won, and their implementation went into OS/2. IBM engineers then had to go into the code and add the error checking that the MS guys left out...at which point it was much slower than the IBM codeline.
I wouldn't trust these 'benchmarks' for squat.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba