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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
Still, the fact that Windows 7 internal version number is 6.1 (Vista was 6.0) is quite telling.
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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