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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.'"
It is sounding more and more like Vista really is the newest generation of Windows ME. People hated Windows ME. But Microsoft didn't shove it down anyone's throat so people danced around WinME without concern. But now, removing other alternatives aggressively, people are really getting annoyed with Vista. This is all good for Mac OS X adoption I suppose, but frankly, even though I am a Linux user, my professional life would be much better if Microsoft would either extend the availability of XP or get something better than Vista out the door soon.
Indeed. I think the question isn't how it compares to Vista but how it compares to XP. Anything else is simply following the Microsoft's red herring.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
and not shipping it. Vista was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread and now it's only been 2 years since Vista. Typical to keep people to consider alternatives. With Vista, they set the bar so low, that almost any inevitable improvement in performance gets hailed. Who cares, wake me up when it's the final product and not just some build in the middle of product development cycle.
I think Microsoft will eventually be undone by their long development times unless Windows 7 starts becoming the trend rather than a frantic exception to counter the Vista stigma. Ubuntu and OS X is certainly improving much faster due to relatively short development cycles.
For a second there I was about ready to hollar at you about it being beta. Thank fully I read the entire post before I hit reply.
Sadly, most people will try out a leaked version, see a driver doesn't work and instantly rage against Microsoft (though that behavior is pretty much the norm for any beta program). Yes, I know, the company's reputation at this point, but hell, at least keep the torches and pitchforks in the shed until the final build is released into the wild.
...from non-final versions of Windows. The early publicly released betas of Vista performed better for me than the later RCs and the finished product, so I have a hard time getting excited about Windows 7 performing great in an early release.
Boot time and synthetic benchmarks are poor indicators of an operating system's performance and usability. It'd be like me comparing the zero to sixty time as the sole metric to judge a vehicle's fitness for use by, say, a college student. Perhaps Miles per Gallon might be better? Or even the number of cup holders? I'll believe Windows 7 is an improvement when it passes the Mom Test... Which is to say, we sit our mothers down at a computer and ask them "Is this better than XP?" But not your mother of course, because she's crazy. ;)
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This is all good for Mac OS X adoption I suppose, but frankly, even though I am a Linux user, my professional life would be much better if Microsoft would either extend the availability of XP or get something better than Vista out the door soon.
I'm running into the same problem. I've got so many customers that are running either specialty or legacy apps that simply will not run on Vista - or they run into stability issues with apps that are supported by Vista. Then, they basically shoot the messenger and make my life a living hell - since I really have no other alternative for them. When I could offer them XP, I could offer them a stable, working solution that they were happy with. Microsoft has stripped me of that option. I really don't see the light at the end of the tunnel with Windows 7, either. To me, it just looks like what the final release of Vista really should have been. Yes, it may be more stable and have better performance - but that doesn't help me when I need to go and install said specialty or legacy apps on it.
I am basically at a crossroads where I have to take a lot of clients into a completely new system, with completely new applications. And let me tell you - after what Microsoft's done, I'm not about to set them up with another Microsoft solution that railroads them into situations like this again. As long as I'm having to redo entire enterprises, I might as well roll out open source solutions or Macs.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
(Apologies to Tycho and Gabe)
Two years ago, much the same was being said about Vista. It was powerful, it was redesigned with wonderful new features. About the only hones thing that was said about Vista was that it would not work with much of the hardware that currently in use. This is why people stayed with XP. MS claims that it has many more device drivers, and if the shipping OS is faster, that will help also. But given history, I must wait to see the proof in the pudding.
In any case, I would much rather see MS support standards, rather than micromanage hardware. I mean, is it not a bit ridiculous that I have to download a new driver package everytime I use a different USB drive?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Thanks for stopping by to give us your views, Mr. Ballmer.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Vista got a lot of people to switch... Away from MS.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Early Windows 7 build shows performance ups and automatically they are viewed as stupid tests, anything can beat Vista, etc.
Oh well. Even if it beat Linux or OS X or every other OS on the planet at speed, the naysayers would still say that it doesn't matter because it's unstable, or too easily compromised, etc.
Basically, if you want to find fault, you will, and can. Unless you find fault with Linux, then you are obviously flamebait and don't know what you are talking about. :)
Which douchebag is going around tagging every story about software with the ubuntu tag? What does a comparison between 2 versions of Windows have anything to do with any other OS? Shuttleworth, is that you?
Maybe people will figure out that throwing random tags around isn't the best idea when they go to do a search for stories tagged "ubuntu" and get presented with a load of crap that has nothing to do with Ubuntu.
Yeah, including such stellar titles as Wingnuts 2, Jeopardy Deluxe, Drop Point Alaska, a brand new Star Wars adventure titled Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (/endsarcasm), etc. Don't ever dare compare the OS X operating system to windows or even Linux with WINE in terms of gaming ever again. There are some relevant games in that list, but most of those are years old. There's a reason why Mac geeks who also happened to be gamers rejoiced when Boot Camp came out. So they could finally play some good PC Games.
i beleive that may not be as much of a joke as some think. don't most early MS Windows builds beat the last version with performance? it's adding all the legacy support that seems to slow things down (and add security holes).
or have i got this wrong?
secondly, it's not hard to beat vista on performance, no? esp with aero left on as the default on an OEM install.
to me this doesn't read so much as "yay, our new stuff is getting better" as "hey guys, just hold on, our new stuff isn't the pure manure our last stuff was".
replies welcome.
Don't ever dare compare the OS X operating system to windows or even Linux with WINE in terms of gaming ever again
What nonsense. Name one game that runs well with WINE or Crossover on Linux that doesn't run under WINE or Crossover on OS X. Name one commercial game available for Linux but not OS X. You might be able to find the odd open source Linux game (Frozen Bubble 2 comes to mind) that hasn't been ported to Mac, but they are pretty rare.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Apple has done nothing to bring OS X up to the same performance level as Linux and Windows since then.
Do you know the difference between supporting a claim and merely repeating it?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is what passes for insightful on Slashdot these days? Seriously mods, this guy thinks Microsoft made Vista that way on purpose as some sort of genius grand plan!
Heh, not quite. Vista isn't the success Microsoft hoped for. From microsofts point of view, Vista has been a dismal marketing failure, possibly even a commercial failure - they pushed too much change all at once, and the market dug in its heels.
However, when all is said and done Vista isn't really a technical failure, and so Windows 7 isn't going in a new technical direction. So windows 7 is just going to address the market failure, which it will be able to do, since the failure of Vista was too much change too fast. Windows 7 isn't going to have much change, and is just going to build on Vista which will have already 'broken the new ground', so the strategy for 7 will likely succeed.
He says Vista isn't ME-2, but provides no reason -- except opinion -- for it. This would never have been modded-up in my day!
Vista isn't ME-2 because:
1) ME was the last of its code base and it died off; its successor was a completely different code base.
2) Vista is the first of its code base, and its successor will be little more than a refinement of it.
That pretty much makes Vista the opposite of ME.
On the subject of low bars. Has anyone got any idea why there even exists a 32bit version of windows 7. IMHO vistas biggest failure was putting out a 32 bit version of an operating system that barely gets by with the 3gig limit that 32bit OS's can support.
And they want to do it again? C'mon microsoft. Learn one lessone and one alone from Apple. A little pain for a big gain. Kill off 32bit and legacy APIs and make a truly kick ass clean 64 bit operating system.
It'll be a hell of a long time before 128bit starts the cycle again.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Is the "Windows protected path" DRM running? Because I'm betting since it is a beta the draconian copyright crap isn't turned on so they can work out the bugs in the core system before dealing with it. So does anyone here have Win7 running and is the protected path DRM on? Because I bet if you stripped protected path out of Vista it would probably be snappy too. Let us just hope that since it is clear that folks aren't going to beat down MSFT's door for Blu Ray DRM that they will leave that crap to the video producers like they did in pre Vista OSes.
I mean why should my machine get slowed down with crappy DRM for something I am NEVER going to use? My PC is for work and I could not care less for Blu Ray as anything but a possible storage medium if the burner and media prices get cheap enough which I'm betting they won't. Please MSFT leave the shitty DRM to the shitty media companies and just focus on making a solid business OS instead of trying to out pretty Apple and out DRM the *.A.As.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Stop feeding the troll. There are people in this world who will spew bullshit till they are blue in the face if it will get them some attention.
Anyone who's opinion matters knows he's full of bullshit.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
modular as in $50 per module?
would you like a firewall with that?
And wouldn't a great benchmark be "UAC dialog boxes per hour" instead?
I wonder how it compares to "requirements to 'sudo' per hour"?
(Oh wait, I've actually kind of done that experiment, and it comes out to be about the same.)
It doesn't matter how fast or slow it is. Whatever Windows 7 is, like Vista, people will have to accept it, because MS will make sure no one has any choice.
You just hit on one of the biggest points of why I keep saying that Microsoft is going down. Microsoft never counted on netbooks, just like they never counted on the Internet.
My blog
To be fair, neither did Apple, Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc. It was only when the EeePC became obviously popular that everyone decided to jump on the bandwagon, although Apple has yet to do so.
All your base are belong to Wii.
There's some kind of joke to make here about the federal government...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The "faster switching" is likely one of the touted benefits of the new 3D-based desktop. When you alt-tab out of a game or something, it no longer has to switch back to 2D rendering.
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Yes, there are differences between UAC and Sudo, but it's far from clear which wins out, at least for home use. You name just one difference, which goes in Sudo's favor. Here are the differences I've thought of:
1.) Repeated UAC prompts require you to enter your password each time.
2.) UAC prompts require you to enter the password of the administrator rather than your password. (In this respect, UAC acts more like su than sudo.)
3.) UAC prompts appear even when logged on as administrator, though do not require a password.
4.) UAC prompts are on-demand.
#1 is mostly in favor of Sudo, and offers a promising lead for improving UAC. That said, my experience is that the difference isn't substantial. My UAC prompts tend to be spaced further apart than at least sudo is willing to cache my password for. Sometimes there will be two or three in a row, but I would say that on average I would have to enter my password only twice as often.
#2 is a mixed blessing. For home use it doesn't matter all that much, but it does have one benefit, which is that I (as the computer owner) can bless an option when I'm not signed on. Sudo, at least as I know how to use it, would give the logged-on user the ability to do what they want, not let me do what they want on behalf of them. There's probably some way to do that with sudo, but I don't know it; you have to go to su for that. (Though that's not a big complaint.) This also illustrates a benefit with the UAC way of doing #1 (at least over sudo; not so over su): if the admin is performing an action for the logged-in user, after he leaves his credentials won't be cached.
#3 is a win for Windows, I would say plain and simple. It is actually a pretty nice middle ground between running as a truly limited user (which is often painful on Windows thanks to crappy programs) and having full rights at all points.
#4 is also a win for Windows over command-line sudo, not Linux GUI sudo, plain and simple. Under Linux, I often run a command, have it fail, then have to re-run it. Not a big deal; up, home (or maybe C-a), sudo, enter, but still more annoying than having the system figure out that I need rights for whatever it is I'm doing.
Overall, sudo probably still works better, but UAC is also ragged on way too much, as the differences are not substantial.
Name one commercial game available for Linux but not OS X.
Sacred. Serious Sam and its sequel. Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Jagged Alliance 2.
You should never say "name one", as there's usually at least few around (and Wikipedia has handy-dandy Category: Linux Games. To be fair, though, I suppose the above list is like 80% of all games that fill your criteria.
Chronologically late.
The entire mechanism for building the OS is based on it being modular.
I think the parent was talking of making it modular for the user. To cut feature creep a user doesn't want. At least the subject was avoiding the weight of feature creep, and building a modular OS isn't the way of doing this, if there's no way for the user to make us of the modularization.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
When did Microsoft "Never count on the internet"? 1995? I've got an anti-trust case that suggests microsoft was very very much counting on the internet. To the degree that they were willing to risk enormous lawsuits.
I remember Microsoft being very optimistic about the internet. They just weren't pushing it very hard because it was a difficult sell. "Get on the internet and... browse usenet groups!" Sure we slashdotters saw the possibilities. But we see the possibilites in most things long before they become commercially viable.
As usual, Slashdot users are oblivious to the existence of a world beyond computer science classes and small web development shops.
There is a lot of niche hardware out there that will never have 64-bit drivers. Many of the users of such hardware, such as big industrial and R&D companies, are very important customers for MS.
MS also want to bring as many users of old hardware as they can up to the NT 6 kernel so they can reduce NT 5 support costs.
And it would be even better if Microsoft got all of the DRM crap out W7 that never belonged in the operating system in the first place!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
MS really needs to create/have a Windows Gamers Edition for Windows 7, or at least multiple profiles you can choose from at install (one being gamer). A profile that strips the OS down to bare bones game function. No backup, no syncs, no offline files, no unnecessary process outside of sound, video, internet, and the ability to install a game. It's the only reason why a lot of people are still committed to using Windows. If it wasn't for the gaming, I would be using Ubuntu for Internet and Media.
Maybe then the Gamers edition would be just the best preforming edition of Windows.... so make it the default edition, and if I need anything else, I'll add the service ala carte from my install disk/internet.
XP and Vista are the end of Windows. Both added bloat and anti-features that dragged down progressively more capable hardware and neither did anything about security issues that truly destroy performance.
Not exactly. Yes, for the average /. geek and corporate user who was having already an NT-based OS, going from the already sturdy Windows 2k to a Windows XP Pro which didn't bring anything new or interesting - this was a big disappointment.
*BUT* the story is completely different for average Joe-6-pack. For the average home user Windows XP Home with all its imperfection, was light-years ahead of the previous thing that the users where forced to endure on pre-installed home PC : Windows ME.
Windows XP met success despite being not that interesting, because WinXP Home saved lots of home users from the pains of WinME.
On the other hand, Vista doesn't have a single argument in its favour.
- Businesses don't like it and downgrade to WinXP Pro at the first opportunity.
- Home users aren't rushing to buy-/upgrade to- Vista because their current WinXP Home is pretty much good enough for them.
So in end, Vista is even a worse product than WinXP.
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