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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.'"
Wouldn't it have been a lot more fun for the author to do the benchmarks on an Intel 915 chipset? We all know that Intel 915 was claimed to be Vista certified, so if Windows 7 is indeed faster, shouldn't it work as well.
And wouldn't a great benchmark be "UAC dialog boxes per hour" instead?
I am surprised he was able to publish the benchmarks, usually there are a lot of license restriction on what you can do with pre release code. Perhaps in this case, since it was favorable to 7, maybe he got permission.
The tablet has a 1.3 PIII & 512 of ram.
http://geekpi.com/?p=38#more-38
When Windows7 is thrust upon the end users as the default OS
for new PC's, it will most likely not yet be supported by the
tens of thousands of 3rd party apps.
Vista was pushed out and the only real apps on the market were
a wet version of MS OFFICE2007.
I don't look forward to the new PC's arriving to my office, with
a new unsopported OS. Going on a hunch that Microsoft will
take the opportunity to remove more legacy support, I can
assume that more of our proprietary 3rd party apps will not
work on Windows7,
Our building automation (environmental controls software), our
gas pump management software, or hydro metering subsystem,
and dozens of other apps are doomed on Windows7 as they
currently are with Windows Vista.
Read between the lines that we are still on WinXP and Win2000pro.
MACs are appearing in the office, and people really like them.
XP runs well on them to boot (via vmware fusion).
Microsofts big challenge is going to be convincing the worlds
3rd party developers to embrace this new OS. And to do it
without threats or forcefully pulling support agreements, etc.
MS's typical business practices are their legacy.
Windows7 is akin to GM tossing a hybrid engine into a CHEVY Tahoe. It is still Vista under the hood, with a new skin on the
outside.
Good luck.
And please remember to extend the life of XP for another 5 years. Thanks.
Agreed. The consulting business that I work for has an IT services side that I fill in on from time to time if they are short staffed. Most of my clients on the consulting side of the business and most of the small businesses that we provide completely or partially outsourced IT services for that believed they'd need new PC's in the next couple of years (who didn't have volume licenses for XP) have already purchased them so they could downgrade to XP. These are mostly non-tech savvy people here who have either heard bad things about Vista from others or who have some first hand experience with it on a home PC that they purchased and they wanted to be sure to buy new systems while they could still get XP. We have a neutral policy when it comes to Vista so they haven't been doing this at our behest.
In fact, I can count on two hands the number of times I've encountered a client who has one or more machines on-site running Vista. It's amazing to me how few clients we have that have even a single Vista machine and it's amazing to me what a bad rap Vista has with the non-tech savvy crowd.
I don't particularly like Vista and on my box at work I've stuck with XP but I don't absolutely hate the thing either. Perhaps that's because I have limited experience with it but if they replaced my box at work with new PC (and I wasn't given the choice to go with a Mac ... I switched at home in 2006) and the box came with Vista pre-installed I probably wouldn't wipe it and re-install XP unless the box was a total POS and I needed to downgrade for performance reasons. I think the Vista to Windows Millenium comparison takes things a bit too far. Millenium was a complete and total POS that was clearly less stable than Windows 98 even on new hardware that came with the OS pre-installed. I've found that Vista, from the admittedly limited experience that I have with it, isn't that bad when it comes pre-installed on new hardware but Microsoft clearly screwed the pouch with it and I think that Apple is benefiting a little bit. We've had higher ups at a few of our clients opt for Macs in the last six or seven months who have asked us to setup Boot Camp or a VM product to run their Windows apps and if you would have told me we'd be seeing that a year ago I would have laughed in your face.
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.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
None of what you said invalidates the arguments against the the conclusions in TFA. In fact it could have come out the opposite with TFA claiming that Win7 is slower than Vista, and aside from a number of horrid jokes much of Slashdot would be making similar arguments to what they are now. MS still has plenty of time to work on and optimize it, etc. MS has gotten itself in lose-lose situations with Slashdot before (eg: IE8 compatibility stuff), but here it's just that there isn't much that can be seriously concluded performance-wise from an early $SOFTWARE build, good or bad.
Just because the arguments made from a group of people happen to echo previous things they've said does not necessarily make the arguments any less solid.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
I agree with you on pretty much every facet of this, but AFAIK there haven't been any driver debacles since pre-SP1. (if I'm wrong feel free to correct me.)
Pre SP1 of what?
If you mean that Vista, since SP1 has mostly put its driver debacle behind it, I'd agree. But the PR damage has been done.
If you mean that XP hasn't had a driver debacle since preSP1, I'd agree with that too, but for XP, it was a driver debacle that only affected home users, not businesses. Plus its been a few years, and memories are short. Nobody remembers their old samsung usb1 mp3 player/cheap parallel scanner/acer webcam/cmedia integrated sound/pcchips NIC/ etc didn't ever work with XP.
Windows7 is Vista at its core
I'd say that Windows7 is "Vista Service Pack 3", or maybe "Vista R2". It's being released in tandem with Win2008 Server R2.
Microsoft heard from *many* customers that they would skip Vista and anything related to it, and wait for Windows 7. Microsoft, of course, is simply renaming the next significant Vista service relase "Windows 7". And I'm sure this will work! I can't even muster any ire at Microsoft for this: what else could they do?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The really nasty problem with Vista(besides it is a bloated pig) is the "welcome to driver and program hell" that comes with it. MSFT seems to have forgotten that the big selling point with Windows is backwards compatibility. If you had a program from 5,10, hell in a lot of cases even older good luck getting it to go on OSX or Linux, but XP would fire it right on up. And just try to find any piece of hardware without an XP driver. Hell I have XP drivers around here somewhere for a freaking Voodoo I!
But when folks bring Vista into the shop complaining that "nothing works" I have to tell them that in all likelihood they will simply have to throw that hardware and software away because it simply won't work on Vista. And good luck finding Vista64 drivers for squat! MSFT in their infinite wisdom let the manufacturers certify for Windows Vista even if no Vista64 driver exists or ever will. And as for XP security it has limited user accounts that work quite well and are less irritating than UAC. So I'm really not surprised when my customers say after being told their stuff just won't run "How much to put XP on it?".
IMHO Microsoft needs to bring back Allchin and make compatibility job #1 again. With the speed of modern machines there really isn't any reason they can't cook up a Windows on Windows compatibility layer so that everything just works again. Because if we are going to have to throw out the majority of ours apps and hardware just to run the thing why in the hell would we stay with MSFT? Especially with EA and the other game companies pissing off the customers with draconian DRM so bad it is killing Windows gaming, which is the last piece holding a lot of folks back.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I think you're forgetting something, or maybe it's only subtly implied but, the fact is Vista is the first 64-bit system for many users, which really compounded the problem of incompatible software, drivers etc. I guarantee you if Vista was 32-bit only, or XP x64 had several more years before Vista was released, there wouldn't be half as many issues as there are now.
The upgrade to Vista from XP doesn't seem so error-prone when you consider that the majority of users were migrating to an entirely new platform which didn't have much support from most software developers at the time, and still doesn't (I can count on one hand the number of games which will run natively in 64-bit).
2) Vista is the first of its code base, and its successor will be little more than a refinement of it.
If we stick with your circular logic, ME would have been head and shoulders above Win98 and SE. So which is it? Do Microsoft products get better or worse as they mature?
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Performance tests show that an abacus and a box of crayons beat Vista.
(Apologies to Tycho and Gabe)
But does this Abacus OS support industry standards like Win32, NTFS and DirectX 10?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;