Slashdot Mirror
32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes tested the latest Win7 build against XP and Vista and came to a surprising conclusion: Win7 performs better than the other 2 OSs in the vast majority of the 23 tasks tested. Even installation. 'Rather than publish a series of benchmark results for the three operating systems (something which Microsoft frowns upon for beta builds, not to mention the fact that the final numbers only really matter for the release candidate and RTM builds), I've decided to put Windows 7, Vista and XP head-to-head in a series of real-world tests...'" This review shows only a 1-2-3 ranking for each test, so there's no sense of the quantitative level of improvement.
When are 32bit OSes going to start going away?
WTH! if i had run those tests and come to the conclusion that Win7 installs faster than XP, i would have rushed to the basement, grabbed my Win3 floppies and performed a "3 vs 7 Install Death-Match"!
that just sounds like a fisherman tale....
How can vista boot up faster than XP.. i have never seen this is a real setup... windows 7 faster vista (I can believe that) but vista & windows 7 faster than XP.. Like above said.. take with a grain of salt..
I'm using build 7000 right now. And yes, it is clearly quicker than XP, and there arent as many point where it has the potential to stop. It feels very fluid. Its the best windows version yet but a fair margin.
Do a 64bit test as well as most system today with with 3-4gb ram + video ram and other system stuff go over the 4gb limit 32bit.
Okay, so ignoring the fact that actually XP is "better" than Vista on machines with 4Gb and somehow "Windows 7" is top on virtually all tests on both types of machines (does the word "bollocks" mean anything to you?), this is ENTIRELY subjective.
For instance, one category is "Burning a DVD" with CDBurnerXP Pro. Somehow, XP gets a 3rd place or a 2 while Vista gets a 3 or a 1st and Windows 7 gets a 1 or a 2 (and, in fact, is one of the very few "non-1st" marks awarded to Windows 7). WTF were you measuring? How can you "rank" the burning of an ISO to DVD in the same software on two seperate machines differently between ANY vaguely similar OS's?
The *only* factor that differs is speed, so you're telling me that Windows 7 can burn disks faster than XP or Vista? Fine... show me the statistics, because I don't believe that XP or Windows 7 are that different when it comes to throwing some data down an IDE/SATA cable, yet somehow this idiot has "ranked" the OS's by some criteria and declared Windows 7 a winner.
Subjective, zero evidence for the reasons of the rankings, stupid scale (1st, 2nd, 3rd, then add up the place rankings and see who got lowest - not one single entry where there's a tied-first or other place, so it takes two "first places" to recover from one "third" place on another category), stupid benchmarks in the first place (i.e. burning a DVD is a valid benchmark but not when you don't say what you are measuring and/or what each OS scored - if one OS finished 0.00001 of a second later than the fastest OS, does that put it in 3rd place, for instance?), blatant sucking up.
If you're gonna claim to be a technology journalist and do such a comparison, at least do it vaguely correctly.
And, yeah, it's purely guesswork but the disclosures section on the author says nothing and yet everything I can find from him (even on Linux.com) is anti-Linux, pro-Microsoft and even the hint of possibly-future-pro-Apple stuff he mentions in passing never shows up as anything other than anti-Apple sentiment. We all have our opinions but this guy's just out to boost MS. Either he gets a lot of nice stuff in the post *cough* Windows 7 Beta's, Microsoft hardware to review *cough* or he's on the payroll.
Disregard.
Does Win7 seem faster than Vista or XP ?
Don't worry, Microsoft has still plenty of time to fix this behaviour !
BTW, the article is really lame, since there is absolutely no indication why Win7 is faster.
How much did the writer get paid by Microsoft for this advertisement ?
Partitioning the drive won't make the test any more fair. It may lessen fragmentation between each "chunk" of the drive than an OS would ordinarily take (if you decided to falsely assume that you can put more than one copy of Windows on a single partition without it blowing up).
Hard drives are cheap, and quite re-usable. Get three identical ones. Do your testing, throw the results online, and then reformat the drives and throw them in the nearest fileserver.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
No, it isn't. What is a problem is that MS has not integrated VirtualPC into Windows, and included a virtual environment to run your 16-bit apps in a 16-bit environment. I know it may sound like splitting hairs, but it is long past the time that MS should be leaving bad code in new OSes just to claim 'Backward Compatibility' when it is totally unnecessary.
Here are some benchmarks right over at tomshardware that show that the "SlashDot world" in this case is accurate (amazing!).
This was on a system with 2 GB of RAM, so according to you Vista should have been faster, but it wasn't. So your idea that it's the RAM that's the problem is bollocks.
Anecdotally, a colleague of mine was complaing her brand new lenovo thinkpad with Vista was slow compared to her imac -- she was kind of amazed that the they had the same processor and memory.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
I did that too, but only after making floppy disk images of all of them.. Never know when MSDOS 3.0-3.2 and 6 might be useful.. not to mention you don't even need to write the images to a floppy disk, you just boot from the floppy image in either vmware or vbox...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
yes. How dare I remain a skeptic. How dare I question something that none of us have anything to compare to.
Is that what you're saying? That we should just lap up zdnet which is known to basically love microsoft unconditionally in the first place? Or the "how can he possibly score windows 7 better in every single category" except for two, part? You don't find that suspicious before the OS has even been released?
When you see benchmarks from hardocp, even tomshardware (as much as they're biased sometimes), or any other reputable website then we have something to debate or believe. I don't doubt windows 7 will be an improvement but not only is the thing not out yet but basically they can't disclose a benchmark. You're saying that dancing the EULA must mean that his information is reputable.
Maybe next time, you should think before you post some completely inane crap.
Cool idea. Now let's take a step back and look at the realities:
Port VitrualPC to Win7: I suspect it'll already run on Win7, but even if it won't they'd do that anyhow.
Drivers to share the clipboard: Sure. Of course, you'd also need drivers to handle OLE stuff (drag-and-drop, for example). I'm sure it could be done, but don't make the mistake of assuming it's trivial. It takes a bit of work (made utterly painless, but still required) just to allow near-seamless mouse movement in and out of the virtual window.
Launching virtual machine now launches the application rather than the desktop: this is pretty easy. Of course, you still need to account for the bootup time of XP. Even with hardware virtualization, this is at least tens of seconds. I'd really rather not wait that long every time.
Virtually 100% all current software would work: Except, you know, anything that needs 3d hardware acceleration. Or direct driver access. Or more than two COM ports (yes, such programs exist, and VPC's limitation to 2 COM ports is an issue for the one program we have that won't quite work right in Vista. The problem could be worked around, but it's indicative of the greater issue).
Sandboxed by default. How sandboxed? Windows supports an incredible number of forms of inter-process communication. Some programs rely quite heavily on such things. You could allow the VPC to run one process and all the programs that it spawns, perhaps, but there would still be problems. Hell, this sort of excessive sandboxing is supposedly the reason the iPhone can't even handle simple cut/copy/paste!
How much RAM do these virtual systems have? Each virtual machine would need a good chunk of RAM, especially with the overhead of running all those excess copies of Windows. However, they would also compete with native apps for physical RAM. What do you do when some process that runs on Windows 2000 starts demanding 2GB of working set? Is VPC supposed to automatically enlarge the physical RAM allocated to that machine? Is it supposed to use its own pagefile? Perhaps you'd like to somehow get it to use the global pagefile instead?
I hope this is enough to help you realize that, noble though your end goal is, your method simply would not work.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
He attached his name, you didn't. That means he may be lying, and you probably are lying.
It's not pointless.
I have been using Windows 7 Beta 1 (Build 7000) for 3 days and am utterly surprised. Here is a quick overview of the experience to date. On Wednesday I finished downloading the ISO and burned it to disc using Nero 9. Once burnt I removed the hard drive from my Toshiba Satellite A215-S5818 laptop and replaced it with a blank 120 GB SATA 4300 RPM drive with only 4MB Cache. I had previously upgraded my ram from 2 GB DDR2 to 4 GB DDR2 while using Vista and it had no discernible effect on performance. After installing the 120 GB hard drive I inserted the Windows 7 Beta 1 DVD and booted to it. The entire install (including initial setup and installing my Cellphone as a USB modem, setting up my internet connection and downloading newer Video Card Driver) took less than 30 minutes. I was blown away, especially considering the Internet Setup was 100% completely and totally different than under Vista, XP, 200, 98, etc. Then I went to restore my 40+GB of data from my external 1TB Buffalo DriveStation which was ridiculously slow (almost unuseable) in Vista. It took less than 20 minutes to restore all my data to the correct locations (even though I had to find some of them because they where in different places). After my data was restored I went to re-installing all my software (about 50 programs and games) which was all backed up to and restored from that same 1TB external drive. I was able to reinstall every single program in about 2 hours without a single reboot (until they where all installed). Office 2007 Professional installed in less than 5 minutes. Nero 9 took the longest at about 8 minutes. Firefox 3 less than 15 seconds. Google Chrome less than 10 seconds. Acrobat Reader 9 about 4 minutes. Adobe Photoshop CS3 about 7 minutes. All 10 of my games in less than 10 minutes. Once everything was reinstalled I started playing around with the OS. First thing I always try is to open several hundred Windows Explorer windows and see how many it takes to crash the system. Much to my surprise Windows 7 said "hell no you only need one and that is all we are giving you". Then I said well I will open a couple hundred pictures, again Windows 7 said "hell no your note" and kindly opened them all in 1 Preview Window. Then I said well let me open about 50 Word and Excel Documents at the same time and low and behold they all opened in less than 10 seconds (after I finished the First Run wizard) and didn't slow down the system AT ALL. SO while they where open I decided to open QuickMediaConvertor and convert a divx avi to vob. Once that was started I opened several different games (including Hardwood Solitaire IV, 3d Texas Holdem Poker, Freeciv and Mahjong Titans all at Maximum Graphics and Detail levels. Still my system hadn't blinked so I opened Google Picasa and selected a 1000+ pictures and applied the "I'm Feeling Lucky" filter. It was done in about 2 minutes. While I was waiting I went and played a game of Hardwood Solitaire IV with no noticeable slow down. Now thoroughly impressed I decided to crash it one way or another and opened every single thing I could find to open (about 100 programs) all running at the same time. Now the system finally slowed down as my processor (an AMD Turion X64 running at 2 Ghz with 2 cores) was almost maxed. Suprisingly my memory (3.5 GB usuable by Windows) was only using about 2.75 GB. System was still easily usable and probably faster still than a normal XP/Vista installation with normal programs running. Now that I have figured out I just can't make it crash I close all those programs. I was fully expecting CPU/Memory to stay up much higher than when I first booted. Much to my chagrin everything returned to roughly the same levels as a fresh boot. Then I started poking around and discovered some remarkable changes in Windows 7 that frankly I hadn't expected. Almost every single process is Sandboxed (Virtualized) by default. My older programs that are not Windows 7 compatible (every one I installed) was Automatically checked and if need be was run in Compatibility mode AUTOMATICALLY. In fact out of the 100
Beyond that, I have yet to see any conclusive benchmarks posted by the defenders of Vista on this thread showing any proof that Vista is faster than XP, just empty assertions. What I do see is a bunch of Microsoft fanboys comforting themselves that their favorite brand released an OS that has turned out to be a flop.
Let me qualify my positions here though. I have Vista installed on an old hard drive on a brand new PC -- my own conclusion is that Vista is not as bad as everyone makes out, but you all need to stop pretending that Vista is fast. It isn't. It's not terribly slow on nice hardware, and it looks very nice and it has some nice features, e.g., the DX10 features on new games, but it's not fast.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
True. I wasn't exactly clear. I'm talking OS audio subsystem for delivering audio from apps to the hardware. Not apps.
Right. Zero latency. Talk about lies. It establishes callbacks in the apps, writing into shared memory segments which are then mixed and delivered to the standard linux audio device. Yeah. Zero latency as long as you stay ahead of the playback. Just like pretty much every sound system since the days of the original Soundblaster Pro using DMA. Where's the signal processing layer in there? Oh, it's third party. Where's the channel synchronization? Can't find it. And awesome how it punts sample rate changes back to the apps. And it uses floats as the sample format? Talk about a really bad design decision. I mean you get three of four apps going in hi definition audio (96/24/7.1) and you're going to be seeing twenty or thirty percent of your system going down the shit hole just to do sample format conversions. And what is the upside? Nothing. For every 32 bits of sample data you get 24 bits of mantissa and a useless exponent. And shockingly enough it's all software. Where's that hardware acceleration you're so fond of?
And what happens under load and the realtime scheduler can't quite keep up? Ah, I see, you get drop outs. What happens on Vista? Nothing, they hook into the scheduler to guarantee that their audio paths get time on the CPU.
It's not a matter of delaying individual streams. It's a matter of delaying individual channels from the same stream. So that your rear speakers sitting against the far wall behind you play just a bit earlier.
Drivers to share the clipboard: Sure. Of course, you'd also need drivers to handle OLE stuff (drag-and-drop, for example). I'm sure it could be done, but don't make the mistake of assuming it's trivial. It takes a bit of work (made utterly painless, but still required) just to allow near-seamless mouse movement in and out of the virtual window.
This stuff is already done by their competitors. So, even if it isn't 'trivial', it is something they will have to do anyway.
Virtually 100% all current software would work: Except, you know, anything that needs 3d hardware acceleration. Or direct driver access. Or more than two COM ports (yes, such programs exist, and VPC's limitation to 2 COM ports is an issue for the one program we have that won't quite work right in Vista. The problem could be worked around, but it's indicative of the greater issue).
So, your saying that MS sucks too much and does not have the resources to bring their product up the match their competitors who are already on the market? I'm not buying it.
Sandboxed by default. How sandboxed? Windows supports an incredible number of forms of inter-process communication. Some programs rely quite heavily on such things. You could allow the VPC to run one process and all the programs that it spawns, perhaps, but there would still be problems.
MOST applications don't share data via inter-process with other applications beyond a simple clip board. But even for the ones that do, you would at least know what applications were trying to access what. Even if you had the simple choices of "No Access", "Clipboard Access", and "Full Access", you would be head and shoulders above what we have now because even if some users just always said "Full Access", they wouldn't be worse off, and anybody that has any concern for security isn't going to do that. I know that I would certainly click "No Access" when my freeware Falangy Counting software asked for access to Quicken.
Hell, this sort of excessive sandboxing is supposedly the reason the iPhone can't even handle simple cut/copy/paste!
That is total BS. Cut/Copy/Paste does not work because while the iPhone interface is neat, it has some serious problems, and Apple simply chose not to implement cut/copy/paste. Likely because they felt it would make the interface too complicated.
How much RAM do these virtual systems have? Each virtual machine would need a good chunk of RAM, especially with the overhead of running all those excess copies of Windows. However, they would also compete with native apps for physical RAM. What do you do when some process that runs on Windows 2000 starts demanding 2GB of working set? Is VPC supposed to automatically enlarge the physical RAM allocated to that machine? Is it supposed to use its own pagefile? Perhaps you'd like to somehow get it to use the global pagefile instead?
Memory actually gets BETTER if you had them running in a virtual machine. Currently an XP application can only access 3 gigs of ram, and anything beyond that must swap to a physical disk. You see, back in the days before dirt was invented and the memory that an OS would use could be counted in bytes, we had this thing called a "RAM Disk". It was a chunk of memory that the OS saw as a physical disk, even though it was in RAM. Since a 64-bit OS could access 16 exabytes of RAM, the RAM disk starts to make sense again. If the machine were virtualized over a 64 bit OS, the swap file could be set to run from the disk, or it could be set to run from a ram disk which would mean that you could get far more real memory to the 32 bit application virtualized than you could from running it natively on a 32-bit OS.
I hope this is enough to help you realize that, noble though your end goal is, your method simply would not work.
No, this does not help me realize that the method would not work. It just shows that you are being short sighted about OSes, and don't really understand how computers work. Or have just drank the "MS said so, so it must be true" Cool-Aid concerning backward compatibility.
Here are my benchmarks using SETI@Home on an Intel Quad Core 9660 with 4 GB RAM. All are fresh installs of the 32 bit versions of each OS on their own SATA2 drives with all updates installed. YMMV
Windows XP SP3
Float Pt (MOPS) 2999.2
Integer Spd (MOPS) 6238.63
Turnaround (days) 0.11
Windows Vista SP1
Float Pt (MOPS) 2935.12
Integer Spd (MOPS) 6076.71
Turnaround (days) 0.20
Windows 7
Float Pt (MOPS) 2910.61
Integer Spd (MOPS) 5714.78
Turnaround (days) 0.19
So Windows gets slightly less performance from the same hardware with each new version but Windows 7 does get slightly more SETI@Home results done in a day than Vista though still not as many as XP.
I found out on my dads old crappy laptop (Windows XP preinstalled), that a clean XP install runs about right on his machine. After I install SP2 the laptop comes to a crawl (probably when it has to load all the new security applications). 10-15min from login to a fully working desktop, as on vanilla XP max. 2min.
If I didn't have compatibility issues with Windows 2000, I would still be using it (for games, that is). It is the only Microsoft product I have ever been content with.
(yes this can be compared with sex)
So what you're saying, is that Microsoft deliberately crippled SP3 to make Vista look better?
I know you were just making a joke but on Vista you can actually update graphics drivers without rebooting. ;)
The installer will tell you to reboot anyway, but the driver has been updated.
This is possibly the best feature in Vista
> The test you link to used SP2, while the new tests use SP3. XP SP2 and SP3 aren't the same thing. In fact, most benchmarks put Vista SP1 ahead of XP SP3 or at least within spitting distance of each other.
I think that's pretty telling, actually, assuming it's the reason. Did Microsoft manage to destroy XP's performance with SP3 enough that it's now below Vista? Did their software department design that "upgrade" or did marketing? (Assuming the two departments haven't been unified this whole time...)
Or do we have some bad benchmark data here?