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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.
Take results with a grain of salt. He ranks Vista as better than XP on the AMD machine and as nearly equal on the Pentium machine.
Of course, the AMD machine has 4 GB of RAM and the Pentium machine has 1 GB, so that could have something to do with it.
When are 32bit OSes going to start going away?
This review shows only a 1-2-3 ranking for each test, so there's no sense of the quantitative level of improvement.
In other words a totally subjective opinion with no numbers/statistics to back it up, also known as Totally And Utterly Useless.
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.
1) Netbooks. The Atom processors in most netbooks are 32-bit only. Also consider any other embedded scenario where 64-bit CPUs are not available, practical, or where 64-bit addressing is not necessary.
2) Upgrades. Windows does not support upgrading from a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit OS (you have to choose the "clean install" option). If you want to sell upgrade discs to the vast majority of current customers, you need to sell 32-bit copies.
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.
Windows Vista 3rd
Windows XP 2nd
Windows 7 1st
Windows 7 wins... it uses the least number of letters.
Their 64 bit version of Vista is actually the best consumer level OS they've done so far. It's the version that should become Windows 7. It's stable, fast (way faster than the 32 bit version on my machine), and its backwards compatible with almost every application that I've tried.
If they made the default install 64 bits, they'd actually be pushing forward an improvement in their consumer OS. As it is, we'll be living with Vista mk. II.
I'll bet the folks who work on the 64 bit version are scratching their heads wondering why they bother!
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
He tested things like moving files around, compression, decompression... This is all good and fine, but it's probably not the thing that most people "feel" when they use a computer. What I would like to know is how snappy or sluggish does the operating system "feel" when using it for every-day tasks? Does everything halt while the hard drive cranks away when you click a menu? Do the GUI animations help use the computer or do they simply slow you down? That's the sort of thing that matters to most users. How often do you really have to move 100 MB or 2.5 GB of files around?
I've said the same when people complained about crappy Vista beta results, so I will say it again: Judge the system's speed when it is done. No nanosecond earlier.
The reason is simple. First, it's plenty possible that there are still parts missing. Parts that can weigh the system down again. In Vista's case, we saw a pretty good improvement in handling, but this can work the other way 'round too if early results are promising (maybe too promising) and optimizing takes a back seat to other matters.
From what I can see so far, Win7 still has some stability issues. Improving stability often comes at the price of speed. It is entirely possible that MS tried to get a system out for "beta report" tests that is as fast as possible to get these desired effects. Vista's resource hunger and its sluggish handling was one of the core gripes reviewers had, so it was likely the first tests Win7 will be put to will be about speed and handling. Vista had no really crippling stability issues (aside of driver problem which are arguably the hardware supplyer's problem), so this won't be one of the things reviewers will make a big fuss about.
So what did they produce for a beta review? Exactly what we have here. A system that is as fast as it can be, everything else back to the corner there. Yes, it's maybe crashing from time to time, but it's beta, you know, and Vista already was stable, so they'll get that done by release, no worries. Now imagine it was the other way 'round, stable as a rock but sluggish. Yes, it's beta, so the speed issues could be ironed out, but reviewers would have had a field day with it.
Bluntly, I don't give a flying fsck about a beta review of Win7. Wake me when it's ready for release. In other words, when SP1 arrives.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Who likes chairs anyway?
Steve Ballmer, that's who.
I'm sure the fact that this build of windows does not have tons of extra bells and whistles installed, thus leaving more system resources for doing benchmarking.
Has anyone tested it on an Asus Eee or the like in comparison with performance of XP on the same machine?
I think that would be an important test what with vendors clinging onto selling XP with laptops/notebooks for as long as possible.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
The general feeling around here is that no-one WANTS to believe it is even possible that Windows 7 doesn't suck. Because if that were true, that would sort of devalue everything done to improve Linux the last few years. (because if Windows 7 is fast and stable and lets you play games, that doesn't leave any room for Linux on the desktop)
It could actually be that Microsoft got it right. It may be that the core of Vista is not as terrible as we all think it is. I've seen posts discussing how Vista uses a completely refactored kernel, with more layers of abstraction and cleaning up of many of the quirks of win32.
Then, on top of this decent foundation, they overloaded it with poorly thought out gimmicks in an attempt to compete with Apple. In addition, some of their rewrites introduced new bugs, such as the networking problems where Vista machines are unable to talk to shared file servers.
It's possible that Windows 7 succeeded. If they fixed the bugs, and ripped out some of the bloated, inefficient Vista code then you might have a decent OS after. Microsoft might be a monopoly, but if they sat on their heels for too long, eventually (it might take 10 years) alternatives would overtake them.
"Win7 performs better than the other 2 OSs" In other words, it only crashes once a month, instead of once a week.
The article wasn't about Windows 2000 vs. 98 and 95.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Now that is bullshit. If Microsoft got their act together and made somethign as fantastic as Longhorn was supposed to be it really doesn't have anything to do with linux, and many of us that use a variety of things would rejoice. Gnome, KDE etc might be furthur motivated to add new features and improve old ones at the desktop level. I use linux because I want a cheap unix - a vastly improved Microsoft operating system isn't going to change that, plus it fills so many niches that are completely unprofitable for Microsoft so they will never go there. So many of the improvements are in things that Microsoft just does not care about and why should they - such as embedded devices, NFS, decreasing boot speed etc etc.
Since Vista even has problems networking with NT4 machines that some people still need for legacy apps I really am not as optimistic as you are. When something from Microsoft is not Microsoft compatable it is a sign that you have a product with problems.
I'll hold my opinion until they implement things like the poorly integrated DRM that caused so many problems in Vista - if they have to have it (and I think they will decide they do), they should implement it in such a way that it doesn't cause a lot of other problems in the system. To be frank, they are the company that has a long list of very stupid mistakes the latest of which is forgetting leap years exist. I doubt that the 32 bit version of MS Windows 7 will even support Intels Pentium Pro from 1995 and be able to address more than 4GB.
Yes, I read that article.
Microsoft developers are actually TRYING. Remember, there are a LOT of these people : I know quantity isn't everything, but microsoft has thousands and thousands of these men and women. Also, while standards have gradually slipped as the company grew, they have always tried to hire degreed computer science graduates with the top grades. Meaning, on average, microsoft developers are at least competent.
Sure, brilliance and freedom and various efficiencies (as well as IBM having a huge team of their own) have let Linux sort of keep up, but the evil empire of Microsoft does have a lot of firepower.
Explain to me why this rates a +3 "Informative" mod when the poster tells us absolutely nothing more about his system, his applications, or how he uses his machine.
full 64bit drivers that can shove data to devices oh like Video cards much faster
How do 64bit drivers speed up DMA?
This includes not only the OS's operation, but even 32bit applications running on the OS.
My understanding is that 32bit application would run slightly slower if the CPU was in 64bit mode. Presumably 15% would be the overall system performance, including legacy 32-bit applications?
You see when you have a 64bit memory addressing and can optimize for this in the memory manager you no longer have FS and pagefile lookkup tables for extended amounts of RAM.
What is a FS (filesystem?) lookup table?
You also can do like Vista x64 does and shove two 32bit memory writes into on 64bit address space, so when it can, you get double the read/write performance out of the memory chip because you are pulling two 32bit chunks in one read cycle.
By "64 bit address space" I presume you mean 64 bit register (you fit 2^32 32bit address spaces in a 64bit address space). But even in 32bit mode Intel CPUs can access 128bit registers via SSE. Anyway, this presumably has more to do with your compiler than your OS, so I don't know what Vista has to do with this.
Everything else being equal, 64bit software would run slower than 32 bit, because you need twice as many bits to represent a pointer. Essentially, unless you need an address space larger than 4GB, you are wasting 32bits on every pointer. This would waste memory, cache and memory bandwidth etc. The standard answer as to why 64bit software runs faster on Intel/AMD CPUs is that on these CPUs everything else is *not* equal.
The biggest bonus to running in 64bit mode on Intel/AMD chips is that since 64bit is essentially a whole new arch, we can throw out all the backward compatibility. In 64bit mode we actually have a decent number of registers. Also since 64bit code won't run on old processors anyway, there is no point in compiling code to be backward compatible with the old i586.
Understand yet?
Not really. Not any better than I understand this paper anyway :P. Could you give links explaining your claims above?
Do you still have to rebuild/reinstall modules for Linux for each version of the kernel?
In addition to the other /.ers' reports :
- openSUSE : No, you don't. .ko into the current modules collection.
if you install the drivers from an RPM (which is one single click on a web-page away, thanks to their 1-click-install feature) everything is taken care of by the package manager.
if you install the drivers from an ATI/NVIDIA installer or something more esoteric that you compiled your self, the openSUSE kernel upgrade will attempt (successfully in all my occurence) to import automatically the previous
- Debian stable : no you don't.
Everything including the kernel version, etc. stays the same across version updates, except for patched bugs. The previous modules keep working because the situation is exactly the same as before.
Atleast you don't have to reinstall every driver in Windows each time you've ran Windows update...
The fact that their whole OS stays exactly the same and doesn't improve a bit over the course of 5 years may have something to play in this situation.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
> 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?