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.

Comments

I question the results.

[Tubal-Cain]

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.

Re:I question the results.

[N!NJA]

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....

Re:I question the results.

[Ethanol-fueled]

But the only number-one score for XP was on the Pentium machine - Move 100 MB files a quick glance through the results seemed to imply that XP usually came in second place for moving/opening smaller files, shutting down, and performance of few other tasks which would be attributed to a "stupider" computer. XP did come on second roughly half the time across both machines(from a quick glance, YMMV). It's nice that his charts are simple and straight-to-the-point instead of the usual spreading of the results across 10 pages, but I still find the results hard to believe.

It's possible that the people who compiled the test results rated the OS's from 1 to 3 with 3 being the best ;) and Mr. Hughes confused the data when he wrote the article. And even if he didn't confuse the results, the 1-2-3 standings aren't very meaningful when the first-place OS opened the file in 1.255 seconds and the second place OS opened the same file in 1.26 seconds.

Re:I question the results.

[purpledinoz]

If he tested all 3 OSes on the exact same hardware configuration and compared those results, then the tests results are valid.

My major problem with these test results is that he ranked them 1, 2, and 3. He should have put in the actual amount of time these tests took so we could see how much big of a difference it is. 1, 2, 3 tells me nothing. The difference between 1 and 2 could be 0.01% or 5000%.

Re:I question the results.

[Skal Tura]

i've found out that generally speaking ZDNet articles are total bullshit, with no relevance to the real world.

This article and your example is just one example of that.

Re:I question the results.

[TheNetAvenger]

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

Sadly, as much as the SlashDot world not like to believe, this is accurate.

If you have 1GB of RAM even on old hardware, Vista is as fast as XP, as the extra RAM offsets the Vista features overhead and Superfetch and other tricks of Vista help make up performance gains.

With 2GB of RAM, Vista will be faster, even if you have a 800mzh PIII and a 1998 ATI video card.

Vista or should we say the NT kernel in Vista is not slow or bloated, it is the extra features that Vista is doing that consumes RAM that offsets its performance gains over XP. (Search Engine, etc.)

The CPU cycles for the Vista features are light, it is all about RAM. Just like with virtually every Windows and known OS update in history, they want more RAM for the features they add.

- Even for Leopard to perform as fast as Tiger you need 1GB of RAM, which is funny considering Apple was making fun of Vista for the exact same reason.

Here is how it works:

512MB RAM - XP > Vista
1GB RAM - XP = Vista
1.5GB+ RAM - Vista > XP

Windows7 so far is showing that even on 512MB is faster than XP in many cases, which is the result of the event based service manager, that unloads processes/services when not needed and saves RAM.

An example on a running test system with 3Ghz P4 and 1GB RAM:
Vista 41% - OS Consumed RAM
Win7 20% - OS Consumed RAM

See how that might help the Vista RAM overhead and put Win7 back in line with XP?

PS And on this test system Vista is faster than XP - even in gaming with a Geforce 5600 video card.

Re:I question the results.

[je ne sais quoi]

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

Sadly, as much as the SlashDot world not like to believe, this is accurate.

Here are some benchmarks right over at tomshardware that show that the "SlashDot world" in this case is accurate (amazing!).

Conclusion: K.O. For Windows Vista? Windows Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to executing single applications at maximum speed. Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP. There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance.

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.

Re:I question the results.

[TheNetAvenger]

Scheduler in Vista also performs worse than on XP (so MS had to resort to such hacks: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx [technet.com] ).

Saying this with the link you provide pretty much discredits anything you continue to say.

You have no idea what you are talking about...

Here:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302499,00.asp

Make sure you read the PCMark, then click Next to go to the Gaming Page. Vista outperforms XP in every test. (The only test it is a couple of points behind is the synthetic 3DMark.)

And this is SP3 - the fastest XP compared to Vista.

So go on again about how horrible the scheduler is in Vista, I am guessing you don't even know what a scheduler does and especially I know you don't know how it works in NT.

If you want to put your hands over your ears and eyes and keep screaming, "Vista is slower", try clicking your heels together too, it is as likely to make it true and take you to Kansas.

The Vista is slower myths need to stop and the idiocy behind them is really getting annoying.

Re:I question the results.

[Nutria]

Unless you need the proprietary ATI or nVidia drivers, one reboot at the end of installation and it's done. And, if you do need to download those drivers, that's only one more reboot. Two at most, and you're done.

Not true, even if you use [gxk]dm, you should be able to "activate" the new driver (after updating xorg.conf) by killing the dm. It'll auto-restart and thus load nvidia.ko.

Of course, God only Smiles on you if you use startx.

Re:I question the results.

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

The win7 beta EULA says no benchmarking. This is his way around that. If he could have posted times he would have.

Re:I question the results.

[mrsteveman1]

Take results with a grain of salt

Salt is forbidden by the EULA......and my doctor.

Re:I question the results.

[yoyhed]

In my experience, as long as you weren't on a complete piece of shit of a computer, XP did start up faster than 2000, and also application startup times were noticeably faster.

Re:I question the results.

[aliquis]

No need to if your Windows DVD happen to have all drivers either I guess, or atleast not many times.

Do you still have to rebuild/reinstall modules for Linux for each version of the kernel? That's always awesome ..

Atleast you don't have to reinstall every driver in Windows each time you've ran Windows update ...

And before you moderate me flamebait, be sure to understand that it's NOT needed for all other oses.

Re:I question the results.

[Anpheus]

And they say Linux isn't ready for regular users.

Re:I question the results.

[Score Whore]

The problem is you just don't understand what the audio system in Vista does. It is by far the most advanced personal computer audio system available on any platform. Which is the reason that it needs a more consistent stream of data. Because adjusting the timing to the computer's various speakers so that the audio arrives at your head at the same time rather than leaves the speakers at the same time isn't free.

Re:I question the results.

[techno-vampire]

Do you still have to rebuild/reinstall modules for Linux for each version of the kernel? That's always awesome ..

That depends on which driver and how you install it in the first place. I use Fedora, so I can only use that for my example. If you use a different distro, YMMV. If you download the nVidia driver from the OEM site and install it, you will have to reinstall it every time you update the kernel, because of the way it works. Or, you can download kmod-nvidia and install that, because that gets updated whenever the kernel does. And, just in case there's a time gap, you can also install akmod-nvidia. That checks on boot to see if you have the latest kmod, and if it's out of date, builds another one on the fly.

So, the answer is, yes, you do have to rebuild/reinstall modules, but the process can, and often is, done either by the distro maintainers, or on the fly without any user intervention.

Re:I question the results.

[venuspcs]

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

Re:I question the results.

[je ne sais quoi]

Fine. Here's some benchmarks from Vista SP1 vs. XP SP2 from ZDNet. Again, Vista is slower... despite the mighty passage of time:

So, onto conclusions. Looking at the data there's only one conclusion that can be drawn - Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows Vista SP1. End of story. Out of the fifteen tests carried out, XP SP2 beat Vista SP1 in eleven, Vista SP1 beat XP SP2 in two of the tests, and two of the tests resulted in a draw.

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.

Re:I question the results.

[HappySmileMan]

Of course it is, but the newbies have to suffer a reboot, only the elite get to keep their uptime even while updating graphics card drivers.

Re:I question the results.

[Score Whore]

"It is by far the most advanced personal computer audio system available on any platform." - is a complete lie.

True. I wasn't exactly clear. I'm talking OS audio subsystem for delivering audio from apps to the hardware. Not apps.

JACK (http://jackaudio.org/) is probably the best personal high-quality audio system (it has a zero-latency design). It's followed by PulseAudio which is now not quite yet zero-latency but much more efficient.

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.

Adding some more latency into audiobuffers to adjust timing is a fairly trivial task. Also, a good implementation would just turn off this misfeature if the system uses only one sound sink.

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.

Re:I question the results.

[ozmanjusri]

If he could have posted times he would have.

But he could have benchmarked Vista and XP, then given an above/below rating for Windows 7.

And in fact, he HAS performed that test in the past and come to the conclusion that XP outperformed Vista.

The fact that his results are reversed this time must throw serious doubt on his credibility.

Re:I question the results.

[Daengbo]

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'm not a big fan of Adrian, but he does hardware pretty seriously and lays out all his testing method well enough for you to duplicate it.

Re:I question the results.

[Cyberax]

"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."

That's pretty much all I want from my audio system. Just give me a precise control over my audio stack and then you can build anything on top of it.

XP does exactly this - there's a fast, efficient, hardware-friendly kernel streaming layer.

Vista on the other hand forces you to use inferior-quality stack because MS couldn't figure out how to do protected audio path with kernel filters.

"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."

DirectShow is famous for its imprecise timing control due to KMixer ;) My previous employer made a lot of $$$$$$ by making time-correcting kernel streaming filters.

"Where's the signal processing layer in there? Oh, it's third party. Where's the channel synchronization? Can't find it."

Everything is third-party. JACK only gives you a microsecond-precise information about audio system. You can do the rest yourself.

"And shockingly enough it's all software. Where's that hardware acceleration you're so fond of?"

It's possible to have hardware filters in JACK. The problem is that hardware filters are not that useful for professional-type audio systems. Look at OpenAL/EAX for hardware acceleration of spatial sound and other goodies.

BTW, OpenAL Creative Drivers even work on Vista by bypassing all its audio stack.

And.... SURPRISE! Windows Vista uses 32-bit floats as internal audio sample format ( http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/04/03/volume-in-windows-vista-part-1-what-is-volume.aspx )!

"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."

Newsflash: if Vista scheduler can't quite keep up - you'll get sound drop-outs (I _do_ get them when I test my audio app on VMWare). There's no way around it. Realtime scheduler guarantees that your audio stack will get the highest priority, just like in Vista.

"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."

That doesn't matter. It's still not hard to do using kernel streaming.

I can distinctly remember that nice '3d-room' settings on my Creative Audigy 2 back in 2003. All in hardware.

Re:I question the results.

[Frools]

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 ;)

Re:I question the results.

[Score Whore]

Everything is third-party. JACK only gives you a microsecond-precise information about audio system. You can do the rest yourself.

So what you're saying then, if I got this right, is that the best audio system on the planet is the one that you have to write yourself? Awesome.

That doesn't matter. It's still not hard to do using kernel streaming.

Didn't say it was hard. Said no other OS is doing it. Your argument seems to be that it's possible to do something, therefore it's already been done. To go for the car analogy, you are saying that since you can melt a Honda Civic down and recycle the materials into some of the parts needed to custom build a super car, a Honda Civic is better than a Bentley Continental.

Show me another OS that, out of the box, has the same feature set that Vista has. Any linux distro. Any kernel. And I'll concede that Vista doesn't have the most advanced audio system. Until them blather on, but you're still wrong.

Still making 32 bit?

[Dyinobal]

When are 32bit OSes going to start going away?

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[Tubal-Cain]

I agree. Nobody is selling 32-bit processors anymore.

Linux can handle 32-bit applications on 64-bit OSes. Surely MS can do the same?

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[vux984]

Linux can handle 32-bit applications on 64-bit OSes. Surely MS can do the same?

Of course they can, and do. Vista x64 runs 32 bit apps just fine.

Unfortunately MS doesn't have the source for all the devices out there, and can't just recompile all of those to be 64-bit, and the 3rd party vendors that can do it, would rather not spend the effort -- hell, they kicked and screamed and did a half-assed job of updating their drivers to work with Vista in 32 bit (the main source of most real Vista woe).

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[Tubal-Cain]

32bit or 64bit is essentially meaningless...

Unless you have more than 3.5 GB of RAM

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[DigitAl56K]

What bothers me about Vista 64 is that Microsoft do not let you load unsigned drivers. Got a driver from a vendor that's not signed? You have to go through the trouble of signing it yourself and kicking your OS into test mode. The problem became worse with SP1 when MS made several known workarounds disappear.

I understand they're trying to work against root kits but I'd rather be able to easily install any drivers I choose on my own system then have Microsoft protecting me against myself and causing me all kinds of grief. I've also never been hit by a root kit and I would guess that regular viruses are just as problematic and more common for nearly everyone.

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[644bd346996]

64bit x86 gives you 4 times the general purpose register space and twice as many vector registers, which is a huge benefit for an architecture that's so lacking in register space.

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[TheNetAvenger]

lol. you've drunk the kool-aid, 32bit or 64bit is essentially meaningless

There is kool-aid, but you need to check you own cup.

If you are referring to the Apple marketing machine, they ya, 32bit and 64bit are not much different, just larger memory addressing. (Of course OS X is still a 32bit OS could be the reason they like to create this mis-perception.)

On a real 64bit OS, there are 64bit registers and tons of other tricks and optimizations that happen, let alone full 64bit drivers that can shove data to devices oh like Video cards much faster.

If you look at Vista x64 it performs 15% faster than Vista x32 if you have 2GB of RAM.

This includes not only the OS's operation, but even 32bit applications running on the OS.

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.

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.

And we could go on and on and on...

Understand yet?

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[DA-MAN]

I agree. Nobody is selling 32-bit processors anymore.

Intel's Atom processor is 32-bit.

Linux can handle 32-bit applications on 64-bit OSes. Surely MS can do the same?

It's the proprietary drivers that make it hard for MS to do the same. In Linux the vast majority of drivers are maintained in source, so this isn't as much of a problem.

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[DA-MAN]

Unless you have more than 3.5 GB of RAM

Unless you allocate more than 3.5 GB per process.

PAE has gotten around the 4 gig limit a long time ago.

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[TheNetAvenger]

There are some good TechNet articles at Microsoft that would give you specific answers of what happens on Vistax64 with regard to 32bit memory allocation. (The SDK/DDKs will also give you some answers.)

Also check out interviews with NT engineers at channel9.msdn.com.

As for you questions regarding the compiler, yes. If you compile your application for 64bit, optimizations like you describe are handled unless you disable them in the compiler.

However, the things I was talking about in reference to Vistax64 is that running 32bit code on the 64bit OS, gives the OS the ability to make decisions like this on the fly for upper level system RAM (not CPU level optimizations/etc). So on Vista x64, and running your 32bit code, it will execute faster on Vista x64 because the OS is running faster, but also if you are using large chunks of RAM, the 32bit application will get additional boosts by combining 32bit memory chunks into one read/write of 64bit space.

Once you get what you need on what Windows x64 is doing, head over to AMD and read about CPU specific optimizations that happen in the register and cache levels of the CPUs when executing 32bit code.

Even if you stick to 32bit development, your applications get benefits of Vista x64.

---

Side Note for others:
Anyone here that installs Windows for gaming, if you have 2GB of RAM, grab the 64bit version of Vista, you will easily get 15% more performance out of your games over Vista x32 and XP.

And if you play MMOs, your zone and load times in either version of Vista will make you never want to touch XP again as it is often a 10x to 20x difference due to SuperFetch.

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[Metasquares]

Despite supporting PAE, Vista-32 still limits addressable physical memory to 4 GB (Wikipedia). PAE will also run into problems at 64 GB, whereas 64-bit machines shouldn't reach another addressing limitation until they hit 16 EB.

Transitioning to 64-bit is a better solution in the long term.

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[644bd346996]

And in practice extra x86-64 registers are not that great improvement because modern CPUs got very good at pipelining and data prefetching.

Good point. However, those extra registers may matter quite a bit more for something like the 64-bit Atom processors, which deliberately forgo most speculative features that mitigate register pressure. It would be interesting to see whether it's a better use of silicon to make an out-of-order processor or a 64-bit in-order processor when you're operating under the power constraints of the Atom. The current existence of 64-bit in-order Atom processors suggests that the performance per watt impact of 64-bit is better than out-of-order execution. I suspect this is because 64-bit takes less silicon than OOE, in a similar manner to how useful a good implementation of simultaneous multithreading can be.

Two reasons for this

[bhpaddock]

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.

Re:Two reasons for this

[Belial6]

There is no excuse for MS supporting any legacy code in Win7. None. Zero. Zip.

If they were halfway competent, they would port VirtualPC to Win7, include a modified copy of XP that will only run 1 program at a time, and include drivers to share the clipboard between the host and the guest. A little configuration magic so that launching the virtual machine also launches the application instead of a desktop, and virtually 100% all current software would not only work, but could be sandboxed by default. If they really wanted to do things right, they would include images for every version of Windows and MS-DOS ever released. This would not only improve security, clean up the API DRAMATICALLY and keep only one code base which would be fully 64-bit but it would also make Win7 by far the MOST backward compatible version of Windows ever released. Hell, they could make even make it XBox 1 compatible and let all of their partners re-release all of their XBox 1 games as "XBox Classic".

Of course, this would have the negative side effect of not letting them claim that backward compatibility was the reason for all of the crap in Windows.

Re:Completely useless

[bhpaddock]

It isn't useless. It isn't "subjective" since it's based on actual objective measurements. It conveys the indication that Windows 7 has *broad* performance improvements.

It has been suggested that exact numbers were not given due to the beta's EULA clause that prohibits benchmarking against the pre-release build.

Re:win7 rocks

[3vi1]

A friend showed me build 7000 for the first time a few minutes ago.

It blue screens in kl1.sys and reboots the whole system every time he tries to register the Kapersky AV it nagged him to install.

I'm showing him Kubuntu 9.04 alpha 2 now, but I haven't found a way to show him a crash.

My benchmarking scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Vista 3rd
Windows XP 2nd
Windows 7 1st

Windows 7 wins... it uses the least number of letters.

Microsoft has a good version of Vista!

[tkrotchko]

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!

Re:Microsoft has a good version of Vista!

[Belial6]

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.

How does it "feel"?

[john.picard]

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?

Re:How does it "feel"?

[Jugalator]

How often do you really have to move 100 MB or 2.5 GB of files around?

A benchmark like this still probably matters though, as if it's fast on moving 100 MB (a size more easily measurable than 10 MB), it's likely faster at 10 MB too. And it's at these ranges it starts creeping into everyday use and the "feel" you're talking of.

Re:win7 rocks

[DAldredge]

Installing kernel level software that isn't certified for the OS you are using isn't the smartest thing in the world to do.

Re:win7 performance

[Z80xxc!]

Who likes chairs anyway?

Steve Ballmer, that's who.

Re:Completely useless

[poetmatt]

You can dance all you want, but the truth is we have no evidence that they even performed testing since there are no numbers. That's not subjective, it's called an editorial/not factual.

If there are numbers out there, other people can compare and go "hey, that isn't what I got using the exact same setup as you tested with", etc.

The eula literally says "NO BENCHMARKING ALLOWED" so this means that this guy isn't even allowed to benchmark. It doesn't say "no posting of a benchmark", it says no benchmarking period. Therefore, he hasn't even done benchmarking. See how this works?

It could be

[ShooterNeo]

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.

Re:win7 rocks

[3vi1]

So, you're saying that when Win7 nags you and clicking the nag opens up http://www.microsoft.com/windows/antivirus-partners/windows-7.aspx, they're pointing you to uncertified software? BTW - I just went to his system and did the install again and didn't get any warning about installing uncertified software, so I'm guessing it's signed.

Are you guys actively testing Win7, or just ragging on people that don't report the bestus experience ever?

Re:win7 performance

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"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.

Re:Completely useless

[Shadow7789]

No, you're wrong. Read the EULA.

You may not disclose the results of any benchmark tests of the software to any third party without Microsoft's prior written approval.

What the author did was within the bounds of the EULA since he didn't disclose the results (the numbers).

What really frustrates me though is that you would suggest that the author is LYING. What gives you the right to make such accusations? Are you working on some kind of historical precedent? Do you know the author personally? Has he lied before? Or are you just being a douche? I can completely understand if you want to see the raw data, so do I. But really, I thought Slashdot attracted a smarter caliber of readers who don't have to result to personal attacks. Apparently, I was wrong.

For the record though, the relative performances he gives us are a valuable indicator. Are you saying that a race scored based upon who crossed the finish line first instead of a stop watch is not a valid way to measure the performance of the athletes in it, because I can think of plenty of sports (even a few Olympic ones) that are scored this way. That makes no sense. Maybe next time, you should think before you post.

Re:win7 rocks

[dreemernj]

Windows is working with them to develop security software. So, what actually happened is your friend installed a Beta test of an OS, and then installed a technical preview beta of antivirus software and on his hardware something goes wrong.

As long as he reported the issues to MS, then it all seems like standard operating procedure for using test software running on a test OS.

The devil is in the details

[westlake]

I have 3GB of Ram. Vista is far slower than XP on my machine.

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.

Re:The devil is in the details

[Khyber]

How about this.

HP DV9825NR
1.83 GHz T5550 Intel
4GB DDR-800
320GB SATA
512MB GeForce 8600M GS
RealTek HD Audio

I had to hack drivers to get the video card to be seen under XP.

Used for audio production, I made a quick multi-tracked setup using CoolEdit under both Vista and XP, then tested mixdown/encoding from .WAV to MP3.

XP beat Vista - 13 seconds in XP vs 28 seconds in Vista, for the same minute and a half of music.

For gaming, even with my hacked driver to get the video card recognized, playing Fallout 3 in Vista at 1280x720, medium details, gives me an average of 32 FPS. In XP, same detail settings and resolution, I average 40, following the same path, same difficulty. In XP I also lose the stuttering issue in Fallout 3 that Vista users seem to be getting, which seems to be caused by the audio subsystem, as turning audio acceleration to Basic stops about 90% of the crashes, and fixes several noise loop issues.

So, Vista SUCKS. My laptop is dual-booted with it and XP, and I only use the Vista partition for internet stuff, webcam, skype audio chat, etc. Games and any WORK gets done in XP.

I want to try 7 on this laptop.

Links Please.

[spaceturtle]

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?

About rebuilds

[DrYak]

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.
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 .ko into the current modules collection.

- 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.