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Did the Netbook Improve Windows 7's Performance?
Arnie87 writes "One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: 'If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista's successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'"
Face it, the real reason that Windows 7 is leaner than Vista is that Vista was a market flop because it tried to do all sorts of things that Windows users were simply not ready for.
There is nothing seriously wrong with Vista, and Windows 7 is mostly an optimized version 2 of Vista. So it's no surprise that with the codebase stabilized in Vista SP1 that Windows 7 will be able to build successfully upon that.
It doesn't matter if I have a netbook or not, if this is true, then everyone benefits. Even the guy with a multimedia powerhouse machine will see an improvement if performance is the bottom line.
Microsoft's fascination with taking advantage of new hardware and technologies has led to a consistent decrease in performance over the years, with Vista perhaps being the most obvious and poorly received example. The tide seems to be turning, though. Symantec pulled all the stops on making the newest releases dramatically lower in memory & faster, everyone's re-writing pages so they scale properly for mobile devices, now Microsoft is paying attention too?
This is a good trend. I hope it continues.
Yeah, because 3 years ago when Microsoft started the work that went into Windows 7 (remember MinWin?) they were smart enough to anticipate netbooks and so they did the performance work up front that would be necessary to make netbooks work well.
Or maybe, just maybe, they realized that Vista's performance sucked rocks and they decided to fix it and Netbooks were a happy beneficiary.
I dunno...Microsoft isn't the only faction that's suffered from some serious code bloat. Computers have gotten so much faster at such a rapid pace. Linux + Gnome and OSX have gotten rather porky as well....
I'd be happy to forego all the eye candy if it would speed up the work that I actually care about.
Best,
I give credit to the OLPC and the push it gave to the computing world to come up with something lightweight but functional. And that was long before Vista shipped. The Netbooks were a result of the global awareness the OLPC gave to a need for cheap, portable, functional computing.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Sadly, I have some bad news for Linux lovers (myself included) when it comes to the netbook. The fact is that hopes for Linux on the netbook is all but dead now that Windows owns more than 90% of this market.
I still have some hope though. KDE 4.2.1 is convincing many folks in my small world. If KDE programmers do what they have to do in terms of multimedia and the browser (read KHTML/WebKit), there is a future.
Nothing is going to get me to stop using Linux, and if all of this competition means that Windows is getting better, well bully. I seriously would not mind if everyone stopped asking me to fix their computer for them.
While they claim (and reports indicate) Windows 7 will be faster than Vista, I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to shoot themselves in the foot as soon as it's released.
And I don't think its the success of Netbooks that is making Microsoft focus on speed on netbooks. It's the fear of Linux/Android taking over where Windows Vista cannot work that is making them focus on speed for Windows 7. Amusingly enough, if Arm based netbooks take off, Not only is Microsoft screwed, but intel too.
Then again, Via Nano based netbooks are also starting to be rolled out, and they are comparable to the atom chipset. We'll see.
Nobody has made a netbook where when the lid is closed you have an e-ink screen for dual use as an ebook reader. This is totally pissing me off. I'm not the only person in the world who wants this or has thought of this.
I never saw an OLPC here in Australia or anywhere else in my travels (including 2 trips to the US last year and 3 months in Europe).
I /did/ see a lot of eeePCs. Not all of them running Linux, but the day my parents came home with their shiny new eeePC running Linux, I thought to myself "Microsoft must be SHITTING BRICKS".
Short answer -- No.
First of all, the obvious: Microsoft started working on Windows 7 late in 2006, even before Vista was released. Netbooks became popular in 2008. 2007 worldwide sales of Netbook-type machines were less than half a million.
Any self-respecting computer programmer knows what's really going on. When you spend months or years working on a major new release, you're often struggling to get the new stuff working at all. Your managers are pushing you to get the thing out the door; deadlines are looming; adding more people to the team would probably be counterproductive since they'd only slow down the people who need to be 100% focused on finishing things up.
Once you get that x.0 release out the door, you take a vacation, reintroduce yourself to your wife and kids, putter around at work for a while, and then dive back in and make your code faster, cleaner, more reliable, more useful. The x.1 release that follows ends up being the one everyone likes; people say "It's what x.0 should have been!" ... Right? That's what happens!
And that's exactly what's happening with Windows 7. This isn't a major "reinvent the wheel" release... it's all about optimization, performance, better user interfaces, and tacking on some new things that have become popular since Vista was released, like proper support for SSD drives, multi-touch, multi-core GPUs, and so on...
Who says it performs better anyway? Arstechnica gives no information on what tests they ran. Windows 7 is really just Vista SP3, so I'm a bit sketical.
Microsoft will *always* improve their products. As the very last resort.
Quick Answer: "No"
I simply meant since XP was released, or more specifically, since the internet became really popular, and .Net was released, there are now hordes of craptastic applications out there.
Vista is pretty much irrelevant, although with Vista, they introduced (to the average windows user) things like Widgets, so now people are a little more familiar with running stupid little shit all the time, so maybe Microsoft realized that when people run all their craptastic software, they blame the OS, rather than the software, so they are trying to minimize that blame by partially taking responsibility for various peoples poorly coded software, and allowing for even more of it to run, or for the "normal" amount now, to run better.
And I'm not necessarily even saying that's what I think, I was only adding another possibility to the GP's comment, although that I'm sure that it does play a part, however major or minor it may be, in addition to just the general desire for a slimmer/faster/smoother OS.
Yeah - godferbid they just make a quick efficient OS because it's a good idea...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This whole thing seems to support earlier rumours that MS was deliberately bloating Windows code in order to make people keep buying new computers. Now that the market has spoken, all of that bloat can be easily removed. Everything in Windows seems to be necessary until MS is forced to remove it.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
The thing that breaks this paradigm is an Intel platform that moves backwards in net performance. When the goal shifts from ever increasing net performance to performance per power it's only expected that Microsoft should miss the turn.
The question is, how did they miss being informed that the turn was coming? Did they get told and disbelieve, or were they just not told? I believe the former, not the latter.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This has a few (opposite) parallels over in the Mac world.
When the PPC platform stagnated, Mac OS releases started doing a strange thing.... they actually tended to be faster than the previous release on old hardware.
I've got a 450MHz G4 in its (mostly) original hardware configuration currently running 10.3.9. Unless I'm doing video encoding, or something else similarly processor-intensive, it certainly doesn't feel like a 10 year old machine. (The video encoding example is an interesting one, given that I used the machine 2 years ago for a large video-editing project with Final Cut Pro, and simply farmed out the rendering and encoding tasks to a more powerful machine -- FCP has remarkably modest hardware requirements)
This is all on a computer that shipped 2 years before the release of OS X. (As a random sidenote, I've also always been impressed that it could handle up to 2 GiB of RAM. That was unprecedented for its time)
Once Apple switched to Intel chips, new releases started to become progressively slower. Leopard would be an embarrassment if it weren't for the fact that Vista was even a bigger embarrassment.
IMO, the PowerPC's limitations actually drove a lot of innovation at Apple during those few years.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
WARNING: Intense rant built up over years of raging against boy wonder dickhead programmers who think they're top shit.
Here is a great hint for all those boy wonders who write shit applications that spray their shit applications everywhere - fix your damn applications up.
It pisses me off when I see vendors spray DLL's everywhere, from their own directory to the Windows directory to the user directory and everything in between.
1) Keep your fucking application exe and all the bundled DLL's in your application director - leave the fucking Windows directory alone. It is not for YOU to place YOUR shit into. It is for Windows and Windows only.
2) Don't write shit to your application directory; if it is a universal setting then you should ask the user for permission and write it to the global registry. Is it a user related setting then save it to the user profile. No if's, no buts.
3) Don't use undocumented API's and hacks. You aren't cool, you aren't hip, it doesn't make you gods gift to the world because you're using private API calls never intended by Microsoft to be used outside their operating system development teams. Its private for a reason - private meaning it is not for you to fucking use. Hack away at Microsoft's private api's and I'll hack away at your privates.
Do the fucking job properly the first fucking time and stop turning a clean and pristine Windows installation ito a fucking dogs breakfast because you think you're top shit when clearly you're not.
By optimized you mean they have DRM turned off. Expect DRM to be in place for the final release candidate.
Seriously, what's with this "DRM" myth? Can anyone provide an authoritative source that DRM is on at all times (not just when you're playing DRM'd content), and that significantly impedes performance?
I really want to like Windows 7.
On one hand, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy.
On the other hand, I use their software everyday at work. And if the market leader massively improves their (somewhat crappy) software, it forces the competitors to get better too.
For instance, IE8 seems much faster and better than IE7 (and of course IE6). This will hopefully wake up Mozilla and force them to improve on Firefox.
Regarding Windows 7, I can see that the memory footprint is lower, and that's a good thing.
=====> But it still _feels_ much slower than XP in everyday use! =====
I am talking about the little things that make up the experience of responsiveness. It just takes a noticeable amount of milliseconds more when I click on an icon, until the OS reacts. Opening a new browser window just have that extra lag. Copying files feels slower. Etc.
At first, I sort of liked Windows 7 and ran it for a couple of weeks. Then I booted back into XP (not a fresh installation of XP, mind you). I was depressed by how much snappier XP feels. I was hoping to have a good reason to ditch XP.
Makers of desktop operating systems should focus intensively on responsiveness. The OS should react as fast as possible on any user request, regardless of whatever else it is doing.
It's fair enough that some heavy calculation takes longer time if you have some other heavy job or service running, but the initial latency from any user request until you get some sort of reaction should be as low as possible. And XP is much better in this regard than Windows 7 or Vista (and also faster than all Linux distros I've been running).
To use an analogy from network land: I would much rather have 10 ms ping times and 1 Mbps than 1000 ms ping times and 100 Mbps.
Wonder why 'we' are never happy here on slashdot? Why no matter what MicroSoft does, they are vilified by 'we'?
Here's a hint: take your user Id, and subtract 1. That's about how many DIFFERENT people registered here before yoi did. Each with their own ideas about priority and values, and what to lambaste MS for.
I lambaste them for lame things like email not working right with IMAP4 servers in WinMobile 5, 6, 6.1, and 6.5. That's 3 YEARS that some as simple as deleting an email hasn't worked right in a device primarily bought to (ahem) read email.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
These are the netbook manufacturers I've collected brochures from:
These were advertised prices. Actual prices were about S$50-150 lower.
None of the vendors advertised the availability of GNU Linux. Asus is the only one that advertised the GNU Linux option. They also put up Eee PCs and Eee Boxes with GNU Linux on display, hooking up to big LCD screens for passer-bys to see.
This happened at the IT Show event, 12th-15th March 2009, Singapore.
So, no, I don't think your "nearly every netbook maker is developing a custom Linux distro that removes the cruft and makes it run faster" statement appears to be true, for the moment.
"ask a kid who's been raped by his priest for 5 years if he thinks what the priest is doing is wrong; you'll be surpised to find that the kid EXPECTS that from priests and thinks that priests who dont rape him dont really love god."
Do you think what the priest is doing to you is wrong?.
Seriously, I don't know how that got modded insightful. My Vista machine boots to the desktop and is usable in under a minute. 15 minutes is complete bullshit unless he's trying to run it on a 486 or something.
Slashdot ran a story about employees suing over not being paid while a computer boots. No, Vista isn't to blame, but some companies require that so many programs be run at log-in that a 15 minute boot time isn't out of the ordinary.