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Windows 7 "Not Much Faster" Than Vista
PLSQL Guy writes "Tests of the Windows 7 Release Candidate in a PC World Test Center found that while Windows 7 was slightly faster on our WorldBench 6 suite, the differences may be barely noticeable to users. The PCs tested were slightly faster when running Windows 7, but in no case was the overall improvement greater than 5 percent, considered to be a threshold for when an actual performance change is noticeable to the average user. One of the major complaints about Windows Vista was the fact that it was consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 can't significantly improve that situation, what chance does it have to convince people to move away from Windows XP?"
Yeah because
1) insert ubuntu live cd,
2) enter your name,
3) choose guided install,
4) wait,
Really is a bridge to far for average Joe... :-/
Only thing Joe has to make sure if he wants his old PC to work right out of the box is to have someone check his wireless chipset if he even has one. That's about the only piece of commodity hardware that's sometimes a problem with modern linux distro's.
Is that you, Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth, shilling for your products offer of free snail mail shipping?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The summary says that 7 isn't much faster than Vista, and then says that Vista is much slower than XP. The implication is that 7 is slower than XP, which a lot of people seem to be commenting on here. However, the summary is very deceptive. Notice the lack of a link to a direct XP to 7 comparison (there are plenty). Now notice that the "Vista is slow" article is from 2006, back when Vista was slow.
If you want to look at a comparison that isn't sadly out of date or intentionally obfuscating the relative performance of these operating systems, look here:
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3557&p=15
Click through all the performance pages. As usual, Anandtech does it right and is ignored by Slashdot, while some silly article by technically challenged people is featured. To summarize the direct comparison between 7, XP, and Vista:
Vista is usually slower than XP - by about 2%. 7 is usually faster than XP - by 2-10%. Everyone who is posting the "I hate MS as much as every other weirdo Slashdot fanatic but it makes sense than XP is the fastest" should cut it out and note instead that 7 is the fastest OS that Microsoft has produced since at least Win2k.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
The only thing full of crap is the people who spout 'vista is bad' without actually using it.
Nonsense. Vista is synonymous to crap of the best quality. At a hospital where I consult, none of the software developed by companies like GE and Siemens work under Vista. Hardware like foot-pedals and audio controllers no longer work. The situation is the same with Windows 7 as well.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The DRM code is dormant and has no effect except when playing back DRM'd content.
I was thinking the same sort of thing, but in a different direction -- these benchmarks don't deal with Vista's problems.
The complaints about Vista's speed were almost never about throughput. They were about high memory consumption, poorly optimized visual elements, and huge amounts of disk rattling. All of these issues have been improved in Windows 7.
Windows 7 may not increase throughput in this test environment, but it runs the full aero theme on a netbook almost as quickly as Windows XP runs its default theme. I've got it on my Aspire One, and it works great -- I bet it'll become the new XP over time (that is, reliable enough, fast enough, useful enough to become a major standard).
It's been a long time.
Vista is not at all a "bad OS." The upgrade path from XP to Vista may involve a hardware refresh but the OS itself is solid, attractive, and pretty user friendly. I've been running it for about a year and it has yet to full-on crash on me. In fact its ability to isolate faulting apps is excellent.
My Fedora10 system, by contrast, has way more quirks. Yes, it's apples to oranges when comparing the two for all the reasons we know about.
While I don't usually stand up for Msft, this "it's a bad OS" conclusion is not fair. Which isn't to say Msft didn't fumble in so far as not doing enough to get drivers rewritten or having awful, awful marketing (The Seinfeld ad was enough to turn anyone off the OS).
What really sucks is that XP is a just-fine OS as well.. but if you try to config a system on Dell now with XP it is an EXTRA $150 (!!).
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
Insightful, lol.
Ok, what you remember is correct, but what your memory forgot is that you just described what happens on the video card itself in hardware. What you've described is a very crude description of HDCP. That doesn't affect the performance of the OS. Also, it was 30x per MINUTE, not per second. This is the same reason why some of your bluray players get out of "sync" with your TV on early implementations of HDCP for *gasp* 2 seconds and then resync (30 times per minute = 2 seconds). The DRM portion of vista is not much more than moving the requesting playback of DRM'ed media into ring 0 so that userland code can't muck with it. A side effect of that is that it's also more efficient -- not slowed down since requests to IO ports and memory blocks for DMA transfer don't get intercepted.
The rest of the post (Blocking IO, etc etc) is just conjecture on your part, and is completely false.