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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?"
It's too much hassle to switch back *for the average user*.
Yes, the Slashdot crowd will rollback, but for Joe "I just wanna check e-mail and look at my porn on the Intraweb", whatever comes on the box at purchase time will be the OS he uses...and that's a majority of the market right now.
I've never had a problem at all with Vista's speed, it was the stability and incompatibility with many software packages that made it not really worth the money, seeing that in Win 7 XP mode is available and that it (even the beta) is much more stable than vista, i have to call shenanigans on whoever made the comment.
The question isn't whether 7 is faster, it's whether it's faster on shitty hardware. Vista has run pretty well since SP1 by most accounts, but only if you have big iron to run it on. Windows 7 is allegedly dramatically faster on limited systems, you know, the kind with less than a gigabyte of RAM. (My teenage self sitting at a Sun 4/260 with 24 MB of RAM would be fucking speechless, though.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Bah. Whether Windows 7 ends up 'faster' will have everything to do with the final version, and not the beta versions. Too many times in the past, Microsoft has released promising betas and release candidates, and delivered a hopeless mess, so Windows 7 benchmarks have little validity at this point.
A beta like this tends to attract more nerd-boys with faster specced systems than mainstream users. They kept the 'old' graphics driver because their system was stable for all of the time preceding the beta. They end up with the newest graphics driver with the beta and get what seems like a big improvement in performance.
They had a fragmented Windows partition with a hundred million hooks to nowhere in the registry. They install a fresh new beta on a freshly formatted partition. WOW! What an improvement! They install it on that second hard drive that happens to be newer/better than the one they were booting the previous OS from. Relatively few people are installing a fresh XP partition and patching it up with the best drivers, then installing a Windows 7 partition along-side it on the same drive. And of course it's going to be somewhat faster than Vista. All they gotta do is strip out the DRM and get a boost. Of course, they might have to put the DRM right back in again the week before they ship, because of the contracts they signed with various media outlets.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
But should an operating system that is 8 years older really run just as fast, if not faster on exactly the same hardware? I suspect the answer is, it depends. It depends on many factors, such as new features, new processes or simply extra bloat.
...but then we haven't had to deal with the needless bloatware that all the manufacturers love to install - *that* will be the test.
You know the drill....needless print engine? check. Unasked for toolbar/ systray icon? Check. Several services running for a single device (Creative, ATI, et all)? Check...
Fact #1: Microsoft's strategy when it comes to software sales: sexy > stable > performance.
Myth #1: Windows is only getting faster and better.
Fact #2: MS Marketing's job is to convince you that Myth #1 is true while at the same time maintaining sex appeal.
Fact #3: Windows 7 is still Windows.
My work here is dung.
I still use Win2k because it is faster and uses much less memory than XP than anything MS has released after it, yet the vast majority of people changed to newer versions. The same could be said of every Windows release before that. I don't see why it would be different this time around.
Shouldn't it be expected that Vista/7 would run slower than XP which was initially developed during a time when hardware was much slower? It's not bloat, it's taking advantage of current hardware to implement new technologies. Go throw Ubuntu on a computer from 2001 and then go cry about how Linux has gotten slower. What the hell is the difference? Get off my lawn?
Similes are like metaphors
a lot of these changes in speed are not noticeable. not many users care about the difference between 10ms and 100ms (unless it stacks of course). so vista is slower because when you hover over a placeholder in the taskbar, you get a little graphical popup of the window in question. do users like this? do they not? what is the trade off in speed? if it is on the order of 90ms, no one is really going to care, regardless of the marginal usability increases
to reverse the argument, look at the popularity of netbooks: a laptop with a cellphone's processor. this is acceptable to most because they aren't playing the latest fps or running photoshop, they are just reading email and web surfing, and the price differential makes it worthwhile. not that windows 7 won't be more expensive than a free os, i'm just dismantling the notion that the average user cares that much about speed at all
we are at an age where "fast enough and cheaper" is more important than "fastest". and yes, windows 7 is trying its darndest to compete on those principles in the netbook arena. stop poopooing windows 7's speed and start focusing on the gains that free os is making in the netbook arena, and focus on leveraging and extending those gains while microsoft scrambles to stay relevant
kind of like how the wii stole the thunder from the monster processing power of playstation 3: most people don't care about some redhead's hyperrealistic flowing hair. they just want a little pubhouse dartboard-and-foosball level time wasting light hearted fun. slower (and cheaper) is the new frontier nowadays. speed just isn't that big of a deal anymore. speed is a 1990s era concern of guys pouring liquid nitrogen on their processor
get over it. "fast enough" has been achieved. speed is only the concern now of a small minority of power users
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Vista SP3 PLUS Marketing hype PLUS Lipstick on a Pig... doesn't make it much faster.
You're absolutely right. The thing is though, Vista is a good operating system that is plagued by a stigma that is largely persisted by technology sites that, by default and in some sort of nerd conformance insist that all Microsoft products are garbage, an opinion formed with disregard to objectivity. By rebranding Windows Vista as Windows 7 and getting some tech sites to view it in a positive light, the layperson who holds any nerds technology opinion as inherent truth will be more apt to try and view it in a positive light as well.
Similes are like metaphors
First, if you want to talk about benchmarking tests speed, actually there's actually very little difference at all now between Vista and XP.
That leads us to "general user responsiveness" benchmarks...a user clicks something; how long before Windows finishes to do what the user said. Well, that's a more tricky one, but given a system has 2Gb RAM+ and has been used for a while Vista & Windows 7 will easily out-perform XP given how SuperFetch doesn't exist in XP. Any less and, well, who knows.
Finally, TFA linked suggesting Vista is slow is (unsurprisingly) dated Dec 27, 2006; probably not the most relevant material nowadays.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Can we stop using articles from 2006 that say that Vista isn't quick. Vista was sluggish when it came out, and I had bought it only to remove it a week or two later and go back to XP.
Over the years Vista has been updated and actually works great - I like having it instead of XP and so would most Vista bashers if they actually used it.
XP was hated for a long time over Windows 98 and no one would upgrade, they somehow XP became everyone's favorite version of Windows.
What MS should be doing - and I have no idea why they didn't this time - is bail on the 32 bit OS - especially since it's the largest limit on RAM and file size. Your OS is limiting the hardware, and that' just idiotic. If you need a 32 bit OS - stick with Windows XP - if you want a 64 bit OS, use Windows 7.
I really don't understand why we see so many stories comparing new versions of Windows to old ones in benchmarks. The users don't care about benchmarks, they care about how responsive the OS is. After using Windows 7 for more than a month now, I have to say it's miles ahead of Vista in this regard. It feels just as responsive as XP while having all the nice new features of Vista (plus a few more).
The issue with Vista had nothing to do with process performance, for the most part, burning a CD or running a batch operation in Photoshop, generally took the same amount of time in both XP and Vista.
The issue had to do with UI performance, for example, the time it takes for a menu to appear when a user requests it or how quickly a folder populates with file. Unfortunately, most benchmarks don't test that.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
The whole story is lame so I voted it down.
Some things can become much faster, such as user interfaces, parsing databases or whatever depending on implementation, some things can not.
If all your benchmark does is x number of multiplications how the fuck would the OS make that faster?
So "omg only 5% increase" don't say shit, one can't expect to get a new machine just by changing OS, the hardware components got the speed they have anyway.
Not that I know what the benchmark in question actually benchmarks but it's fucking stupid to draw conclusions from a benchmark (even worse a single one) anyway.
Also Vista and Windows 7 does more than XP do, some of these things may be worth it (such as security features) even though it makes things slower.
Last benchmarks I saw of the BSDs and two Linux versions wasn't in OpenBSDs favour either ..
geting faster from beta to release and/or not having any significant increase from vista to 7 = 2 things. 1: why would anyone from vista give a crap to switch, and 2: that it's basically vista. They're just trying to sell vista twice since it already failed once.
All of this is basically not compelling for the average user, meaning people won't have interest to buy this. It has been admitted in the past that 7 is built off of vista in the first place instead of starting from scratch and fixing stuff as they should have done.
I think the TFA misses the REAL issue, which is:
1.check the improvement between Win7 and Vista;
2.check both against Windows XP.
After all, what's the problem with Microsoft making available the Best and Fastest Operating System it can produce?
Remember: in all the corporations, this issue is very real. MS is trying to make me pay for a new operating system, which is slower than the previous one, and that requires bigger hardware. Where's the value here? Yes, they can go on buying the producers of XP addons and quietly retire their products... but that won't produce customer satisfaction.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
I see this claim a lot, but I call it baseless FUD. If DRM were off pre RTM, you wouldn't be able to play protected content. Why spread rumors and lies, the very FUD that is often claimed to come from MS, then try to claim the higher moral ground?
More important to me is the perspective of the change.
Vista came out directly after XP. So there were a lot of machines being upgraded from XP to Vista. OR, there were a lot of machines being sold that could *barely* run Vista. Either way, Vista was slow.
The fact that Windows 7 is not a lot SLOWER than Vista, is a move in the right direction. Had Windows 7 followed the normal trend, it would be 20% (or a lot more) slower. But it isn't.
Remember, XP runs a lot slower than most of the preceeding operating systems- it just seems really fast now...after new hardware and a lot of updates.
No reason to lie.
Speak for yourself. I don't know who this "most of us" are you're speaking for but I'm not in that.
I'm happy with the Win 7 RC. It performs just as well as the beta and is stable for me. There have been a few small improvements and it feels pretty polished to me.
Don't think of it as a flame, more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage.
I have to tell this story one more time. When XP was a new thing, I installed it on an AMD K6-3 running at 450 mhz, and tweaked it like a madman. Soon thereafter, the wife bought a new Compaq with a 1ghz Athlon. My machine was faster, subjectively speaking.
Benchmarks be damned - it is the user's experience that counts. It matters little how fast that Ghz machine can crunch numbers, if it makes me wait a second or two for a menu to pop up. The first time a user has to wait on ANYTHING, he is irritated.
I can, and will, verify that Win7 is a huge improvement over Vista. I might even agree that Win7 is a small improvement over WinXP. I did some moderate tweaking on Win7, and afterwards, I saw no difference in speed or usability. Again, these are SUBJECTIVE measurements. I simply don't CARE what a benchmark might say, if and when my subjective experience is contrary to that benchmark.
(I can't say that I've ever used a computer on a bench, anyway. I have an office chair that I sit on mostly.)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
what does the average user do? By a PC that they don't really need?
Uh... yes? Have you *looked* at PCs lately? That's the only thing that drives pre-built system sales. The average user has no clue how to maintain their system, it starts falling apart, they buy a new one that costs about the same as their old one did new. Then, they either run their old programs, or upgrade if they won't run on the new OS. The average computer user doesn't need multi-core systems and DDR3 RAM. They run a web browser, email client, and IM client. Maybe watch a movie. A system from 5 years ago can do that easily, and older ones could still probably do that.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Yes Vista was "slow" when it came out, and still feels a bit sluggish even with a dual quad-core machine with 10k rpm disks and 4GB of ram - but that isn't my gripe.
My concerns are with the bone-headed DESIGN decisions Microsoft made with Vista.
Managing a network connection in Vista is unnecessarily complicated. Why do I need to go into that damn network and sharing center to get to my network cards or to choose a wireless network? Why the hell do I need a diagram of my computer, my house, and the globe to explain how my computer is connected to my network and the internet? I connected the damn thing - there is no need to draw me a picture of how it all works.
Does renaming "add/remove programs" to "programs and features" really make me that much more productive? It takes me an extra second or two EVERY time I go between XP and Vista and the change added NO value.
Transparent menus - WHY? I want to look at the text in the menu, not at what is behind the menu. God forbid you have something behind the menu that is the same color as the text.
I could go on and on about how slow network file transfers were when Vista shipped, or how many drivers and programs made Vista crash, or just flat-out didn't work, but I won't. Those are bugs, and in time, they are fixed and the problems go away.
Bad design decisions, unfortunately, are not as easy to fix as a bug. The first step in fixing a bad design decision is to admit that the designer made a mistake. Microsoft is too arrogant to ever admit they made a mistake, so the bad design decisions live on.
Until Microsoft takes usability seriously, I suspect Windows 7 will still irritate me and many other users. I will try it when it comes out, and try to keep an open mind, but disappointment seems to be the Microsoft way these days.
-ted
>>>Windows 7 is basically vista. They're just trying to sell vista twice since it already failed once.
Question of the decade: Can Microsoft survive two "mistake editions"? They survived M.e because they were able to discontinue it after just one year and replace with with NT 5.1 (XP). But can Microsoft successfully survive two bad OSes, Vista and Win7, back-to-back?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Of course they can. Just reinstate XP as an option and inertia will keep the money rolling in. Honestly, I kind of wonder why they bother trying to develop "the next windows" instead of just polishing what they have. Maybe they should try a "plus pack" if they're yearning for upgrade cash.
The perception that I have gotten is that they are trying to make Vista right with Win7. Vista is the Windows Me of the 21st century. Vista sucked. I had to put up with it when I worked on some of my friends' computers, but I never installed it on any of my own hardware. We never installed it at work.
I have used Windows 7 and it works a lot better than Vista. I don't have to disable Aero to get a responsive UI. I don't have a bunch of pop-ups bothering me when I am making changes to the system. They have added some neat enhancements to the UI also. I like the fact that I can hover my mouse over a group of open programs (like Word documents for example), and the UI will bring up small copies of them that I can browse through without actually having to go all the way into the program. It makes finding what I'm working on more convenient. I'm sure that they "stole" the idea from OSX, or KDE or whatever. I don't care where it comes from or who invented it first, it's a productivity enhancer and I'm glad to see it in Win7.
I would never have rolled out Vista on my network. I might think about rolling out Win7. I probably won't because most of my clients are running integrated video and I haven't done any testing on those. However I'm confident that the OS itself will work and do what it needs to do... unlike Vista.
I've been evaluating the Win7 RC here at work for a week now, and I can tell yo that I am pretty excited for this release.
Vista suffered from being a major architecture overhaul with few bullet-point features. Windows 7 adds those features, many of which take advantage of the underlying changes from Vista.
XP mode looks to me like it will help us transition our existing (2000+) deployment packages to Win7 slowly, rather than requiring a complete re-certification process. (I'm not 100 on this yet, but so far so good).
Vista improved OS deployment via the WIM format significantly, and Windows 7 adds all sorts of usability tweaks that I think are highly inspired by the iPhone and gestures. It also adds codecs, while stripping out useless cruft like Windows Mail and DVD creator.
Discussing the speed of it in relation to XP is sort of disingenuous... it runs great on modern hardware, and does a lot of things XP will never do.
Jeremy
as someone who used Vista from the RC days right until months after the release
Some of it was fixed in SP1 but I didn't try it for long enough to find out what... I haven't even considered running Vista since and never will.
At least you admit that you have no desire to form an objective opinion.
Similes are like metaphors
Get us the source code or a DRM-free copy of the OS, and we'll talk then. Speaking from what I remember from just before the release of Vista, the OS makes requests to its hardware for voltage and other information. It does some calculation to decide on the likelihood that the unencrypted data stream is being captured in some way. It does this check about 30x per second, targeting multiple pieces of hardware. This requires the drivers for the devices to block for IO, and the computer can't do anything else with the device while this happens. It does this even when DRMed media aren't being played. Anytime that you're working with hardware polling like that, it's going to slow things down. They're using clock cycles on *my* personally-owned hardware to do checks for large Hollywood corporations that I'm not stealing their data. And the encryption of a lot of the data they would want to check (Bluray, for example) has been rather thoroughly broken anyhow. In short, every Vista/7 machine is wasting time checking data streams that can be decrypted in software anyhow.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
What about that rubbish where the network speed would significantly drop if you were playing an mp3 file? Even if they fixed that particular issue it doesn't exactly breed confidence.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
In fact its ability to isolate faulting apps is excellent.
I think its ability to isolate faulting apps is a little too excellent. Often times, Vista will report that an app has hung or is not responding and should be closed when it is simply performing a rigorous task. This leads to calls where the user keeps complaining about a crashing app, Photoshop or Quark usually (although Quark truly does crash very often). Often times in my experience, Vista is simply being impatient, and conveying that impatience on the user (who really doesn't need assistance in this aspect). *face palm*
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 (!!).
It is a secret to no one that Microsoft offers incentives to OEM vendors who comply with their policies. I'm sure no one here, including yourself is surprised about this. If the OEM vendor doesn't comply, they will suffer serious repercussions in their ability to compete with other vendors who do comply. Whether this is a bad thing, or a good thing is completely relative to your perspective.
If that's so, what else could Microsoft have possibly screwed up so badly that a modern OC would stuter playing an MP3 for lack of power? The DRM argument was convincing, because poorly tuned crypto could quite reasonably destroy performance to this degree. I have a hard time imagining anything else that could.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
A system from 5 years ago can do that easily, and older ones could still probably do that
...if they weren't completely crawling under the load of viruses, spywares and trojan by now, under the management of Random User Joe.
At least that's something average users are going to need their multiple cores for : to keep their system running for a longer period even if there are a dozen of background tasks spitting ads about online-casinos and various-body-parts-enlarging drugs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yeah, while that was the official story, it doesn't seem at all credible. We'll (probably) never know for sure, and therefore I'm not saying you're wrong, but lacking evidence either way it's reasonable to assume bad faith on Microsoft's part.
I thought it worth looking at what people are buying at Amazon.com.: In brackets - the number of days in the Top 100.
Bestsellers in Software
1 MS Office Home and Student 2007 [863]
2 Quick Books Pro 2009 [232]
5 Photoshop Elements 7 [253]
8 MS Outlook 2007 [840]
9 Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard [273]
13 Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 [243]
18 MS Offfice Pro 2007 - Full Version [427]
20 Quicken Deluxe 2009 [258]
21 Rosetta Stone Version 3 - Latin American Spanish [325] $494
23 Family Tree Maker 2009 Essentials [247]
25 MS Street & Trips 2009 [234]
34 Corel Video Studio Pro X2 [34]
45 Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate [19]
46 Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 PLatinum Pro Pack [217]
47 Oregon Trail 5 [170]
48 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 [273]
In sum: the essentials for the MS home office and a broad mix of video and photo editing software for the amateur-enthusiast.
This isn't the market as the geek imagines it.
I'll admit that Rosetta's strength surprised me. I think it's sign of how deeply Hispanic - multilingual, multicultural - this country is on the way to becoming.
It can be very revealing to look at sub-categories like Home & Hobbies. Home design, landscape design, home publishing and other craft projects dominate here.
It's computer aided design for the middle class - a software category I'm not even sure the geek knows exists.
If none of these apps bring your aging PC to its knees, a game certainly can:
Best sellers in PC Games
Windows 7 is competing with that people think Vista is like, not what it is actually like. It's competing with what the people who hated Vista when it first came out and they stuck it on hardware that has since failed and no longer exists.
Windows 7 will have no substantial increase over Vista's performance because Vista's performance isn't actually bad. In fact since SP1 for the most part it's quite good. When you sit down a user(or a reviewer) in front of Windows 7 they'll say it's much faster than Vista because they think that Vista is much slower than it is, or they'll have experienced Vista on much slower hardware.
How Windows 7 performs on modern hardware isn't even really an issue as Vista has no problems on that hardware either. How it performs on netbooks and/or much older hardware might be interesting though.
...When i went back to XP i realized just how slow Windows 7 is. It was as if i had put a new processor in my pc...
You're obviously running an old desktop compter (+4 years), otherwhise any speed difference when using the standard features like explorer etc, will hardly be noticable.
..Windows 7 and Vista have terrible file I/O. Its just slow and bloated...
Again more unfounded generic statements...
...I've grown to hate vista because of how poor it is. I cant stand the UI. The automatic folder views suck. Vista never gets it right...
Wow, this is really your entired post summed up. You never bothered to learn/customize the UI in explorer, and for that reason you have a burning hatred inside you against vista.
Vista loves to eat up all of your ram, and then when a program needs lots of ram, your system takes a giant shit because Vista goes into swapping mode to dump its giant "cache" to hd.
One of the things that Vista is actually superiour to XP with is memory managment. If you have problem with disk trashing/swaping, it's not vistas fault. You simply don't have enough RAM, sorry buddy. You can't expect to be able to run your photo and video editing software smoothly with 512mb in Vista. And with the price of RAM today... 2GB is sufficient for ~anything~... I have run Vista several years, loaded with 4 gb, and have never, ever experienced cache hangups. Not even with the latest games minimized, plus that I always leaves 20+ apps running in the task bar.
(Summarized) Blah blah XP is better.