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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.
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.)
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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
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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