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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?"
When I run Windows 7 vs. Windows XP Pro in Microsoft Virtual PC, the performance in many areas is the same and also notably faster that Vista. Tests in a lab environment frequently do not represent real world result.
One of the major criticisms of XP was that it was much slower than 98.
Hell, I vastly prefer vista to XP, on account of it doing much fewer crazy and unpredictable things, and I look forward to 7.
I am sure systems like 20 years ago were faster than Windows 7 at doing some particular tasks.
The whole point of new systems, isn't just speed, but functionality, or what you can do with it.
The real question that should be asked is "does Windows 7 offer significantly improved feature set"?
If not, then one begs the question of why bother.
I figured, what the hell, give it a spin. Tuesday I sat down and installed Windows 7 64bit on my desktop machine. The install took maybe a few mouse clicks, some typing, and thirty minutes to complete. On boot it recognized pretty much everything in the system save for the sound card (Curse you Creative Labs and your poor excuse for drivers). It even recognized my HP Printer when I accidently turned it on, installed the drivers, and non of the HP bloat. It recognized the Killer NIC card in the machine as well and that Razer gaming mouse. Came up quick and clean. It ran, in my opinion as this is a personal anecdote, just as fast as if I had freshly installed XP.
I was able to install my regular software (a bunch of games, some vista capable burning software, a few image editing tools) with no hassles what so ever. The games ran as well as they did on my XP machine.
Things I did not like. Certain things are not properly named. There are two 'Device Manager' links. One is the easy to recognize one from the My Computer right-click properties, which brings up the panel as it would in XP. The other I believe sits in the Control Panel and presents a very odd list of 'external devices' (think keyboard, printer, mouse, etc) that was not what I was expecting. If waiting on a slow task initialized from another program (clicking on the downloaded file in the firefox download manager for example), it will gray out the initializing task while it waits for a response from you or the software. What is this 'passcode' it uses for home networking? These are the ones that immediately come to mind.
It has only been a few days and most of my time has been spent playing games, surfing the net or watching a movie (common user operations?), so I can not say for sure how fast/reliable it will be. For now, I am cautiously optimistic about it's behavior and pace.
Side note, this is the first time I didn't have to preload some special drivers for it to recognize my hardware to do a 64bit install of an OS.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
I have a recent Ubuntu on a machine from 2000. Things actually feel faster than they did back in 2000 because the kernel itself is more preemptible and things like the IO scheduler have shown up in intervening years. Firefox feels better than Netscape 4 and so forth. Suspend to RAM/hibernate work for me with newer Linux releases (yes I am aware that it's still an issue for others). On boot more things happen in parallel which makes things faster. ACPI support is much improved.
The machine itself still has a dual booting Windows 98 on it (not the original install) and that runs quickly but again became "faster" over time with the release of new drivers before eventually becoming slower as the drivers became focussed on newer hardware.
You happened to pick a point that can go both ways (usually software becomes slower but it can go the other way). OSX is apparently another piece of software that has allegedly become faster on subsequent major releases (I'd imagine this only applies to fresh installs).
I wonder whose lawn I've just stood on - it's simply too easy to do...
The problem with this reasoning is that I am not buying new PCs at the rate that Windows is being slowed down. Even if you consider the time between Windows XP release and Windows 7 release I have PCs/laptops around from the beginning and I still would like there to be an OS available for them.
At one time I was very interested in buying a faster PC. Between Windows 95 and Windows XP came the ability to burn a CD and not risk making a coaster, DVDs, ability to play real time video, etc. What has come to computing between Windows XP and Windows 7? Maybe the games look better but I don't play games, and other then that it is a lot of bloat in my opinion. There is no functional need for me to buy a faster PC right now and therefore I will not be. I want an OS that can support my choice. Fortunately I am a sysadmin so I am comfortable with Linux, but what does the average user do? By a PC that they don't really need?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I was running the Windows 7 beta for sometime and while i like some of the new ui, its still a VERY slow os.
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.
Windows 7 and Vista have terrible file I/O. Its just slow and bloated. XP ran siginificantly faster with windows desktop search, comodo firewall, and nod32 anti virus installed. One would think those extra processes would slow down XP, but it was still far faster than windows 7.
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.
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.
XP (XP64 also) is a better OS all around.
MS is hurting themselves by continueing to force Vista/Windows 7 on all of us. Its a slow OS, poorly designed. Its memory management sucks and while it may help those who just browse the internet... for those of us who use programs that demand lots of ram (video editing, 3d animationm, photography) Vista can be a nightmare. Such programs expect lots of free ram at any moment, but Vista eats up all of your ram, and when the programs need that ram vista chugs until it can free it up (IF IT EVER FREES IT UP)
Microsoft needs to dump Vista and Windows 7 all together and start over from nothing with the idea that leaner/faster is better. Take out the DRM. It is slow and ruins the OS's performance. Fix the dam kernal. The I/O is terrible.
It's one thing to copy Apple and make a pretty UI, but they forgot to copy the performance of osx... linux... and even xp. I cant remember which MS manager it was that said it... but he was correct when he said "We lost our way with Vista" in the leaked emails.
Windows 7 is a continuation of that nightmare.
Try it yourself, Uninstall it for yourself :P