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?"

Comments

The test is flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the FA, and the authors did not take any precautions to ensure that their computer had not been tampered with by Italians, or that Italians were not interfering in the system's operation during the test using their nefarious Italian network messages. Without the proper anti-Italian protections, computers can behave erratically and even dangerously. It is a sad commentary on the lax attitude to system security in M$ Windows that in this day and age, protection against Italian attacks is not enabled by default. Does Bill Gates want us all to catch the Italian virus flu?

Re:Windows 98 FTW

[Idaho]

It's not bloat, it's taking advantage of current hardware to implement new technologies.

Where by "new technologies", you mean mainly "DRM".

Oh, and also a GUI that gives the impression that some Microsoft techies looked at Mac OS X, decided that the important technical improvement was that it uses OpenGL to draw the GUI, and then implemented some design-by-committee monstrosity on top of that, too.

Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick to Mac OS X, Linux, and XP for the occasional gaming session, thank you very much. If I saw any actual "improvements" that I would care about in Vista, I'd have installed it long ago. Unfortunately for Microsoft, I don't.

Re:What else did we expect?

[Joe U]

No, Vista got slapped with the reputation for being a worthless piece of shite by, hmm, let's see, being a worthless piece of shite

You can't drag me back to XP. Vista is, by far, superior to XP.

Sorry, I'm happy running a x64 OS, where I can run all my developer tools and virtual machines and games and office on the same computer without having to dual boot or spend a week configuring things.

The only thing full of crap is the people who spout 'vista is bad' without actually using it.

Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster?

[kokojie]

Um, I can assure you, DRM had very little to no effect on the performance of the OS

Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster?

[schwinn8]

Remember... the only reason Win7 isn't slower than Vista is because it's really only Vista 1.1