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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?"
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
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.
Because the marketing department will tell them it's faster, maybe they'll commision a few "studies" that show it's faster.. and voila.. all the people who didn't do any actual testing will think and say its "a lot faster".
Vista SP3 PLUS Marketing hype PLUS Lipstick on a Pig... doesn't make it much faster.
My guess is that XP will live a long long while on Netbooks at least.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Windows 7, Windows 8, How long do we have to wait untill Windows 2000?
LiFe iS bEAuTiFul
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.'"
I want to be excited about Windows 7, and I don't need to hear this nonsense. I want hype. I thrive on it, and it makes me want to get up in the morning. I'm just going to pretend like I didn't read this.
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.
If you release a new OS that adds features and stays "as fast" on the same hardware, when you put that OS on new hardware, it will seem much "faster" to the end user.
Windows really needs to push 64bit, as a box with a quad core processor and 8gb of ram will be standard in 2010. On that hardware, 7 should run fairly well (until the average user has used it for 6 months).
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Windows 7 is CASTRATED APPEASEMENT to soy latte-sipping girly-men who wish they owned a Mac. We want a REAL operating system. An operating system that PERSONIFIES America's INDUSTRIAL MIGHT. That makes you feel AWE at the MAJESTY of the progress of its operation. VISTA is a monument to everything that makes us the country we are!
Like Chrysler, like Hummer, like Edsel - "Vista" is a name that will be remembered as the greatest operating system in Microsoft's history.
Just Say "No" To Seven -
SAVE VISTA!
Original blog post - Facebook group
We want ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE to join this group. So far we have nearly 30. TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS!
"I fully support this initiative. My computer business employs 200 people; the best possible thing for it is to make sure Vista continues and goes forward." - M. Shuttleworth, London
"I can't tell you how much Vista has done for my business. So many people depend on it." - S. Jobs, Cupertino
"Vista is the one thing that will keep people seeking out and using systems that are at the forefront of technology. It's been the best thing for all of us." - L. Torvalds, Portland.
"I'm ... I'm touched. *sob* I didn't think anyone cared. You guys. Developers! *sob*" - S. Ballmer, Seattle.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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
Maybe, and this is typical of them, they are just hoping hardware improves enough in the time running up to the final release that people won't notice.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
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.
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
By the time it is released people don't need to be convinced to move away from XP, they just will/have to move either because their machines are too obsolete, or too crippled by viruses/spywares/whatever junk accumulated over the years. When they get Win 7 with brand new hardware, they will perceive it as faster (even though the speed up comes primarily from better hardware).
I installed Windows 7 RC on a HP-Compaq D530 with 512MB of RAM. The install was so much faster than XP's it wasn't funny (I'm used to installing Linux off a DVD in 1/4 the time XP will install). When I tried it out everything seemed to be very snappy, even running Explorer, IE8, Media Player at the same time. Switching between them was very quick too. I use Linux almost exclusively, but I have to admit, Windows 7 looks pretty good (although I'm very unlikely to spend the money to install it on one of my machines).
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.
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();
As I understand it, the problem with Vista is that it has too many controls and limits for DRM and such. Windows7 will be the unavoidable "better" release but clearly not "better enough" and most likely for the same reasons. I predict some really smart people figuring out where all the slow-down code exists and neutralizing it with some NOOP and JMP instructions.
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.
PC World - consistently behind the times since 1999
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
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
The true test will be if it can copy 16 1kb files from our server to my workstation in under 3 hours.
"If Windows 7 can't significantly improve that situation, what chance does it have to convince people to move away from Windows XP?"
Not just speed but usability. What features will Microsoft implement that are new and must have (that isn't stolen at least)?
I must say that I've been very disappointed with M$. I never saw a reason to move to Vista (don't care for DX10 and UAC - no thanks) and after playing with the RC1 I'm still wondering what the hell their brainstorming sessions actually do.
I want something new that won't hinder MY use of a computer whether it's visually, the performance, or even backwards compatibility. Why must we upgrade to something they dictate that is a meager step in place, rather than forward?
Channeling Balmer here, forgive me.
Listen here, you pud-pulling jagoffs. We went and called it 7. Not R2, not Vista 1.5, not any motherfucking jungle cat name. No. It's 7! This means it's a completely different operating system, you fucking cunts. What's that, you say? The kernel on Vista is 6.0 and 7 is only 6.1? Security? Get over here. I want you to put on your dick-stomping boots and make this smart-ass' pride look like a waffle. Get the fuck out. Now as for the rest of you pole-smoking faggots, get with the story. 7 is what's it. It's the only game in town. Anything else is just stone age barbarism, may as well be using an abacus. Now I don't care if we have to throw in an extra blade and two aloe strips but this is going to be the biggest Windows launch ever or so help me, you better hope you have all your fucking chairs hidden.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It's still going to get changes between now and when it hits the shelves/warehouses. Between now and then a load could happen. I'm going to take this story with a very large pinch of salt. Maybe Honshu sized would be enough. Vista's a real big pain in the ass to me and hasn't impressed me. Some good ideas were badly implemented causing people to either disable the features or just get the dreaded "yes to everything" syndrome that I often see. If Windows 7 comes with any DRM I'm getting a Mac and grabbing some Windows XP disks and to f*** with what MS have to say. Digital Rights Management? Digital Rights Mangling more like. I haven't forgiven Sony/BGM for the 2 very public rootkitting incidents and for once slapping a rootkit on my machine after playing one of their CDs on my machine. I want to know who came up with that crap so I can punish them with a cactus up where the sun doesn't shine.
There have been many times when dealing with people that I wished I could kiss my own butt goodbye
A) Wrong story, you want the other one.
B) Everyone *I* know calls it Lego singular, Lego plural.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
It's faster than XP. It's really not, but most people will believe it is. Why? Because in the last 3 years nearly everyone has upgraded their PC, and a large portion of computers at workplaces have been upgraded within that time. So by the time they get to Win7 it will seem faster just because the hardware has finally caught up to the bloated monstrosity that is Windows. They won't know this, but they would have been happy about performance if Vista had been installed on their machines instead of Win7. Instead, what you'll hear is "Oh, I'm so glad we finally moved to Windows7 and skipped over Vista completely!"
Windows XP can't be beat because the X in XP stands for XTREME!!!!
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...
Windows XP got slightly more bloated with every service pack and security update. We're comparing Windows 7 with XP SP3, not the original XP. In other words we're not really comparing an 8 year old OS.
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
I've been using Vista for over a year (had to, didn't want to). I never had a Blue Screen Of Death from Windows XP. But I see plenty of these from Vista:
http://img216.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mwvistabluescreen.jpg
Although I consider some features of Vista an improvement over XP, if I can't rely on Vista every day, it isn't worth a plug nickel.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
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)
In my experience it is MUCH faster - since it is not crashing all the time, bugging you with security alerts etc - and actually lets you get your work done. CPU speed is almost irrelevant these days.
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).
I love how it says that the main problem people had with Vista is that it is "slow". No one seems to understand the massive hardware requirement leaps that moving forward involves. That's as stupid as going from your 500Mhz System with 128 Meg Ram running windows 98 then upgrading to XP. "OMG XP is SOO SLOW, this is garbage /complain /complain"
...
/sob
My Quad Core system with 4 Gig's of Ram running windows Vista flat flys. I also hate the fact that people say:
"you shouldn't have to buy high end hardware to run a simple desktop operating system."
The reality of the situation is that a midrange quad core processor is around a $150-$250 and 4 Gig of Ram will set you back all of $99
"Whoa!!! spending 500 dollars for a computer?! that's outrageous."
Well no fucking wonder your $99 piece of shit that you got used at a garage sale runs vista so slllloowwww
Oh and btw it's not the community's fault that you spent $500 on a retail system at wal-mart or best buy that has retardidly low system spec's and is over priced. So don't argue that either.
Retail PC market is just like the Automotive Dealership... You know what youâ(TM)re doing your fine... You don't... Youâ(TM)re fucked.
Do your research or find a friend/someone that can help you... otherwise bend over and be ready to take it.
The issue with Vista had nothing to do with process performance, for the most part, burning a CD or running a batch operation in Photoshop, generally took the same amount of time in both XP and Vista.
The issue had to do with UI performance, for example, the time it takes for a menu to appear when a user requests it or how quickly a folder populates with file. Unfortunately, most benchmarks don't test that.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Eventually, people will need more than 3 GB of RAM. At that point, the choice will be between XP x64, Vista, and Windows 7 if they want to stick with M$ Operating Systems. XP x64 has compatibility issues; Vista is slow. Take a guess at what they are going to pick.
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
The thing about performance is that you go so darn quickly from having plenty of it to having not enough of it. A 5% difference is not just a 5% difference, it may be an extra margin of safety before you fall over the edge of the peformance cliff.
My experiences with Vista were on a dual core 1.6GHz Duo with 1GB; the same with 3GB, then a 2.53GHz Duo with 4GB of RAM. When the older machine was working well, the older machine wasn't perceptibly slower than the much more powerful new one. What happens is that from time to time the old machine simply became unusuable -- more RAM helped of course. The new machine remains usable all the time.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I still maintain that outside of big businesses, where a specific OS (and version) are deliberately chosen, most of the time most people just use whatever OS comes preloaded on a new machine. If Windows 7 is what comes preloaded, then a lot of people are going to use it.
So the question is what'll keep people who buy new hardware with Windows 7 preloaded, from "downgrading" to XP. And if speed is the main complaint about Windows 7, then I think the answer is that that the biggest reason to not downgrade, is that new hardware is simply going to be faster. If Windows XP is fast enough in 7 year old hardware (I don't think it is, but millions of people disagree with me) then Windows 7, even if slower, is fast enough on 0-year-old hardware.
So I think all Microsoft needs to do, is keep hammering the OEMs and discourage them from offering competing OSes, or at least keep Windows as the default choice for people who don't think about what OS they want. This is way more important than making it faster. If Windows 7 comes preloaded, it's going to be relatively successful regardless of any qualities (or lack thereof) in the product. This strategy has worked for over 2 decades now; it's solid.
If they can keep this going, then all they really have to worry about, are people keeping their old hardware instead of buying new stuff. So I guess the next best thing for MS to do, would be to encourage OEMs to cheap out on power supply and cooling fans. ;) I'm sure AMD and Intel would be happy about that, too, so maybe collectively they can work together.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For me the slowest thing in XP is deleting a file/folder. Sometimes it takes minutes to delete a small file.
I guess its it needs to make some room in recycle bin but...come on. How hard can it be to make the recycle bin a database design for this job. Jeeze.
... On my new and shiny laptop. Which is the way most people get their Windows 7.
The UI improvements over Vista are enormous.
It's like Vista started exercising, took off 250 pounds, got a job, a house and a car. Finally met the girl he wanted to spend his life with, and got married.
She's got expensive habits, but she's a devil in bed and it feels like it's worth it.
Older systems? Yes. By all means, stick to XP.
But Windows 7 has come to the point where phasing out XP seems inevitable.
Or linux... I tried for two weeks, and going to Vista felt like coming home, but that's probably because this is a system I feel familiar with. (Unlike Vista, which never felt like "home")
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I set up two VMs each with 1GB of RAM and access to a single 2.4Ghz CPU and 20GB of HDD space. When Windows Vista first boots (completely vanilla) it uses 6**MB of RAM; Windows 7 uses 6**MB of RAM when it boots initially, but then suddenly drops to 360MB of RAM. I did't notice a performance difference between the two VMs though to tell the truth.
till they turn on the DRM checks and all the tiltbits...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Well my home PC's have moved on a lot since XP so a small slow down has been swamped by the speed up I have in CPU/RAM/HD. In fact, my slowest PC (a 1.8Ghz single core, 2GB DDR1 server) is presently runnign Windows 7 RC 32bit in VMware server on top of Windows XP without breaking a sweat. My cpu is still throttled down to 1.0 Ghz most of the time and I still have 1Gb of free ram according to the task manager. (I set up the vmware environment to have 800Mb of RAM and 20Gbb of storage assigned to Windows 7). Even windows 7 task manager is happily using low CPU usage and only 400mb of ram.
(I'm doing this so I can try out the new windows media player 12 streaming/transcoding to another WMP12 over the internet feature)
I'm also happily running Windows 7 32bit RC on my 800mhz , 2Gb, Samsung Q1U UMPC. I'd take the advances in desktop look and feel, handwriting and touch screen input any day than go to XP. - This was the speed of my desktop running Windows XP not so long ago.
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)
They can have my XP when they can pry it from my cold dead hands...lol...
Honestly, I have had no problems with XP, other than from crapware loaded onto it by idiots. I have heard about countless problems and compatibility issues with Vista, and from what I hear, 7 won't be much better. Then there's the annoyance with having to approve and re approve any changes to settings. Plus there's the issues with DRM, Trusted Computing, and the like that I would very much like to avoid. Finally, why should I shell out thousands to upgrade PCs that work quite well already?
I'll use XP until they won't let me validate the keys any longer, then I'll upgrade to Ubuntu.
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
i was really surprised to see that games had slightly higher fps on win7 than windows. i mean i had been avoiding vista only due to poor gaming performance.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
The trolls figured out that the latest benchmarks between Vista and XP are now equal if not favoring Vista slightly, so now, when comparing Win7 to XP, they compare it to Vista and use the FUD that "Vista is slower than XP" to come to the dramatic (and incorrect) conclusion that Win7 *must* be slower than XP.
Really...
A Vista vs. Win7 benchmark to compare Win7 to XP?
Seriously?
Are you guys on crack???
Yeah, Vista still sucks....but it's from a *usability* standpoint, not a performance one. That was fixed for the most part after SP1.
Windows 7 is faster on the same machine than XP for me. The hardware was not changed at all. I'm running on a Pentium 4HT with 4 gigs of PC5300. I did a fresh install of XP a month ago and did a fresh install of Win7 64bit this week. Boot time is faster and the machine over all seems snappier. I ran Windows 7 in a virtual machine on an XP host ( different machine, Core2Duo with 2 gigs ram) and Windows 7 booted faster than the host XP OS.
http://www.CelloFourteGroupie.net
I'm no fan of windows but to be honest it doesn't seem as bad as I had thought it would be. I have the RC running in virtualbox (proprietary not open source) in Ubuntu. I allocated a single gig of ram to it to see how it would run at minimal specs and the only real speed issue I have is the boot time, it's really slow. Once it's up though it runs a lot smoother than vista did and is almost as fast as XP. Given the amount of ram it's running on I am fairly surprised.
sudo apt-get lost
The problem with Windows hasn't been speed. Well, it has, but it's not because it's innately slow. It's just been a resource hog. Windows 7 has a substantially smaller footprint than Windows Vista and one that equals and sometimes beats Windows XP in my own experience.
If the systems in the test were decked out in RAM, of course you're not going to see an improvement. Also, you're not going to see a difference if you open one application and test its speed. Windows 7 is markedly better at multitaking, though.
In the long run, it all depends on what you're looking for. Windows 7 isn't the best thing since sliced bread, but it's the best thing that a Windows user has seen since Windows 2000. And it definitely has real world pro's against OSX and Ubuntu, not the typical straw man arguments and the "it runs all my applications and games" deal.
Dig past the benchmarks and you'll see the improvements. It's not going to switch a Mac user from OSX or an open source junkie from Linux, but it should make a PC user happy. Windows and OSX are on fairly equal playing fields so it's not longer a choice of "do you want house brand ice cream or Ben & Jerry's" and more of a question of "do you like chocolate or vanilla?"
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I agree RC performs slower than Beta did for some uknown reason...however, could someone tell me why it does FEEL faster than Vista does? Also, it is much, much, more stable and compatible with drivers and software, that alone is a big plus over Vista.
You are just as capable of submitting a story as the original submitter is. If you submitted a story with that anandtech article in it and it was rejected, I have some sympathy for you, but if you're just bitching about how another story was posted instead of the one you wanted, I couldn't care less.
Incidentally, the summary didn't include comparisons to XP because the article didn't benchmark 7 versus XP. If the article had, I'm sure it would have been included instead of the one from 2006. But I'm sure you're much happier seeing conspiracies in everything where there aren't any. I think you probably need to find somebody to give you a hug.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Absolutely, this summary makes me feel dirty just reading it. Its intentionally misleading, otherwise why say 'was consistently slower' rather than just 'is slower'? It's a weasely way of lying.
One thing I notice with most of these performance evaluations, is they test only synthetic benchmarks. Yes, an operating system can be benchmarked on its ability complete computations under time constraints. However, a more relevant benchmark would be Win 7's responsiveness. How long does it take to launch apps, menu's, etc? This would seem to be of more concern to people than, whether or not an OS can squeeze out a few more PC Marks.
Most new digital cameras are PTP these days, which simplifies support in every operating system.
Only trouble is going to be the older ones, and the oldest camera I could find was a Kodak...and Kodak were the first to use PTP. :)
Printers...I'll concede that one for now. Lexmarks are in general paperweights, and everyone I talk to seems to have one.
I haven't seen a HP printer* that doesn't work, or any that speak Postscript fail to function.
* Haven't run into any HP that require binary firmware.
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.
this argument conveniently ignores the massive price differential.
Until the advent of xbox, a game system cost about as much as a couple trips to the grocery store for a family of 4, the xbox cost significantly more, and suffered popularity problems until it both dropped in price and was "liberated" into a very cheap PC through stupidly trivial modding. .. for 25% more you could buy a macbook!.. and for what? HD that most people dont have?
Then came the ps3 and xbox 360.. they cost as much or more than a standard home PC!
THAT is the reason why the wii took over. It was never about speed, it was about an overpriced console made for TV's nobody had being beaten on the market by a more practically priced one with similar capabilities.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Linux is already better than good enough.
The problem is that for non-technical users, Windows 7 will play their games, and will run pretty well on their new computer. Or they will keep their current machine. Why switch to Linux?
For businesses, Windows 7 may offer enough security to save them money, when they inevitably upgrade their computers. It works with the latest whiz-bang features of Office, and offers point and click management of websites, servers, email, whatever. Again, why switch to Linux?
The problem with a lot of Linux proponents is that they fail to see that businesses, especially small businesses who can't afford full-time IT staff, have no compelling reason to use Linux, because Linux has no out-of-the-box solutions for small businesses. No Quickbooks. No Sharepoint. No Adobe Suite - old versions and the GIMP don't count. The cost of them re-learning everything and dealing with the black holes in the software offered in any Linux distribution will cost a hell of a lot more then the $100 or even $200 premium they will pay for Windows, which they are sure will work with their printer scanner, and run FireFox and OpenOffice just as well as Ubuntu.
The backdoor is to make cross platform applications for all three systems - OS X, Windows, Linux. Make them work well, and provide REAL alternatives to Quickbooks and the Adobe Suite. In ten years, when Windows 9 comes out, and someone in the office notices that all of the software they use will run on Linux for free... game, set, match.
Apple has a different model that will ultimately fail for enterprise customers unless they allow 10.7 to run on commodity hardware, or if they drastically lower their hardware prices. They release dirt cheap software that only runs on Macs. But they will probably stick to media production professionals, who don't mind paying premiums for hardware and software, and who can't use Final Cut Studio 3 with virtual machines.
Plus, their server software is a dog, and remotely using a Mac is sort of like squeezing a watermelon through a straw.
"this argument conveniently ignores the massive price differential."
except where my argument specifically refers to the price differential maybe?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you find yourself near an old computer running Windows 3.1 try clicking on a few programs.
You will be surprised at how responsive the system is. I do not mean fast in performing computing tasks. I mean when you click on a program the response is damn near immediate.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I would agree with your observations on this. Windows 7 is noticeably quicker on my gaming machine than Windows XP. I don't have the technical reason for this, but after 15 years of computing I can sense when something is quicker accessing files, loading programs, etc.
I have installed Windows 7 RC and beta on a couple of different computers and both verions seem considerably faster than XP on all my computers.
I have to agree with you, except wireless networking does not 'just work'. It's a PITA.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Everyone in the world who owns a PC either knows how to burn an ISO, or has someone in the family who burns ISO's, or knows someone who can burn an ISO. This, after all, is what has the MPAA's panties in a wad. EVEN MORONS BURN ISO's!! ISO's aren't hard to burn, at all. XP can't burn an ISO OOB? Well, duhhh, it takes exactly one freaking google to come up with dozens of ways to burn them - whether by enabling it within XP, or downloading a program to do it, or installing a real operating system that isn't aware of CD/DVD burning limitations.
"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
performance is not a bad thing. By the time Windows 7 is released, 3 years would have elapsed since Vista's release. Computers are better and cheaper. Discount brands give you at least a dual-core cpu with 2Gb of RAM. Windows 7 won't have the issue of being pre-installed on hardware that can't give it reasonable performance.
I've never run Vista. I have played with Windows Server 2008, and while it's performance was acceptable, the lack of anything terribly new from XP had me putting XP back. However... this is a copy-paste from my blog about Win 7 RC:
I had a quiet day, so I decided to install it on my empty 500GB SATA drive. Other than some minor problems with my blank media, the installation process was smooth, easy, and came with a VERY delightful surprise.
After installation completed, my new Windows desktop just came right up. I didn't even have to reboot, it was ready to go. That was pretty cool.
In fact, the restart demon of Windows seems to have been pummeled quite a bit. Very few restarts were needed through the process of installing things. There was only one driver I had to install manually, which was my video driver, and this installed through the upgrade driver choice in the device manager.
Later I found it was also a recommended update from Windows Update. This means the drivers for my motherboard, UPS, printer, various USB devices, CDROM drive, network adapter, etcetc were all automatic and never required my manual attention. Very cool.
As far as compatibility goes, I added 2 games and 2 major applications and a handful of minor ones. One game required I go find my DirectX 9 Redist package and install it. It now runs flawlessly, the other game ran fine out of the box.
Office 2007 installed with no noticeable problems. Though Outlook did crash once for reasons I don't know. Quickbooks 2007 also installed with no problems, it updated fine with the manual updater I have for it. I even did some transactions with it today, and added some appointments in Outlook. Everything peachy. Additionally, after getting Thunderbird installed, my GF sent me a large PowerPoint document, which I viewed. Worked no problems.
AntiVirus also works with no complaints, no problems. Using Avast Personal Edition. I expected this not to work with Windows 7, but it does. Daemon Tools virtual DVD drive also works, despite a warning from Windows 7 (several in fact) that it may not work. I only proceeded because there was a release note on the site that they corrected a known issue with Windows 7 RC.
StarDock's Fences does seem to have issues. It installs and works fine... until I changed the background of my desktop. This broke it. Rebooting seems the only cure. So the automatic slideshow of different desktop wallpapers is out. Nice feature that, I'll add.
The way folders are organized with these 'libraries' is still a bit puzzling to me. I haven't entirely gotten my head wrapped around how it's designed to work. But I'll figure it out eventually. Migrating settings from XP proved fairly simple (to me at least.) One annoying thing, was how 7 is forcing me into modifying all the permissions and occasionally even ownership on folders and files on the XP drive. I highly doubt XP will even work properly now.
So, all in all, Windows 7 seems like a winner. There are some popups about programs changing stuff that grow old after a while. But I imagine once I get my system all ship shape and just go about my daily use, they'll no longer be noticed much. The new Media Player 12 is so minimalistic (at least when I double clicked a movie on my XP drive) that I've not bothered to install VLC just yet. I like a minimalistic player. A slider to fast forward and rewind. A play, stop and pause button and a volume control. It has this and not a lot more. At least by default.
I really don't like the start menu. In XP I always tweaked my start menu to be basically the same as the Windows 2000 start menu. Doesn't seem to be a way to do that with Windows 7. But I can live with this start menu. It's not horrid, it's just not what I'm used to.
Many of the UI's effects and "bells and whistles" are neat. Not necessary, but they're neat. Performance is fantastic despite all these fancy "bells and whistles" so I'm not going to complain.
Oh yes, last part, networking. This required the most effort. My ma
I haven't had a chance to get me hands on 7 yet (I'm the linux guy at work), but by boss (the Windows guy) just installed it and loves it. He's running on a system with an Atom and 1G of ram and says it's fabulous specifically because it's really fast.
Before I go to the trouble clearing off a partition for it somewhere, does anyone else have actual Windows 7 experience? I wonder if the benchmark people have their head up their @ss and are just analyzing data quantitatively but haven't bothered to actually use the stupid thing and see what they think.
It's really going to be the year of the microsoft desktop
*DrugCheese rants*
All they gotta do is strip out the DRM and get a boost.
The overhead in managing the protected path is trivial - always has been.
In return the buyer gets protected media play and a single-cable HDMI audio and video solution for his 3-D Ready HDTV.
The quad core desktop with a 2.4 GHz Cpu, 8 GB RAM and 64-Bit Vista is $800 at WalMart.
It's lunatic to fret over the "loss" of an occasional clock cycle when the mass market PC has specs in this class.
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
When Vista was first released, much of the performance problems were related to immature drivers and testing on systems with limited resources(under 2GB of RAM). As a result, Vista seemed notably slower than XP.
Since Vista first showed up in November of 2006(retail in 2007), the driver quality has caught up, and now you need to compare how Vista compares to Windows XP before you can say that it was Vista, and not drivers/limited resource that were limiting Vista performance.
It may not be much faster, but there is plenty of marketing hype saying that it is...
Also, hardware is on average faster now than it was when vista was released...
People will think it's faster, whether it is or not.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Here are some of the "most of us" http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/8241-rc-hangs-every-4-seconds-about-2-3-seconds.html http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/8058-build-7100-vs-7077-x-64-anyone-7077-better-me.html http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/8955-7077-much-faster-than-official-rc-7100-a.html I am going to revert to my 7077 drive image tomorrow as RC is quite a low slower than 7077 that I had. YMMV
I agree fully that TFA is a poor choice, but your anandtech link doesn't do much for me either. First, half the links led me to an error page. Slashdotted? I dunno, but their website needs some work.
Secondly, the performance comparisons are between 7/Vista/XP on 64 bit machines. I'd be willing to bet that the percentage of windows machines with 64 bit OSs are far less than 1%. Further, there's no report on memory usage and how it compares between the versions.
The best link I've found is based on the beta of Windows 7, but it's still more informative on a practical level than TFA as it actually compares the OSs on a machine with 1GB of RAM -- which is still far more common than those pumped up 4Giggers:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3236
"If Windows 7 can't significantly improve that situation, what chance does it have to convince people to move away from Windows XP?" Windows XP is fast and has everything everyone needs. You have to be a complete idiot to even consider upgrading. What people don't seem to realize is that Windows XP meets all their needs. Windows Vista - Windows 7 comparisons are pointless, especially when it comes to speed. Windows XP is of course going to be faster and more efficient in every way. If a stupid transparent start menu that costs hundreds of dollars and bloats and slows everything down floats your boat (Vista) then go ahead and "upgrade" to Windows 7. Idiots...
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
Whats really tiresome theese days is that i cant really read a review and make any use whatsoever of it. This benchmark is an excellent example. With all the astroturfing going on the only way of knowing if something is usable is to test it yourself or talk to a friend you trust.
Vista actually looked rather promising and got good reviews all over but the moment i had the chance to try it out i realized all was just empty talk from the spin machines. I strongly suspect the same for Windows 7. The good reviews and comments about Windows 7 are probably all fluff and paid for astroturfing. Once we have it in our hands we will see its just Vista with a new name.
HTTP/1.1 400
I'm not a Microsoft fan, but this test is bogus. Windows Vista has had a lot of performance tweaks since it came out. Vista's reputation for horrible performance is based on initial impressions from when it first came out. I'd be interested to see how the latest version of Vista compares to Windows XP. If Windows 7 is 5% better than Vista is right now, then people are going to have a much better initial reaction to it than Vista and performance won't be a barrier to switching from XP.
This also raises the other point where this test falls down. Measured performance is not the same as perceived performance. Most people don't sit there with a stop-watch and measure how long something takes. What really matters to most people is the responsiveness of the system. Vista failed here. It basically attracted attention to the areas where it was most slow by interfering with doing other things while some operation was taking forever (e.g. copying files, etc). A lot of these issues can be smoothed over with better threading, etc. I think Microsoft has learned that lesson. I'm not sure whether Windows 7 will be faster than XP in measured performance but I bet it will feel as fast or faster.
I loaded 7 x64 yesterday, and I'm actually quite impressed. It boots faster, has a significantly smaller memory footprint (my Vista install, after booting, clocked in at ~1600MB RAM, 7 is ~1200), and definitely runs games faster. I'm getting in the area of 10 fps faster in Mirror's edge (and that's after enabling ambient occlusion, which I hadn't done under Vista, which is supposed to incur a performance hit). UT3 runs faster, firefox loads faster. And it's not just the speed. The UI is dramatically more polished than Vista. Vista always felt a bit slapped together, and rough around the edges. 7 is cleaner, has fewer annoying quirks.
Gotta get back to work...
How much are Microsoft paying you to say this, Mr. Anonymous Coward?
- Dan
So a few people on a bulletin board "is most of us" only if "us" is defiend as the people what 1. Read that board 2. Have performance problems with W7 I'm don't meet either of those requirements, so I guess I'm not part of this mythical "us"
An OS job is to interpret application I/O into something the hardware understands and vice versa.
It should be transparent to the end user. This transparancy is shattered when the UI changes.
Microsoft OS version --------- Release date
Dos based releases:
Win v3.1 March 1992
Win 95 August 1995 ***3 years between radical UI changes
Win 98 June 1998
Windows Me September 2000
NT based:
Windows NT 3.1 July 1993
Windows NT Server 4.0 July 1996
Win 2000 February 2000 ***4 years between radical UI change
Server 2003 April 2003
Windows XP October 2001 ***Cosmetic change that could be reverted
Windows Vista January 2007 ***7 years between radical cosmetic change
Windows 7 2009*
"Average" family computing history
Win3.1 -> Win95 -> WinXP -> Vista -> Win7
0 -> 3 years -> 6 years -> 6 years -> 8 years
The amount of time that transpired between Win95 & XP was a huge 6 years. This major change was resisted by a LOT of people. Eventually people accepted it and adapted.
When Vista was released the # of "average families with computers" was larger, therefore even though the time-spam between 95-XP & XP-Vista was the same, there were MORE people complaining.
The need to relearn how-to do something is the single most annoying aspect of the computing experience. Necessary changes (i.e. Win3.1 ->Win95) between generations can be understood (Apple did this 'correctly' in OSX), but unnecessary changes (i.e. Win2k -> XP -> Vista) are annoying roadblocks to getting things done.
That is the purpose of an OS, enable the user to 'get-at' the applications (s)he want and get out of the way.
I use Debian, Fluxbox is my WM. My OS does not impede me.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
If Microsoft's DRM is such a showstopper as far as speed is concerned, why put up with it?
There are alternatives: The Mac options have DRM, but won't slow you down (at least not that I've noticed), and Linux-based apps essentially ignore it (provided you have libdvdcss.so).
Oink, Oink.
It takes forever to boot up, which is my primary issue. And this is on a T61 Thinkpad, 3gig memory and a T8300 chip. Yes there are apps there but honestly it goes to the OS itself at the end of the day.
And if we're just going to discount any os issues by saying it's all the apps fault then well that just does well for this whole "open systems" thing now doesn't it.
Just means if it's open then it sucks because it can be screwed by other's apps. Gee, how nice.
For folks who want everyone to move to Linux, well show me all the apps that look, feel and have all the functions of what Joe User would have in his blessed WinDOHs world and ok maybe it would work.
You just can't expect the average Joe to have any patience with that.
Some have moved to Mac because honestly at this point you can be totally MS free on there, and have the app function you want. All in what would be much easier for Joe to use than trying to run with Linux.
I've downloaded Windows 7 and will try it on a couple boxes here both in 32 and 64 bit mode. We'll see.
I installed Windows 7 beta on my machine a few months back on a second drive. It was a beautiful experience, honestly. It ran much more quickly than Vista had, the only issue I had was one of my two nic cards didn't have a driver that worked. But, since I had a second, that wasn't an issue. I was blown away by how much more quickly everything ran.
I just installed the RC over Vista, and I'm amazed by how much less polished and how unimpressed I am now. My CPU usage does eventually drop, but for the first 20 minutes of booting up, will hover around 85%. Clicking on the Start Menu brings up Start and the programs list, but the thumbnails take a few seconds to load. All in all, its little things like this, and the fact that it does generally seem slower that I notice.
It's not supposed to perform faster on normal benchmarks. It's not like the CPU, memory, or hard drive runs at a different speed when you install Windows 7. Where Windows 7 is noticeably faster is in these areas:
1) Overall UI responsiveness.
2) When you start getting low on memory (7 still seems to be a memory hog, but it seems to handle it better than Vista).
3) It doesn't chew on your hard drive constantly like Vista did (Vista always did that for me, anyway). When I run a few apps simultaneously that need to use my hard drive, the whole Vista UI often hangs completely for 10-60 seconds. I haven't seen Windows 7 do that once yet.
Most benchmarks can't reliably test for things like this, so they don't bother to try. As a developer, I tend to run a lot of IO-heavy apps simultaneously, and having my entire OS hang when I do that is not acceptable because it interrupts my work-flow. So far the worst I've seen with 7 is that when I try to run two instances of a game I'm working on so I can test changes to the networking code, the game instances stutter pretty badly compared to when I run two instances on XP. My 2 CPU cores aren't maxed like they are in XP, so it's probably hitting a bottleneck in the graphics card/driver (which is BETA). Or it may have something to do with how Aero handles multiple instances of D3D apps in windowed mode. Either way, it's not something I can fault Windows 7 for at this time.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying Windows 7 is great. I haven't had enough time to get comfortable with it yet, and it still requires more memory than XP. But so far it sucks a lot less than Vista. Despite what this article claims, the differences are very noticeable if you're the kind of person who pushes their PC to its limits a lot. The first time Vista hung for a full 60 seconds with two idle CPU cores on a system with 4GB of memory, it made me want to kick someone at MS in the nuts as hard as I could (just to make sure they felt my pain). I haven't had I/O wait times like that since I had a Commodore-64 with a cassette tape drive (even my C64 floppy drive was faster than that). I really wish I could say I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. For everyone who has had no problems with Vista, I'm happy for you. You're probably not debugging apps in Visual Studio while running SQL Server AND multiple virtual PC's that also do some of those things at the same time. I can barely run Visual Studio by itself on Vista, but I have to do all that other stuff on XP every day I come into work. ;-)
you just disable features on it, and only install the core of the OS. Windows XP worked the same way.
P2P Pirates have a Tiny XP Distro based on XP Pro that only has the core of the XP OS minus IE, Media Player, and other things and it runs faster than the average XP Pro install. I think it only needs 48M of RAM and is about 384M of hard drive space it takes up.
You can get the same effect by installing the minimal XP Pro and then selecting Internet Explorer and Media Player to be uninstalled.
I'm hoping that Windows 7.0 has a minimal install option and allows you to remove parts of it that slow it down.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I downloaded the Windows 7 RC and set it up on a test machine I have just to give it a spin and see what it was about. Here is what I can tell you. It's windows vista with a new GUI. These changed things around and given it a new look but in all honesty I can't see from a end users view point much of a change other than the way the GUI is laid out. If you do some digging you can find all the vista stuff in there. (mean exactly the same interfaces). The only thing I can tell you that is totaly changed is its not very easy to change it to look like XP anymore (something you could do with vista fairly easy). My two cents for what its work. FYI - it crashes alot with the old Blue Screen of Death.
How did you get the jump from 95-XP??? Where did you get this info from please I'd like to know as I have been in computer sales for a 10 years. my records show that I have sold 98 three times of the 95 copies thus you missed typed or found some strange data somewhere that I want to read.
Or you buy a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu for $699, plug it in, turn it on, and it will work resaonably well. And if it doesn't work with his hardware, he calls support, just as he would with Windows.
How about we compare apples to apples?
Or this way: You can pick up your new PC, and a copy of Windows on a CD at the store (XP Home? Pro? Media? Vista Home Basic? Home Premium? Business? Media? Ultimate? Any of 1000 Windows variants, all with different advantages and disadvantages...)
Then hope you've entered everything right, including the CD key, and if this license has ever been used before, prepare to talk on the phone to either a machine or a person in India, typing in an even longer "activation key"...
Then install drivers one by one -- whoops, gotta use your old computer to download the network drivers, those aren't included out of the box -- easy enough, once you know the manufacturer, just go to their website, unless you happen to have one of those laptops for which nvidia refuses to distribute drivers -- then you have to go to Dell, and find the driver, unless you were unfortunate enough to buy XP instead of Vista, in which case you need to find an XP driver for an entirely different laptop that Dell support happens to know will work...
Oh, and some drivers might not work on a 64-bit Windows...
Or you can use the old computer to download and burn an Ubuntu CD, or order one for free in the mail, pop it in the drive, click next a bunch of times, and you're installed. With all the drivers ready to go.
Oh, and pretty much all the drivers and software will either already be 64-bit, or be packaged with everything needed to run that 32-bit app (or browser plugin!) in a 64-bit OS (or browser!)
Any way you slice it, Ubuntu is easier to install than Windows. Whether you have other issues is just playing anecdote wars. Since both can be had pre-installed, it's truly moronic to suggest that we compare a pre-installed Windows with a do-it-yourself-Linux.
Now, which way is Joe gonna go? He's gonna go whichever way the person in the store tells him to. That, or someone he trusts -- his tech-savvy son, cousin, friend, etc. He's gonna end up with Windows. That doesn't mean it's the best or easiest choice, though -- sometimes it is, sometimes it's not.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Subject says it all.
I made a seperate partition for Win7 but I don't think I'll be using it much on this 8 month old machine. At least not till I can get video and sound working correctly. Mostly it's just driver weirdness. No support for 1360x768 on my LCD. Spanned desktop doesn't work. Audio jack ports can't be reassigned like they can under WinXP. That sort of crap.
Speed wise, I didn't notice anything to recommend or discourage using it on a "budget gaming box". The gui is pretty. Maybe the hardware support will improve.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
This javescript loaded Slashdot is epic slow on IE8/Vista. Just saying....
It's god awful slow on Win7/IE8 as well.
I think it's disingenuous to call Vista a good operating system that is plagued by a stigma. It's an ok operating system which was released with some significant problems which earned it a large amount of bad press. Some of these issues have seen some improvement, others it is presumed we will ignore (or disable).
But the truth of the matter is that slowly the market is making a change to being a competitive market place. In this regard even XP can be seen as a competitor to Vista and users are becoming increasingly aware of the differences between competing products and therefore a products features and/or performance.
Vista simply isn't a great product.
Quack, quack.
Simply put Windows is an OS for people to afraid to use a computer, you don't have enough control , quick access or power use. So if you want to listen to music and write a word document go ahead and waste that thousand dollar computer, but if you want to any real work go ahead and get a real OS.
Not to be a troll, or flamebait, or whathave you, but are you sure you weren't using a Mac there? You also seem to be saying anyone just using their computer for office work is just wasting their machine. Guess we should go back to pens and paper, or typewriters?
And the *majority* of users aren't going to want most of what you just said they should add. A built-in C compiler? After all the shit Microsoft got in just for including a browser (yeah, yeah, I know the full story, point still made)? What's more, you're talking like a programmer, not like a casual user. Define "windows users not being able to use their machine." I figure if they can turn it on, install a program, run the program, and use the program, that's using it well enough.
The one I agree on though would be a proper shell, so you could apt-get a compiler of your choice, or a browser, or whatever. Or since they're getting big on multiple versions of the OS (*sigh* don't get me started on that crap), maybe a power-user version that would come with the stuff you wanted, since for the average email-checking, IMing, web-surfing, gaming user, most of what you said would only get them in further trouble trying to use their machine. You're trying to turn the OS in to something it's not really meant to be. You'd be better sticking to *nix systems.
PS: It's "retarded." Not "retarted."
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Well, maybe Windows 7 barely beats Vista in testing. But I installed the Win7 RC1 on my old Dell Celeron laptop and it runs great. I wouldn't even try to install Vista on that machine. I actually forgot I was on an old laptop after running Win7 for a while. Win7 is sweet even if it's mostly just a reconfiguration of Vista. I think the public will embrace it.
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.
It won't be an old PC.
Joe trashes his aging - faltering - P4 when he can't stop drooling at the thought at what he what he can afford new or refurbished.
The quad core system with 64 Bit Vista Home Premium, Blu-Ray, 8 GB of RAM, a terabyte HDD, and the HDMI video card.
It ships to his door and comes with a warranty, a service contract and a toll free number for technical support.
It works, it gets fixed, or the seller tales it back.
That is Joe's comfort level.
Not Google. Not IRC Chat.
Not the neighborhood geek who makes promises he can't keep.
3) choose guided install
Joe expects all configuration and performance issues to be resolved at the factory.
He is not a technician. He is not a system builder. He does not resemble the geek in any way, shape or form.
Not once in thirty years has Joe or any member of his family installed an OS from scratch.
Vista is not so bad after all!
XP does more than Vista or 7 can, for me at least. I rather value the ability to unmute my line-in and actually monitor what the SBLive! EAX is doing to my guitar effects-wise. Vista and 7 don't allow this at all, purely as a means of trying to stop piracy.
Microsoft - More Bloat, Less Features, More Expensive, Less Personal Control.
That's a fact, Jack. Bet you won't find that on Microsoft's "Get The Facts" website. Every successive version gives you LESS CONTROL. I think anybody that upgraded from 98 to ME knows this, as well as those who tried to move to Win2K, only to find out DMA to video memory was not allowed compared to 95/98/ME.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I dunno, but boy is it gonna be fast when it gets here!
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 ]
Is largely anecdotal, but here is my experience:
I have a Mac Pro with Dual Quad-Core Xeons, 4GB of ram and 10k discs for each operating system.
Mac OS Leopard and Windows XP Pro seem equally "snappy". Vista is definitely slower than both. Menus take longer to appear (especially context menus). Windows take longer to populate with files. Applications take longer to start up.
The machine is still perfectly usable in all operating systems. The slowness in Vista does not prevent me from using the operating system, but the cost should come with some benefit. Vista has no appreciable benefits over XP to justify the performance hit.
At my company, we decided to skip Vista altogether. No performance benefits, no additional useful functionality, and finally, having to throw out functional printers and scanners due to a lack of Vista support meant that Vista added no value to our systems - and cost a bunch of money.
No one pays something for nothing. And that is Microsoft's problem with Vista.
-ted
It seems to some that Win7 is more like Windows Server 2008.... What i found so far is ok, but i could not figure out in the interface (start or in menu/explorer/tools how to make win7 restore open folders on reboot/looging in. Vista and XP have it (but not w2k). So, is this something ms is doing deliberately to see how many people scream?
OTOH, removing that feature *might* be to deny people having umpteen number of explorers open (file explorers and ie?) up on logging back in. This could be a feint to make people get to the desktop faster. But, it creates the aggravation due to the need to put shortcuts of things into the startup folder. Failing that, the user has to go trawling around for folders from previous sessions.... Rather Annoying.
What i noticed, too, is that whereas in Vista in VirtualBox i could open and use files, win 7 croaks/complains if i try to open some files traversing via VBox to a Linux share. It is not just shares or less-net-savvy apps from 1999 or 2003, but even modern ones released just 3 weeks ago. I'll try again, but my initial workaround was to create in the win7 volume a folder containing the files to be used.
But, when i buy another laptop (probably December), i may be ok with w7 on it -- as long as i have the reinstallation media so i can shove win7 into VirtualBox. I don't run native instances/instantiations of windows, and i don't surf with win, and since it seems to be tough finding service packs without having to go online, my vista install is still at home premium, sans any service packs. Probably ms' way of trying to keep a closer-to-real-life tally on the number of vista users (legit or bootleg) and what version of vista they're on. I be w7 will be similarly operating.
But, for now, i'm going to keep using Vista and likely dump w7 beta before it even expires, otherwise i'll have far too much stuff to track to avoid forking what i'm doing in Vista and testing in w7. At least w7 nicely dynamically expanded to the max res of VBox and my laptop.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
With its impressive eye candy and new name how could it possibly fail? It's not like last time they gave Windows a new name and desktop effects...wait, hold on, I'm being told they did. Well...shit.
"Just a fox, a whisper."
When Windows XP was released what was the most widely available cpu, the P4 2.x Ghz or a comparable AMD Athlon? Seven / eight years later there have been huge leaps in the overall hardware that is commonly available in a PC, 64 bit cpu's, dual and qual core cpus, serial ata and much faster hard drives, four and six gigabyte memory kits available for under $100. Even with all of this, Vista and Windows 7 are noticeably slower than Windows XP running on what is greatly improved hardware. People should not have to have a Core I7 Extreme with six gigs of memory to get that XP experience. This is just another black eye for Microsoft who have as always failed to learn anything from the Vista debacle!
What did the farmer do when he couldn't sell the pig wearing lipstick?
He changed the color of the lipstick.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Hardware has moved on, it needs the same as Vista as a minimum but what it will actually br run on will be way beyond minimum need giving the feeling of progress.
I've administered networks for over a decade, I've been a self-employed consultant, I've managed networks for large financial institutions, medical institutions, and schools. I currently am an IT director for a private school. I have a BS in Computer Science, and I've developed software in multiple languages in many environments for many purposes.
It's enough to say that I've been doing this a while and have run/used/lived-with a large number of Microsoft's products (enterprise and consumer) in the last decade.
That said, can you give me a compelling reason to use Vista? It seems that the market has answered that question with a resounding NO.
By the way - managing a network connection means lots of things (disabling/enabling/changing addressing schemes-WINS-DNS-gateways...etc) - stuff that needs to be done when servicing multiple networks for a living.
Vista works just fine (finally) - it's just not easy or enjoyable to use. It's like a car that smokes, leaks fluids, and shifts poorly - it still gets you to work, but it sucks to drive.
I've been on a mission to convert my friends and family members to Mac OS in the last year or so. Of the people I've converted from Vista (Mother in law, Father in law, sister, two cousins, and a handful of friends) - none have wanted to go back to Vista even after I offered to install it on their new Macs. Why do you suppose that is?
-ted
Vista is flying off the shelves, consumers are happy, and Windows 7 is completely and totally unnecessary.
Apple's market share is also in decline due to the widespread satisfaction of Vista users.
On a more serious note - it seems that Microsoft misjudged the market post XP. The world went small and light (netbooks, handhelds, web based computing/apps) and they went the other way with their desktop OS.
I would like to see Microsoft's offering be really competitive - fast, easy to use, and above all, reliable. Competition is a good thing, and for the first time in a while Microsoft is feeling a bit of it. The entire computing world is still theirs to lose. They are making improvements though - they are offering decent web based services, and every version of Windows Mobile really has been better than the previous version.
I don't just beat up on Microsoft. As much as I love Mac OS, their server products.....well, they suck. Leopard server was almost unusable for almost 6 months until they got the bugs worked out of it.
I also wish the Linux guys put more effort into usability, and appearance. That would make this thing a real three horse race. I do cut Linux a bit of slack for two reasons - it's free, and I don't contribute to any projects - so I have very little room to criticize.
But if I'm paying for a system or software, I want it to work the way I expect it to work - or better.
-ted
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
I'm still waiting for the release of Windows 98: Third Edition. I haven't given up hope :(
It is actually address space that is reserved for hardware, not memory. A 32-bit operating system has access to only 4 GB of real address space. It can use that address space for whatever it wants. Well, as long as it only wants memory or devices, but that's pretty much what an operating system wants. If the devices in the computer need 768 MB of address space, then it can only map in 3.3 GB of memory. Any leftover memory is left unused.
You can get around this limitation on x86 by using a kludge called PAE. Having written some Linux kernel modules I can say that PAE is not particularly difficult to work with, but you have to pay attention to it or you'll introduce bugs that stop your code from working if you are using PAE to extend the physical address space. Client versions of Windows do not support using PAE to extend the physical address space because there are so many drivers that do not support it. Amusingly, Windows clients do use PAE, since it is the only way to get the NX bit on x86.
Copied AC's post since they should have logged in for it.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
It is WAY too bloated and is terrible at the one thing MS's operating systems have going for them, backwards compatibility. My notebook PC came with Vista pre-installed and I remember how furious I was when I attempted to copy something and waited and waited and waited for it to decide to complete. This was supposedly imporved in SP1, but I haven't noticed much difference. The same machine with Ubuntu absolutely screams. So, its not just bad marketing: Vista sucks and no amount of product renaming is going to fix that. The hardware will eventually catch up enough that it becomes tolerable (as happened with XP when we moved from Win98), but the problem is there is no compelling reason for us to switch like there was with the move from Win98 to XP (where we got an NT based kernel.)
It wasn't fast enough. Whatever bloat they added to make it run slower took it over the threshold of fast enough to the point of "What the @#!!!*&!! is taking it so long?" Add in hardware and software incompatibility and some stability issues and then top it off with a LONG development time and you have a monumental flop.
XP's insistance on software activations was what turned me from a loyal MS fan into somone looking for the freedom promised by free software. The evil that MS did by resurrecting that DRM genie with requiring activations for XP cannot be understated (before then activation codes, dongles and other wierd schemes had been largely killed off in end user computing products.) Still, once you got the stinkin OS installed, XP ran pretty well. This is just not the case with Vista.
Its now baked into the OS, and since the OS is not open source, we can't tell that its not the cause. So, we have an OS that runs like a slug and we know that somewhere in there, something is checking to see if the content is DRM or not and if it suspects that it needs to apply DRM it will do so. I think assuming it is at least part of the problem is reasonable. As far as your assertion that an OS which doesn't support DRM won't play that DRM'd content, its bunk. There is no business on earth that would avoid a system that has 90% or so of the installed base on the planet! If MS had remembered that we are their CUSTOMERS, then they would have left that crud out of the OS and it could have been added at the driver/application level for the people who wanted to play that media (and avoided entirely for those who don't.) As it is, they decided to add it to the OS, so you're stuck with it even if you never play a DVD or MP3 on your Vista machine.
Unless you work at MS or otherwise have access to the source code, then how do you know that its working as designed? Isn't it at least plausible that some of this mysterious file copy slowness is the result of a bug in the DMR checking? My point is, that if I buy something I need to be able to trust it. In the case of Vista, MS decided to go along with the content industry's view of all people as potential thieves. This means they sacrificed my interests for potential future sales or deals with them. So I not only know they picked someone else's interests over mine, I have to trust them to have implemented it properly.
With roughly a 10Gb minimal install footprint; Windows 7 is composed of (roughly): 7Gb of DRM, 1Gb of committee designed UI fluff that adds no form to function, 1.5Gb of Microsoft proprietary shovel-ware (browser, crapplets, mono-ware), 500Mb OS. The 'new technology, features and benefits' are all Committee, At tourney, Marketing Weenie derivative fluff that have little or nothing in the way of real innovation and a everything to do with revenue generation and marketing copy -- and carry enormous heft and bloat as a consequence. With Management, Marketing and Development bureaucracy top heavy and ungainly then what IBM employed to develop OS/2, and with less in the way of objective design goals -- it shouldn't surprise anyone that the 'new OS' is little more then 'Vista SE'. I used to be a Microsoft Fan, but now I think it's shocking and disgusting that products like Windows 7, and all the anti-competitive chicanery is the best that a company with Microsoft's resources can do...
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.
I have to say I agree, and I was expecting Windows 7 to effectively be a rehash of Windows Vista. Here's the deal:
My desktop machine is an early '06 box (Core 2 Duo, dual core), and the only upgrades I've made fairly recently have been to add another 2GiB RAM and an updated video card (my old one blew up with bad caps--the NVIDIA-base 7600s were notorious about this). Yet the funny thing is that Vista is a sluggish beast on this system. Windows 7 is noticeably better--and smoother--even with Aero enabled. I can hardly tell the difference between XP and 7 performance-wise (though the new video card helps a lot!). Oddly, the upgraded card didn't impact Vista's performance much. Win 7 looks good and runs very nicely.
I confess that the 32-bit Win 7 release works better for me. The 64-bit distro has some odd annoyances. The window manager will periodically hang and the desktop feels sluggish. Not to mention the expected pre-release lack of vendor support such as the "Aw, Snap!" Google Chrome bug... Perhaps it's just me, but the x86 Win 7 build just works better. I daresay I like its UI a *lot*.
Even if Windows 7 is only a minor improvement over Vista, I'm planning on buying it, and I tend to dual boot between Gentoo and XP. I curse Microsoft, sure, but Win 7 is "Vista done right." Heck, the network performance seems slightly better than XP's. I can't say I really like the full screen user selection/login prompt. Unfortunately, everyone is moving to this paradigm, including most *nix login managers. *sigh*
He who has no
If they used usb for things that dont need high speed io it would have worked out of the box.
Im sure its all soo so hard coded to XP too.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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.
Ok, so I went and looked at the review. It looks like, in general, 7 and XP are really close, by less than a 2% either way, which seems promising (is network traffic still throttled during media playback?). All this is pretty much irrelevant because it's more about the experience than the numbers...and there's no way to capture an overall experience in a number.
Been using Windows 7 RC1 for 2 days now. This article you refer to is BS. Windows 7 is nice and clean. Takes up a lot less space on hard drive than vista and is way faster to the average user than vista (even with vista in classic mode). I predict this to the be Microsoft's best seller yet. Hum, 2 days already and I havn't re-installed Linux partition yet...
That is the reason of the performance. With this amount of memory, I bet Vista is really faster than XP. People complained about Vista, because it required much more memory than XP did. And that is where Windows 7 much improved.
The testers have no sense what real-world configurations are.
I did not check the preview results carefully enough. I could not type the > verbatim. I meant to say ">= 3GB...".
In all this mass of trivia there's one major thing missing that would justify the title that he's chosen to use: Any attempt at all to address the central thesis of the content protection analysis, that trying to seal shut (portions of) the historically open PC architecture in the name of DRM is technically a really bad idea, and one that's bound to fail. As Bruce Schneier put it, "Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet". So the DRM will fail, and all that'll be left is the collateral damage. I'm not sure if this is merely an accident or deliberate, but in his entire multi-page writeup Ed has completely, utterly failed to address the central issue of content protection/DRM. That's quite a major target to miss, completely.
Please refrain from commenting if you haven't read his paper. You can scream that it's bullshit, but you better explain why. You're being silly -- not even DRM proponents deny that there's content protection technology in Vista. Read Gutmann's paper if you want to have at least some pointers to articles that give you all the examples you need (examples of people who could not do something they wanted to do, because of Vista's DRM).
You're only partially correct. PAE only works for memory > 4GB. Because the I/O registers are below 4GB, they shadow over real memory. That memory can't be remapped on a 32 bit OS, PAE or not.
With a 64 bit OS, the complete physical memory can be remapped anywhere in the 64 bit range, leaving the I/O registers and memroy free to not be shared with physical memory.
Of course this is also dependant on your BIOS also, which has to allow it.
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