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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.
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.
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
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
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();
Can we stop using articles from 2006 that say that Vista isn't quick. Vista was sluggish when it came out, and I had bought it only to remove it a week or two later and go back to XP.
Over the years Vista has been updated and actually works great - I like having it instead of XP and so would most Vista bashers if they actually used it.
XP was hated for a long time over Windows 98 and no one would upgrade, they somehow XP became everyone's favorite version of Windows.
What MS should be doing - and I have no idea why they didn't this time - is bail on the 32 bit OS - especially since it's the largest limit on RAM and file size. Your OS is limiting the hardware, and that' just idiotic. If you need a 32 bit OS - stick with Windows XP - if you want a 64 bit OS, use Windows 7.
I 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.
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)
The issue with Vista had nothing to do with process performance, for the most part, burning a CD or running a batch operation in Photoshop, generally took the same amount of time in both XP and Vista.
The issue had to do with UI performance, for example, the time it takes for a menu to appear when a user requests it or how quickly a folder populates with file. Unfortunately, most benchmarks don't test that.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
The 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 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.
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)
You obviously haven't spent a lot of time in the business community. Do you understand that there are thousands upon thousands of doctor/dentist offices, garages, small fabricating plants, law firms and the like that still use P3's or even P2's? They aren't going to lay out ANY money for new computers, much less $500 multiplied by however many machines there are in the firm when what they have now is still working just fine.
You know what those computers are mostly used for? Bottom-end, super-basic office functions. Are you honestly so naive you think a lawyer gives a fuck whether his secretary prepares a brief with Office 2007 or Office 4.3? I know one law firm that bills at least $75 million a year and still uses P3's. About 60 of them.
Unless you happen to be in one of the relatively rare places that needs the horsepower, the only way that your quad core burner is going to make its way from your mom's basement into a real work environment is if you take it there yourself.
Jeez...fuckin' amateurs!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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
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
Oh, I understand that. The problem is that manufacturers have never sold machines with enough RAM due to price. When I bought an XP box in about 2002 or so, I put 1GB on it since I already knew that the 256MB or so that was common was nowhere near enough.
Heck, back in '92 if you bought a Windows machine with the "recommended" 4MB that Microsoft gave as a guideline, with 4MB the machine was completely unusable. The machine would thrash itself into oblivion with only Word running -- yet, people said that it should be a usable configuration. Those computers ran slowly right out of the box too.
By the time Vista came out, 512MB wasn't really enough to run XP on, so it's hardly a surprise that it couldn't hold up to Vista.
Quite frankly, that's why I think Flash-based anything is a piece of shit. It uses way more resources than older and more established video formats like Quicktime, MPEG, or AVI -- and I'm not convinced it actually provides any benefits.
I don't have flash installed on my machines. Anything which is solely Flash dependent is something I avoid because it's garbage and resource intensive.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Your claims are false. The quicklaunch concept is different on Win7. They've combined quicklaunch with the taskbar so that the same button will either open the first instance of that app or will minimize/maximize it. Also, you can pin documents to each of those quicklaunch icons so that you can instantly access a file and open it with that specific program (handy if you have multiple handlers). Finally, when you're copying files there is a progress bar behind that application's icon on the taskbar.
What's stupid about TFA is that it basically concentrates on how many CPU cycles are required to perform a task, but what about the number of steps the end-user has to follow to perform a task? That's the real value of Win7 - usability.
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 ]
I thought it worth looking at what people are buying at Amazon.com.: In brackets - the number of days in the Top 100.
Bestsellers in Software
1 MS Office Home and Student 2007 [863]
2 Quick Books Pro 2009 [232]
5 Photoshop Elements 7 [253]
8 MS Outlook 2007 [840]
9 Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard [273]
13 Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 [243]
18 MS Offfice Pro 2007 - Full Version [427]
20 Quicken Deluxe 2009 [258]
21 Rosetta Stone Version 3 - Latin American Spanish [325] $494
23 Family Tree Maker 2009 Essentials [247]
25 MS Street & Trips 2009 [234]
34 Corel Video Studio Pro X2 [34]
45 Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate [19]
46 Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 PLatinum Pro Pack [217]
47 Oregon Trail 5 [170]
48 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 [273]
In sum: the essentials for the MS home office and a broad mix of video and photo editing software for the amateur-enthusiast.
This isn't the market as the geek imagines it.
I'll admit that Rosetta's strength surprised me. I think it's sign of how deeply Hispanic - multilingual, multicultural - this country is on the way to becoming.
It can be very revealing to look at sub-categories like Home & Hobbies. Home design, landscape design, home publishing and other craft projects dominate here.
It's computer aided design for the middle class - a software category I'm not even sure the geek knows exists.
If none of these apps bring your aging PC to its knees, a game certainly can:
Best sellers in PC Games
Windows 7 is competing with that people think Vista is like, not what it is actually like. It's competing with what the people who hated Vista when it first came out and they stuck it on hardware that has since failed and no longer exists.
Windows 7 will have no substantial increase over Vista's performance because Vista's performance isn't actually bad. In fact since SP1 for the most part it's quite good. When you sit down a user(or a reviewer) in front of Windows 7 they'll say it's much faster than Vista because they think that Vista is much slower than it is, or they'll have experienced Vista on much slower hardware.
How Windows 7 performs on modern hardware isn't even really an issue as Vista has no problems on that hardware either. How it performs on netbooks and/or much older hardware might be interesting though.
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