Windows 7 "Not Much Faster" Than Vista 821
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?"
A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
So stability doesn't mean anythign anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Beta or Gold? (Score:2, Insightful)
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=
Not to defend Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
It certainly seems faster to me.... (Score:3, Insightful)
...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 Vs Fiction (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
history... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
"Okay Joe, here's your options, you can take this box home for $699, plug it in, turn it on and it will work reasonably well...*OR* you can use your old PC to download one of 1000 linux variants, all with different advantages and disadvantages, copy it over to this new box, spend hours installing and tweaking it, with no guarantee it will work with this hardware, and then it will work....reasonably well.
which way is Joe gonna go?
Windows 98 FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
the concept is "fast enough" (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:What else did we expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista SP3 PLUS Marketing hype PLUS Lipstick on a Pig... doesn't make it much faster.
You're absolutely right. The thing is though, Vista is a good operating system that is plagued by a stigma that is largely persisted by technology sites that, by default and in some sort of nerd conformance insist that all Microsoft products are garbage, an opinion formed with disregard to objectivity. By rebranding Windows Vista as Windows 7 and getting some tech sites to view it in a positive light, the layperson who holds any nerds technology opinion as inherent truth will be more apt to try and view it in a positive light as well.
Nonsense Metric (Score:5, Insightful)
First, if you want to talk about benchmarking tests speed, actually there's actually very little difference at all now [extremetech.com] 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.
Vista is actually good now... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Where does Joe get his Ubuntu Live CD?
Windows can't burn ISOs out of the box (or XP can't) and he likely doesn't know what a "ISO" is anyway.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
my dear little poo
Okay, NEVER AGAIN. Thank you.
Back on topic: I feel that Vista is the fall that comes after pride. Microsoft thought that everyone would just play along again. They were wrong. There are real alternatives today. With that said, OSX and Vista both have smoother animations than Compiz, and Xgl [wikipedia.org] is dead, long live AIGLX [wikipedia.org].
I did have Compiz+Xgl working on Ubuntu once, I forget if it was Hardy or Intrepid. It was awesomely fast. I look forward to having that experience again someday. (For example, the Magic Lamp transition was actually fluid, no joke. I have a Quadro 2700M in 8 bit mode and it's not fluid here. I miss Xgl.)
Re:Windows 98 FTW (Score:1, Insightful)
That's not good enough.
The software I use runs fine under XP.
There is nothing the operating system can do that is more useful than running my application perfectly.
What possible benefits could a new operating system that runs my software slower have?
Microsoft need to remember that some people really don't give a shit about their operating systems at all, other than that the software they need works.
I run one app full screen all day. The only difference I will see in Win7 is slightly different window decorations and a different 'start' button. Is that really worth lower performance?
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:3, Insightful)
As a Solaris and Redhat sysadmin, I love all things *nix, but have to concede it is still not ready for prime time.
The user doesn't care about benchmarks (Score:1, Insightful)
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).
Re:the concept is "fast enough" (Score:3, Insightful)
"fast enough" has been achieved. speed is only the concern now of a small minority of power users
Vista was not "fast enough", due to being marketed for laptops with 512 MB RAM that couldn't handle it. Windows 7 is "fast enough", due to 3 years of improving hardware, even if it wasn't any faster than Vista. I'm betting Vista could have done very well if it was released this year or even last year, and only on systems with 2+ GB RAM.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:1, Insightful)
wouldn't windows get sued for antitrust crap if they included an iso burner with windows 7?
UI Responsiveness vs Process Performance. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're not arguing that Joe would be better served with Anything-But-Windows-OS just that the current market makes it hard for him to get?
Almost as if there is a hole in the marketplace for selling a pre-installed linux system to the average Joe. One that would handle web browsing and email out of the box, but $100 cheaper...
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole story is lame so I voted it down.
Some things can become much faster, such as user interfaces, parsing databases or whatever depending on implementation, some things can not.
If all your benchmark does is x number of multiplications how the fuck would the OS make that faster?
So "omg only 5% increase" don't say shit, one can't expect to get a new machine just by changing OS, the hardware components got the speed they have anyway.
Not that I know what the benchmark in question actually benchmarks but it's fucking stupid to draw conclusions from a benchmark (even worse a single one) anyway.
Also Vista and Windows 7 does more than XP do, some of these things may be worth it (such as security features) even though it makes things slower.
Last benchmarks I saw of the BSDs and two Linux versions wasn't in OpenBSDs favour either ..
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:1, Insightful)
Installing Linux is not the problem. Having to use it afterwards is.
I build software for a living, but when I want to go home and just USE my computer, Linux failed miserably. Switching back to Windows let me focus on the things important to me at home; my finances, email, games, watching movies / listening to music, wireless networking JUST WORKS. And since I opted for SBS, I also have what I need for a server and managing the network easily.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
geting faster from beta to release and/or not having any significant increase from vista to 7 = 2 things. 1: why would anyone from vista give a crap to switch, and 2: that it's basically vista. They're just trying to sell vista twice since it already failed once.
All of this is basically not compelling for the average user, meaning people won't have interest to buy this. It has been admitted in the past that 7 is built off of vista in the first place [windowsteamblog.com] instead of starting from scratch and fixing stuff as they should have done.
Tfa missing something...... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:3, Insightful)
I see this claim a lot, but I call it baseless FUD. If DRM were off pre RTM, you wouldn't be able to play protected content. Why spread rumors and lies, the very FUD that is often claimed to come from MS, then try to claim the higher moral ground?
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
More important to me is the perspective of the change.
Vista came out directly after XP. So there were a lot of machines being upgraded from XP to Vista. OR, there were a lot of machines being sold that could *barely* run Vista. Either way, Vista was slow.
The fact that Windows 7 is not a lot SLOWER than Vista, is a move in the right direction. Had Windows 7 followed the normal trend, it would be 20% (or a lot more) slower. But it isn't.
Remember, XP runs a lot slower than most of the preceeding operating systems- it just seems really fast now...after new hardware and a lot of updates.
Re:Windows 7 vs. XP (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm happy with the Win 7 RC. It performs just as well as the beta and is stable for me. There have been a few small improvements and it feels pretty polished to me.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to tell this story one more time. When XP was a new thing, I installed it on an AMD K6-3 running at 450 mhz, and tweaked it like a madman. Soon thereafter, the wife bought a new Compaq with a 1ghz Athlon. My machine was faster, subjectively speaking.
Benchmarks be damned - it is the user's experience that counts. It matters little how fast that Ghz machine can crunch numbers, if it makes me wait a second or two for a menu to pop up. The first time a user has to wait on ANYTHING, he is irritated.
I can, and will, verify that Win7 is a huge improvement over Vista. I might even agree that Win7 is a small improvement over WinXP. I did some moderate tweaking on Win7, and afterwards, I saw no difference in speed or usability. Again, these are SUBJECTIVE measurements. I simply don't CARE what a benchmark might say, if and when my subjective experience is contrary to that benchmark.
(I can't say that I've ever used a computer on a bench, anyway. I have an office chair that I sit on mostly.)
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
The problems were with entry-level computers with 1GB or less, and is why TFA is fine for rich gamers, but adds little to no valuable information for the masses that have highly popular entry-level laptops.
Re:Vista is actually good now... (Score:3, Insightful)
They can't.
Netbooks use 32 bit processors, and Microsoft isn't going to cede that market to Linux, so there will be a variant of Windows as long as there are 32 bit processors around to install them on.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
what does the average user do? By a PC that they don't really need?
Uh... yes? Have you *looked* at PCs lately? That's the only thing that drives pre-built system sales. The average user has no clue how to maintain their system, it starts falling apart, they buy a new one that costs about the same as their old one did new. Then, they either run their old programs, or upgrade if they won't run on the new OS. The average computer user doesn't need multi-core systems and DDR3 RAM. They run a web browser, email client, and IM client. Maybe watch a movie. A system from 5 years ago can do that easily, and older ones could still probably do that.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tfa missing something...... (Score:3, Insightful)
If all you're concerned about is speed, then download FreeDOS. Just because XP is faster at certain tasks does *not* automatically make it a better experience. The reason that Vista is so much slower than XP is because of all the protection that has been implemented to make it harder to get a malware infection. Yes, it's still possible to get a malware infection in Vista, just as it's still possible in 7, but it's a damned sight harder. Considering the amount of spam we all get, not to mention the intrusion attempts that my servers see from botnets, I'd think you'd rather that people have better protection against that crap.
And don't give me that "linux is immune to viruses" bullshit. The only reason Linux is any better with viruses is Linux's relative obscurity. It's not a mainstream OS at the moment, and most of its users tend to be power/advanced computer users at that. This makes it not a viable target for a virus writer. However if a virus writer wanted, he could very easily write something that could zombie a Linux box. You could even write a virus that's capable of rooting a system via e-mail infection, even if the user runs in userland...
Use basic social engineering. Make something enticing for users to open up, some executable or flash video or something. User opens it, gets his 5s of reward, closes it, deletes the e-mail. Meanwhile, the program has added a silent keylogger to ~/.xinitrc, which watches ps for sudo and gksudo threads... when those are running, it logs all input until a mouseclick or [enter] is pressed. Now it's got your root password, and can set itself up as a startup service, affecting other accounts. And thanks to the wonders of the graphical boot screens that most distros have on them, the user will probably never notice that a new service is running.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>Windows 7 is basically vista. They're just trying to sell vista twice since it already failed once.
Question of the decade: Can Microsoft survive two "mistake editions"? They survived M.e because they were able to discontinue it after just one year and replace with with NT 5.1 (XP). But can Microsoft successfully survive two bad OSes, Vista and Win7, back-to-back?
Re:Tfa missing something...... (Score:3, Insightful)
, which is slower than the previous one, and that requires bigger hardware.
Well, Win2k is faster than XP [techreport.com], perhaps we should downgrade to that? Oh, wait, Windows 98 is faster than Win2k [ni.com]. I'm wondering how quick MS-DOS would run on a quad core!
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course they can. Just reinstate XP as an option and inertia will keep the money rolling in. Honestly, I kind of wonder why they bother trying to develop "the next windows" instead of just polishing what they have. Maybe they should try a "plus pack" if they're yearning for upgrade cash.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:3, Insightful)
Nor does he *care*, which most geeks fail to realize.
Linux is all well and good, but it's still not the magic bullet for Joe. Neither functionality nor ease of install (which includes obtaining the media for install) are appropriate for Joe's level of computer competency.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows 7 does burn ISOs out of the box, just click on a .iso file and it will open a wizard. If you don't have Windows 7 there are pretty detailed instructions with links on the Ubuntu website at the download page, which I'm pretty sure you can reach with a single click at the top of their homepage. We're talking about Joe User, not Joe Illiteratemonkey, right?
If Joe is using Windows 7 in Beta/RC, he already knows what an ISO is...
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
The perception that I have gotten is that they are trying to make Vista right with Win7. Vista is the Windows Me of the 21st century. Vista sucked. I had to put up with it when I worked on some of my friends' computers, but I never installed it on any of my own hardware. We never installed it at work.
I have used Windows 7 and it works a lot better than Vista. I don't have to disable Aero to get a responsive UI. I don't have a bunch of pop-ups bothering me when I am making changes to the system. They have added some neat enhancements to the UI also. I like the fact that I can hover my mouse over a group of open programs (like Word documents for example), and the UI will bring up small copies of them that I can browse through without actually having to go all the way into the program. It makes finding what I'm working on more convenient. I'm sure that they "stole" the idea from OSX, or KDE or whatever. I don't care where it comes from or who invented it first, it's a productivity enhancer and I'm glad to see it in Win7.
I would never have rolled out Vista on my network. I might think about rolling out Win7. I probably won't because most of my clients are running integrated video and I haven't done any testing on those. However I'm confident that the OS itself will work and do what it needs to do... unlike Vista.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been evaluating the Win7 RC here at work for a week now, and I can tell yo that I am pretty excited for this release.
Vista suffered from being a major architecture overhaul with few bullet-point features. Windows 7 adds those features, many of which take advantage of the underlying changes from Vista.
XP mode looks to me like it will help us transition our existing (2000+) deployment packages to Win7 slowly, rather than requiring a complete re-certification process. (I'm not 100 on this yet, but so far so good).
Vista improved OS deployment via the WIM format significantly, and Windows 7 adds all sorts of usability tweaks that I think are highly inspired by the iPhone and gestures. It also adds codecs, while stripping out useless cruft like Windows Mail and DVD creator.
Discussing the speed of it in relation to XP is sort of disingenuous... it runs great on modern hardware, and does a lot of things XP will never do.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What else did we expect? (Score:4, Insightful)
as someone who used Vista from the RC days right until months after the release
Some of it was fixed in SP1 but I didn't try it for long enough to find out what... I haven't even considered running Vista since and never will.
At least you admit that you have no desire to form an objective opinion.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:3, Insightful)
What about that rubbish where the network speed would significantly drop if you were playing an mp3 file? Even if they fixed that particular issue it doesn't exactly breed confidence.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact its ability to isolate faulting apps is excellent.
I think its ability to isolate faulting apps is a little too excellent. Often times, Vista will report that an app has hung or is not responding and should be closed when it is simply performing a rigorous task. This leads to calls where the user keeps complaining about a crashing app, Photoshop or Quark usually (although Quark truly does crash very often). Often times in my experience, Vista is simply being impatient, and conveying that impatience on the user (who really doesn't need assistance in this aspect). *face palm*
What really sucks is that XP is a just-fine OS as well.. but if you try to config a system on Dell now with XP it is an EXTRA $150 (!!).
It is a secret to no one that Microsoft offers incentives to OEM vendors who comply with their policies. I'm sure no one here, including yourself is surprised about this. If the OEM vendor doesn't comply, they will suffer serious repercussions in their ability to compete with other vendors who do comply. Whether this is a bad thing, or a good thing is completely relative to your perspective.
Re:UI Responsiveness vs Process Performance. (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly, I think you've definitely struck the heart of the issue, normal benchmarks don't take these into consideration which is the problem. I've always felt that Windows Vista was considerably slower than XP, in my experience 7 is somewhat faster than Vista. But the thing all these benchmarks really show is that there really isn't much difference between XP/Vista/7. Sure when you copy a multi-gigabyte file (or what-have-you) it's a second or two different between each version. But I think this is all in the margin of error, I'd say it's safe to say they are all equivalent in these respects. At least in my opinion, the REAL performance is, for example, how long it takes for Explorer to open when I click My Computer. When I click the start menu, how long does it take to display and fully render? When I drag my mouse across a row of icons in Office 2007 do they all immediately highlight as I pass over them, or is there a delay as it tries to play catch-up with my cursor?
To me, "performance" isn't whether my computer takes 451 seconds or 449 seconds to copy a file, it's whether that copy dialog showed up instantly, and if I click "cancel" it IMMEDIATELY stops and closes the dialog. In this respect XP is vastly superior to both Vista and 7. And if you really want to see this GUI difference played out try going back and trying 2000, or better yet, NT 4.0, and then tell me that Vista or 7 is "just as fast".
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's so, what else could Microsoft have possibly screwed up so badly that a modern OC would stuter playing an MP3 for lack of power? The DRM argument was convincing, because poorly tuned crypto could quite reasonably destroy performance to this degree. I have a hard time imagining anything else that could.
Viruses (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Reality Check (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [amazon.com]
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. [amazon.com] 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 [amazon.com]
Because it's not competing with Vista.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Its true. I went back to XP (from windows 7) (Score:2, Insightful)
...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...
You're obviously running an old desktop compter (+4 years), otherwhise any speed difference when using the standard features like explorer etc, will hardly be noticable.
..Windows 7 and Vista have terrible file I/O. Its just slow and bloated...
Again more unfounded generic statements...
...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...
Wow, this is really your entired post summed up. You never bothered to learn/customize the UI in explorer, and for that reason you have a burning hatred inside you against vista.
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.
One of the things that Vista is actually superiour to XP with is memory managment [wikipedia.org]. If you have problem with disk trashing/swaping, it's not vistas fault. You simply don't have enough RAM, sorry buddy. You can't expect to be able to run your photo and video editing software smoothly with 512mb in Vista. And with the price of RAM today... 2GB is sufficient for ~anything~... I have run Vista several years, loaded with 4 gb, and have never, ever experienced cache hangups. Not even with the latest games minimized, plus that I always leaves 20+ apps running in the task bar.
(Summarized) Blah blah XP is better.