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?"
Windows 7 vs. XP (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
The question isn't whether 7 is faster, it's whether it's faster on shitty hardware.
Agreed. Running XP wasn't that stable when it was first released, and it didn't even support all my hardware, Vista does, but since my system is just enough to be considered usable with the aero interface I decided to use Vista. I know that as soon as the first service pack comes out for vista a lot of problems will be addressed, but why should we have to wait for that? I could run linux only, but it is more useful as a backup system since most of my favorite apps run in windows, like office. I don't choose to use a windows emulator in linux to run my windows programs, because that just seems obsurd. I really don't understand why OS's such as OSx and xgl linux can run on hardware that aero won't run on. It just doesnt make sense why microsoft doesn't produce a nice graphical OS that supports more standard workstations, but it does if you think about how much more hardware people are going to have to purchase if they want aero running smoothly on par with OSx or XGL. Microsoft just needs to realize that it is digging a hole for itself while more people realize how smooth and beautiful XGL or OSx run with half the amount of $ spent. For the price of a really nice vista system with aero you could have a system running OSx and another running XP and linux with XGL.
Why, my dear little poo, is this the case?
=Smidge=
Re:Windows 7 vs. XP (Score:2, Interesting)
They said the same about XP (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, I vastly prefer vista to XP, on account of it doing much fewer crazy and unpredictable things, and I look forward to 7.
Stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not to defend Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
Your essential point- that XP is almost 10 years old, and therefore able to run on lesser h/w than either Vista or Win 7- is a reasonable one. But a better question is: what does the new OS offer to make it a 'must' for people currently using the older OS. If people figure that Win 7 is going to run only marginally faster on brand new equipment than XP does on their current, older equipment, it's a major disincentive to purchase the new PC w/the new OS.
In other words, even if Win 7 is a major improvement over Vista, users may still hesitate to adopt it, for some of the same reasons that they hesitated to adopt Vista.
Personal Anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:2, Interesting)
No, but there is a switch to turn on all kinds of DRM in release version.
Re:history... (Score:2, Interesting)
There is a reason people change. At the moment, on this system, XP is using about $18 worth of Ram (and that price has since come down) and less than 2% of the 3 year old processor.
I guess there is the argument that those are really high and not worth the added features of XP, but I don't agree that those values are high, and just the somewhat better hardware support is worth it.
Not quite your point but... (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Not 8 years older (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Windows 7 vs. XP (Score:3, Interesting)
The benchmark they ran has an obvious flaw. They are benchmarking applications. Applications use the same code on Vista as on Windows 7, they don't operate any differently so naturally performance is going to be exactly the same.
The only area Windows is going to make any difference is in terms of caching and system calls, and maybe some better memory management, but 5% is pretty much all you would expect for that.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:2, Interesting)
Where does Joe get his Ubuntu Live CD?
Download it [ubuntu.com]
Buy it [ubuntu.com]
Get it for free [ubuntu.com]
Windows can't burn ISOs out of the box (or XP can't) and he likely doesn't know what a "ISO" is anyway.
Joe can always make a bootable USB [ubuntu.com]. Joe has options.
Not necessarily "shitty" hardware. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:the concept is "fast enough" (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. One big argument for why people didn't pick up Vista was that that XP is good enough, plenty fast and runs on cheap hardware and there was no reason to upgrade. Will Windows 7 change that? We have been hearing about some new features of windows 7 that sound interesting so maybe people will see some advantage but unless it's a lot faster on cheaper hardware like you say, I don't think they will. If I had to guess though, I'd say it's more likely that Windows 7 will rapidly replace most of the Vista installs, but people who haven't upgraded yet will probably stick with XP.
As somebody else pointed out, Vista SP1 is pretty stable, and now that everyone has figured out what services to turn off to make it run better, it's not all too bad (speaking as a die hard linux and mac os x geek who only installs windows to play games). By services I mean Aero, Superfetch, indexing, and some network services that slow down your system noticeably but don't provide a huge benefit.
But, even though Vista SP1 is stable, people aren't installing it at the same rate as they did a year ago, and Vista growth peaked well below what XP did when it was replacing Win 2k (see this [slashdot.org] comment and the chart that goes with it). Right now I think that the only new users of Vista now are ones that are buying it on a new computer, or incidental installs (i.e., somebody trashed their system and decided to upgrade while they were at it). I suspect that XP is just good enough, and the only loss for XP's market share now is people replacing their old computers. If I'm right, Windows 7 might be stuck at ~25% usage share for a while (Vista is currently at 23.9% give or take a few percentage points).
Re:Windows 98 FTW (Score:1, Interesting)
Well I installed Ubuntu on a P2 450 (Ok, so it has 1Gb RAM) last month, and my sister is happy with it.
Does that count?
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:1, Interesting)
Exactly. You think Microsoft removed the DRM from 7? I don't. That's where much or most Vista's slowness comes from, so although MS might have done some performance optimizations and added less new bloat than usual for a new Windows version, it's inevitable that 7 will still be slow because it's still performing complex pervasive checks 30 times per second to make sure you're not trying to do anything unauthorized with it.
If the early reports of good performance in 7 are really true (and that's a big if), I'm almost sure it's because the DRM is disabled in the betas while Microsoft desperately tries to get some early good reviews.
Now bring on the shills who will claim that (1) DRM is good for you, and (2) the DRM code is dormant and has no effect except when playing back DRM'd content.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:3, Interesting)
Me: Yes Joe. We can install Linux dual boot! You can use Linux for your real computing, and use Windows as a game OS until you get a real gaming box!
The rest of your post is equally ridiculous and off base. Thanks for playing. Not.
Re:Nonsense Metric (Score:3, Interesting)
Bingo.
My problem with Vista is not overall performance, but responsiveness. If I right-click on something, I should get the context menu, not a spinning blue doughnut for a second or two. (This is on a machine with impressive performance, by the way.)
I get good responsiveness on XP, Ubuntu, and MacOSX. I never start an action that should be perceivable and doable as one thing and have to pause in the middle. That throws me off and frequently derails my train of thought. I should never have to pay attention to the process of using a menu.
So, barring serious problems, my question about Windows 7 is not whether it will do some long task or another faster or slower than Vista, XP, or for that matter MacOS 7. My questions are more like whether I'll be able to Control-Alt-Delete and then type in my password, or will I have to hit Control-Alt-Delete, wait a bit, and then type my password.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Interesting)
At one time I was very interested in buying a faster PC. Between Windows 95 and Windows XP came the ability to burn a CD and not risk making a coaster, DVDs, ability to play real time video, etc. What has come to computing between Windows XP and Windows 7? Maybe the games look better but I don't play games, and other then that it is a lot of bloat in my opinion. There is no functional need for me to buy a faster PC right now and therefore I will not be. I want an OS that can support my choice. Fortunately I am a sysadmin so I am comfortable with Linux, but what does the average user do? By a PC that they don't really need?
Re:What else did we expect? (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems you completely forgot about the entire DRM/TCP crap. You know. You not being in control over the computer. Some random media company ordering a takedown for your graphics card (because someone coded a fast cracking tool that uses it) making the card run in safe mode only. And much much more. Adding to all the useless colorful clickable stuff that takes more power than compiz for no reason. ^^
That is what Vista really as plagued with. Not the religious hatred, that you made-up because you never read the facts behind the hate.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, I just ordered a decorative thermometer from an online gift shop. It came in a box with cat stickers on it. Inside, besides my item, was an advert for "The Cat Lady Diaries", ... and an Ubuntu 8.10 install CD.
There is some guerrilla marketing going on out there.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:3, Interesting)
Every new version of an OS adds new features. New features require more memory. What's more, hardware is expected to get faster and have more resources available and the prevailing wisdom is to use those resources to improve performance (for instance, pre-fetching expected code and data so it doesn't have to be loaded from disk).
It's all about increasing the *perceived* speed, which sometimes reduces the actual speed. Simply put, Vista does more than XP, thus it uses more CPU cycles, thus there are fewer CPU cycles for applications, thus they run a little slower on the same hardware.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:1, Interesting)
I put 7 on an HP dx2300 that was originally running XP pro/SP3.
When this computer was running XP pro, it would crash all the time, get registry errors, run really, really slow (even after a toast/reinstall).
I put 7 on it, and it runs like a dream. My only complaint about 7 right now is the lack of a specified "classic" mode. You can make stuff look "classic" but the terminology changed up a bit.
I also put Ubuntu on an HP dx2000, that was running XP, and I was very impressed with performance. We may seriously consider making all of our old dx2000's into Ubuntu machines, and for all the windows apps that can't run on Linux, we will just have em RD into the server set up for Thin clients already.....
My only complaint is still connecting to Exchange. I hate having to hold my mouth right, and figure out the right combination of caps/no caps to be able to get Evolution to pass authentication.
Yea, I'm a Ubuntu newbie....there may be an easier way and I just don't know it yet.
Its true. I went back to XP (from windows 7) (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:3 GB of RAM will not be enough for anyone (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:My gripes have never been about speed (Score:2, Interesting)
You're not talking about "usability", you're talking about "do exactly what I'm used to, damnit, I hate change get off my lawn!!!" That's different. :) Or wait, there's a good dose of "THE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND TED!" in there as well.
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.
How often do you even use that control panel? Once a month? Maybe? Did it ever occur that the networking diagram might actually be useful for non-you people who, for example, have several networked Xboxes, a networked file server, maybe a wifi printer or two in their house? But no, it doesn't help you personally, therefore it's useless and awful.
I don't know what you mean by "managing" a network connection, but you can do all the common wifi operations from the taskbar icons, as always. If you *have* to go into the Networking control panel for this, your computer is broken in some way and not at all typical.
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.
Does it make you more productive? Probably not, Mr. Grumpy. I guess you're the only person ever to use Windows, and if it doesn't help you, it shouldn't ever be done. How often do you use this control panel, anyway? Maybe once a month? Max? Why are you griping about the *least*-used features of the OS?
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.
1) If your menu is obscured by the stuff behind it, your computer is broken in some way, and your experience is not typical. Actually... WTF... I'm sitting behind a stock Vista install right now, and I can't find a single application with a transparent menu in it. Even Explorer doesn't have any... Could you maybe provide an example?
2) If you don't like the feature, just turn it off and stop bitching. Although from looking at my own machine, I think you're bitching about something that has nothing to do with Vista.
Re:Windows 7 is fast enough (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Its true. I went back to XP (from windows 7) (Score:1, Interesting)
How old is your computer?
I have 7 installed on 2 machines: a dell optiplex gx260 w/a geforce 2mx for video, 1gb ram, and a 2GHz p4. The computer is 6-7 years old, and can run like ass with 7, mainly because of the shitty video card using generic drivers.
Now my other computer is an HP laptop, with onboard graphics (128MB shared), 1GB ram (including the shared portion, 895mb without) and a 2GHz turion x64. This runs 7 like a dream, with aero & at a ridiculously high resolution (like 1920x800, can't remember offhand).
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually it probably is. Way back in the day, one of the ways to get a DRM-less copy of a DVD was to run DVD software, and then have a background process that automated the "printscreen" 30 times a second to disk. There was an article on this loophole a few years back. Shortly after that video drivers, video codecs, and DVD playback software all attempted to disable printscreen while video was playing.
I have to agree--Win7 isn't that bad (Score:3, Interesting)
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*