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?"
Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Funny)
I modded you up because your sig ordered me to. Fortunately, the sig doesn't say anything about posting comments afterwards.
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: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: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: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.
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.
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]
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: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:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Informative)
I was thinking the same sort of thing, but in a different direction -- these benchmarks don't deal with Vista's problems.
The complaints about Vista's speed were almost never about throughput. They were about high memory consumption, poorly optimized visual elements, and huge amounts of disk rattling. All of these issues have been improved in Windows 7.
Windows 7 may not increase throughput in this test environment, but it runs the full aero theme on a netbook almost as quickly as Windows XP runs its default theme. I've got it on my Aspire One, and it works great -- I bet it'll become the new XP over time (that is, reliable enough, fast enough, useful enough to become a major standard).
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.
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:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Informative)
Vista is not at all a "bad OS." The upgrade path from XP to Vista may involve a hardware refresh but the OS itself is solid, attractive, and pretty user friendly. I've been running it for about a year and it has yet to full-on crash on me. In fact its ability to isolate faulting apps is excellent.
My Fedora10 system, by contrast, has way more quirks. Yes, it's apples to oranges when comparing the two for all the reasons we know about.
While I don't usually stand up for Msft, this "it's a bad OS" conclusion is not fair. Which isn't to say Msft didn't fumble in so far as not doing enough to get drivers rewritten or having awful, awful marketing (The Seinfeld ad was enough to turn anyone off the OS).
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 (!!).
Re: (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
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.
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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:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Informative)
The DRM code is dormant and has no effect except when playing back DRM'd content.
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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.
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Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Informative)
Insightful, lol.
Ok, what you remember is correct, but what your memory forgot is that you just described what happens on the video card itself in hardware. What you've described is a very crude description of HDCP. That doesn't affect the performance of the OS. Also, it was 30x per MINUTE, not per second. This is the same reason why some of your bluray players get out of "sync" with your TV on early implementations of HDCP for *gasp* 2 seconds and then resync (30 times per minute = 2 seconds). The DRM portion of vista is not much more than moving the requesting playback of DRM'ed media into ring 0 so that userland code can't muck with it. A side effect of that is that it's also more efficient -- not slowed down since requests to IO ports and memory blocks for DMA transfer don't get intercepted.
The rest of the post (Blocking IO, etc etc) is just conjecture on your part, and is completely false.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
To quote the post that you just non-answered:
Right, and how about something to back up the claim that it *does* slow Windows down? That was the first assertion, so the burden of proof is on the first poster.
So how about it? Are you going to quote that "researcher" Peter Gutmann?
You've been had. The Vista DRM debacle was nothing but a smear campaign. Try reading someone who actually researched the topic as opposed to someone who just went with what he could find of anecdotes on random blogs. Ed Bott has made a series of well-investigated rebuffs of Peter Gutmanns diatribe: Read "Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (3 parts"):
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:4, Informative)
You really have no idea what you're talking about.
The reason you can only see 3.2GB or so of RAM in 32 bit versions of Windows is because of hardware I/O reservations. Roughly 768MB of memory is reserved for hardware I/O devices, but this changes depending on BIOS and hardware installed.
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Printscreen not working with DVD playback most likely has nothing to do with DRM, it's probably related to how the image is composited and rendered on screen. XP has similar issues.
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.
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Those "Joes" would be better served with a Anything-but-Windows OS.
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?
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah because
1) insert ubuntu live cd,
2) enter your name,
3) choose guided install,
4) wait,
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. That's about the only piece of commodity hardware that's sometimes a problem with modern linux distro's.
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:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (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:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Funny)
Joe: Hey! That's like a whole day. I could get like 5 sessions of Fighter Ultra Captain Kain in that time!
OMG. I just realized that I'm Joe.
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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.
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As a Solaris and Redhat sysadmin, I love all things *nix, but have to concede it is still not ready for prime time.
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> Done. Now he can double-click on an EXE, and it will work.
Uh. Have you ever actually TRIED that? More often than not you get an epic fail. Sometimes you get an application that almost but not quite works. Very rarely you get 'just works.' Use the commercial Crossover Office and the odds get slightly better. Go look at winehq or codeweaver's compatibility lists sometime. Most apps don't work. Microsoft gave the Wine team several years where everyone was stuck on the WinXP APIs and it wasn't enou
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:Tfa missing something...... (Score:4, Funny)
You should check all three against Windows 95. You'll be shocked at what a scorcher Windows 95 is compared to those bloated pigs the illegal monopolists keep trying to get me to pay for. I wasn't fooled the last 2 times.
Besides, you don't need multiple cores, more memory, bigger hard drives, faster internet. All that big hardware is for posers and Moore's Law devotees.
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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 pos
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, 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!
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This isn't insightful. I did an ubuntu install this week in under and hour and it does ALL these things. Writer of the parent is totally lazy or a troll.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, 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: (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
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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'
Windows 7 vs. XP (Score:4, Interesting)
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The first beta release though is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the RC1. Most of us here are very disappointed with the RC released this week...
Typical for MSFT to screw things up. I wonder what they "added" to make it slower than the beta.
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: (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.
So stability doesn't mean anythign anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
Stability is everything and Vista ain't stable (Score:3, Informative)
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 [imageshack.us]
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.
Re:Stability is everything and Vista ain't stable (Score:4, Informative)
The error your seeing is typically caused by a third party kernel module, such as anti-virus or in some cases a driver. Are you using an older version of ESET NOD32?
Blue screens are seldom the fault of the OS. usually less than 20% of the time. All OS's are vulnerable to bad 3rd party kernel modules.
What else did we expect? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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.
Re: (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
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Holy shit. I've been on Slashdot for longer than 1 hour you know.
That same tired article is brought out EVERY SINGLE TIME this is mentioned, with no mention of the fact that everything in that article is COMPLETE BULLSHIT. Yah, I've seen that link-- about a million times. No, it's no less true than the first time I've seen it.
Tell you what, I'm going to write a webpage saying "Hurricane78 is a bad person who strangles kittens" on my blog and then start spreading it around every single time you post-- with n
Re:What else did we expect? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Vista really is garbage.
I agree with you that it is a fairly good operating system in that it is pretty stable, has better security... but the interface is worse (GPU GUI does not improve Vista's performance), the I/O is horrible and the performance overall for what it is.... IS TERRIBLE. That is where it fails.
Its not that its "bad" entirely... Its more so that its bad at what it does, and at what cost. Its too heavy of an OS and it doesnt really do anything different than XP.
You could say that they integrated search, so its slower. But thats not true. You can install Windows search on XP and XP will still be faster than Vista and Windows 7. I know because i did just that. I went back to XP and installed windows desktop search, comodo firewall, nod32 anti virus... and its all faster than Vista.
So what does Vista do for me that XP cant? Directx 10? Is that the reason why its so slow? I cant imagine how that could be.
Vista doesnt even doesnt support firewire! (maybe sp1 does but launch version did not)
So what does Vista give me that XP64-bit cant do? DRM? Slower performance??
Now you see the problem.
Re:What else did we expect? (Score:5, Informative)
The only thing full of crap is the people who spout 'vista is bad' without actually using it.
Nonsense. Vista is synonymous to crap of the best quality. At a hospital where I consult, none of the software developed by companies like GE and Siemens work under Vista. Hardware like foot-pedals and audio controllers no longer work. The situation is the same with Windows 7 as well.
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Wait...you're arguing that Vista is "synonymous to crap" because it is not backwards compatible to software that was released in 2001? While Vista may have its problems (and, for the record, I actually like Vista), not being totally backwards compatible does not mean its "synonymous to crap." It means that those hardware controllers need to be updated to match with current technology, OR you need to continue to use the older technology (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
Re:What else did we expect? (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking as someone who used Vista from the RC days right until months after the release because it was part of my job to do so. Vista is crap. It would just fall apart over time - eg. not letting you see whether the network cable was plugged in because you didn't have permission (WTF?). Directory copies/moves were downright dangeruous as it could and did lose data.. it had a habit of abandoning the operation silently halfway through and ditching the file it was currently working on. Network access was 100mb speeds on a gigabit LAN... several parts of the Win32 API were just plain broke and required special workarounds...
And I haven't even started on the usability issues. 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.
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.
Not yet (Score:3, Funny)
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.)
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
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.)
Damn it... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Save Vista! (Score:5, Funny)
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 [today.com] - Facebook group [facebook.com]
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.
Windows 98 FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
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: (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: (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
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes. I'm being sarcastic.
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.
Re: (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
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: (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.
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.
Yes, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Windows XP can't be beat (Score:4, Funny)
Very Sneaky Summary - Lies Worthy of a Politician (Score:5, Informative)
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 [anandtech.com]
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 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 o
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: (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 t
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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: (Score:3, Informative)
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 off
Re: (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 boug