Windows 7 Hard Drive and SSD Performance Analyzed 248
bigwophh writes "Despite the fact that Windows 7 is based on many of the same core elements as Vista, Microsoft claims it is a different sort of animal and that it should be looked at in a fresh, new light, especially in terms of performance. With that in mind, this article looks at how various types of disks perform under Windows 7, both the traditional platter-based variety and newer solid state disks. Disk performance between Vista and Win7 is compared using a hard drive and an SSD. SSD performance with and without TRIM enabled is tested. Application performance is also tested on a variety of drives. Looking at the performance data, it seems MS has succeeded in improving Windows 7 disk performance, particularly with regard to solid state drives."
But... (Score:5, Funny)
Is is fast enough to get first post?
(Sarcasm guys)
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Is is fast enough to get first post?
(Sarcasm guys)
Depends. What were you using when making that comment?
Anyway, why doesn't the article compare to XP as well? I'm sure 7 is beter than Vista, but we all agreed that Vista was crappy anyway. Will I see any benefit moving from XP though?
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
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Windows 7 is undoubtedly the most exciting new operating system to come out of Microsoft within the past decade--
When the article starts out like this, you can guess where it's going.
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To me what comes out best here is SSD drives, almost regardless of OS. Booting in half the time of the velociraptor? Very cool.
re: compared to Vista vs. XP? (Score:2)
It might basically be a big press release, but I don't know that it's fair to claim they compared it to Vista simply because "they knew it sucked".
I think for the typical Windows user, the issue today is that XP has been around since 2002. Microsoft is inching ever closer to stopping any support for the product. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to be a very good option for a 64-bit OS - and PCs are rapidly moving to 64-bit capable processors. Sure, it's still the best choice for existing hardware, but when y
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Because the entire article is basically a press release for Windows 7. They compare it to something they know sucks, because they know it wouldn't look nearly as good compared to the thing (XP) people are actually running now.
I've tried doing some searches for troubleshooting Windows 7 issues I've encountered. In response, what do I get? Fluff: "20 great new things about windows 7", "How Windows 7 will make you more efficient", "Windows 7 outperforms Vista [but we won't talk about XP]", "10 great new things about windows 7", "23 Windows 7 Improvements", "Exciting changes in Windows 7". If I'm lucky, I /might/ get something related to my issue in the top 10.
These aren't all blog posts, some are in mainstream media (local an
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Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
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Its good enough to get first place.
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you're
fixed
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fixt
fixt
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
They also forgot the most important test with Crysis - framerates!
Older tests [anandtech.com] have proven that SSDs have a massive impact on the minimum framerate for texture hungry games. Waiting 15ms for some textures is bad since that wastes most of that whole frame.
I don't understand why the article writer is so enamored by burst speeds. Burst is just data coming in from cache... my old 320GB Seagate drives get burst speeds over 200MB/sec. I threw four of them in RAID and was enjoying a comfortable 700MB/sec burst speed; though sustained read was barely over 220MB/sec.
But burst almost never comes into play. The most likely scenario for seeing its effect would be... starting up a game, exiting, then starting the same game over again. Although I suppose burst is several seconds long, so it does reflect on the drives' skill in reading data before it's needed. (Something SSDs don't really have to do, so no impressive data bursts; just super high sustained read)
Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
The most likely scenario for seeing its effect would be... starting up a game, exiting, then starting the same game over again.
Ah, I see you've been playing Empire too!
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any reviewer measuring FPS in relation to SSD performance should go get a job painting fences.
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Beg to differ... [anandtech.com]
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You're both kind of right. Average FPS should stay the same regardless of drive, but minimum FPS will change greatly if the game makes use of streaming (loading while playing).
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Only if you are talking about arithmetic mean.
By average I meant "most of the time", so more of a median.
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Any reviewer measuring FPS in relation to SSD performance should go get a job painting fences.
Why was this modded insightful? Some games need to load things from the HD on the fly and write on the fly because some programmers know that people hate looking at loading screens.
Especially on games with open worlds like Morrowind. If the hard drive can't keep up, then the cpu and video card will sit there with nothing do to.
Yes, if the game programmers did it right then you won't have a true drop in FPS because
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But burst almost never comes into play.
I managed to get extremely good throughput by getting disks that had cache as large as the drive size and by running "cat /dev/sda > /dev/null" on boot. They're a bit hard to come by but if you insist your reseller will surely find some.
Of course YMMV.
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Running "cat /dev/sda > /dev/null" on boot.
Was this ment to be funny? I sure hope so....
Cat ? Funny ?
lolcat sez man 1 cat.
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This is impossible. Given the speed burst you mentioned of 700MB/s and a typical HD cache of 12-16MB the burst can last about 0.029 seconds at best. Simply because at 700MB/s, the cache will be empty in that amount of time, though during that time, you'll be able to get another 4MB off the platters and burst that, but then you're once again depending on spindle speed.
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Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
Build 7000 (beta) was notably faster and slimmer than Build 7100 (RC) when we tried it here - 7000 was highly responsive and usable in 512MB, 7100 thrashes and is slow in 1GB. We were horrified. So forget 7000's admirable speed - it appears the RC was compiled with -fsuck-like-a-dyson-on-steroids enabled.
I just switched from 7000 to 7100 on a 1 gb netbook and saw no change in responsiveness. Both are much more responsive than XP, which liked to stall for ~3s at a time every time I ran something uncached on the Dell Mini 9's SSD. 7 hasn't done it once. You do know that in the first few hours of use it thrashes intentionally to build the index and populate superfetch, right?
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Just curious.... Did you do re-formats and fresh installs of RC1, or did you try to upgrade from build 7000 to 7100?
I've heard other people say Win 7 RC1 got slower than the beta builds, but I didn't notice that at all on 3 machines I've used both on so far. (The thing is though, all 3 systems I've tried had at least 4GB of RAM in them - so I can't speak for performance in lesser RAM configurations.)
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Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
This information is irrelevant to many of us; for a frame of reference, how does HD performance on 7 compare with XP?
Even more importantly, in the particular frame of reference, where XP is moving at a velocity of 38.5% c relative to Windows 7, with a time of passing of 92.3% relative to XP, do these calculations add up?
Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
Which one is going east?
Windows is an old Indian word for "bottleneck". (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to see some impartial figures to see how disk subsystem performance (regular and raided) compares with FreeBSD. You can even use FreeBSD 2.2.1 if you want.
And them again under heavy load. Not just "oooh, lets try a million database reads".
I'll wait. I use windows. I'm used to it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course how many of us are likely to have a 16 or 24 core box sitting around anytime soon?
In the US, we have 8 core boxes today. 4 core notebooks. 16 core is in preproduction.
Moore's law is still live and well. Linux and the other OSes need to get their act together for these bigger SMP (or whatever you want to call it) boxes.
iiiiiis it (Score:2)
and how many apps and games out there that use even 2 cores ?
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These days a lot of games have three or more threads. Three cores has been said to be about the useful limit for consumers right now, which may be why AMD is selling them.
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er... anything based on the Source (Orange box) engine does.
As I recall, even the Unreal Tournament engine from a decade ago (1999) does... it causes issues with games based on it, like Deus Ex, because they expected these operations to be performed serially for whatever reason.
In order to run Deus Ex on a modern version of Windows, you have to bind it to a single core.
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What in the hell would most of us even DO with a 16 or 24 core box besides crank up our electric and cooling bills?
I'm not sure how Windows handles this since I only run it for games and all I really do there is click on icons, but the PC Unix systems still have a way to go to handle multi-core CPUs efficiently.
I'm regularly looking at my (dual core) machines overloading one CPU while the other one is mostly idle. I know that it's fairly difficult to handle efficient load balancing, and that there are lots of apps that don't scale gracefully. But the CPU intensive current desktops really should start to look into this (
Many-core machines and their application (Score:2)
What in the hell would most of us even DO with a 16 or 24 core box besides crank up our electric and cooling bills?
emerge world
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Well considering this is a slash-ad for Win7, and the last time I read about Win7 and Vista going against WinXP in benchmarks it got its ass kicked [engadget.com], I am really not surprised they didn't run against XP. I especially liked the part where Infoworld said that XP should only win until you go past 8 cores, that after that Vista and Win7 should win. Of course how many of us are likely to have a 16 or 24 core box sitting around anytime soon?
Hell most of the time my Phenom dual core sits around twiddling its thumbs because it has so much more power than what is required for most everyday tasks. What in the hell would most of us even DO with a 16 or 24 core box besides crank up our electric and cooling bills? When I built this new box I finally took the plunge and went to XP X64 and I have to say I am impressed. It has run everything I have thrown at it with the exception of a 7 year old cheapo TV tuner which I found an X64 replacement for a grand total of $34. So while I think Win7 looks purty, I think I'll just sit this one out, thanks. To anyone who hasn't tried it XP X64 is awesome if you mobo supports it. And with all the bells and whistles, along with a real firewall and AV, I'm running a grand total of 438Mb of RAM, leaving the bulk of my 4 and soon to be 8Gb of RAM for the stuff I ACTUALLY want to run, you know, things other than the OS.
Add to that the fact that XP X64 doesn't seem to be pounding the firewall wanting to call home like Vista did, along with running every single game and app I have thrown at it thanks to WOW, and I think I've found a winner. Question to you Win7 users: Does it try to phone home all the damned time like Vista did last time I tried it? Does it support the older games and apps as well as XP?
The benchmarks in your link found that in terms of accessing 10 concurrent instances of a SQL database, running transactions against 10 concurrent instances of an Outlook .pst file simultaneously, and playing 10 .asf files ALL simultaneously, XP achieved more operations per clock cycle than Windows 7.
This is the only benchmark that has found 7 to be slower than XP. It's obviously not what a consumer OS is optimized to run. As we've seen in several other benchmarks, 7 is equivalent to XP for gaming, and fa
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This information is irrelevant to many of us; for a frame of reference, how does HD performance on 7 compare with XP?
Just don't try to delete lots of small files. I have an old app which is based on a thousands of tiny text files.
Tried to delete a backup on a USB disk. Win7 came up with "Deleting... Estimated time remaining: 4 days".
Gave it 5 minutes to ensure it was not a bad initial estimate. Stopped the process, plugged into XP machine, deleted same files in 4 minutes.
My impression is that the overhead on each file operation is huge compared to XP. In that specific case, a big enough problem to be a deal-breaker.
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This information is irrelevant to many of us; for a frame of reference, how does HD performance on 7 compare with XP?
Mechanical HDs will be irrelevant in less than 5 years.
The question you should be asking yourself is "When can I get an SSD at an affordable price?" rather than "How well does the old HD perform?"
The key issue with Win7 is that it does include the TRIM command that improves SSD performance and longevity where WinXP and Vista does not.
That said, SSD improves any OS performance, it is just that
Linux already has this (Score:5, Informative)
To see what scheduler you are running (on this case
# cat
noop anticipatory deadline [cfq]
Here the completely fair scheduler is currently running. To swap to the noop scheduler:
# echo noop >
[noop] anticipatory deadline cfq
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I found that CFQ gave best results on my Ubuntu box. When moving files around, it was usually about 20% faster than deadline, and 100% faster than anticipatory. I can't remember if I tested noop.
Re:Linux already has this (Score:4, Informative)
On my eee 1000 (with its slow pair of SSDs) I found that while CFQ gave the best average throughput, the noop IO scheduler gave me the best disk latencies and the best interactive performance, which IMHO is much more important on a netbook than raw throughput. I think the issue is that the netbook SSDs have such slow write speeds (and no write cache on the SSD) that any long sequential write freezes all other IO for obviously noticeable periods of time. All of the 'intelligent' IO schedulers in Linux reorder IO requests so that writes happen in one long sequential block if possible to avoid seeking, which is the right strategy for traditional Winchester disks and probably even SSDs with a decent amount of write cache, but wrong for simple, slow SSDs. CFQ isn't too bad as it tries to be fair to different processes asking for simultaneous IO so there aren't too many very long writes, but the anticipatory and deadline schedulers are really painful on my eee.
Re:Linux already has this (Score:5, Informative)
noop scheduler != support for SSDs.
Sequential writes in common Flash SSDs are faster than random writes. Sequential reads are also usually faster than random reads.
See: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531 [anandtech.com]
For RAM + battery based SSDs, while there's still a difference the difference should be unnoticeable for drive workloads.
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You lose I/O prioritisation going from CFQ to something else. Also, writes should be as sequential as possible on most SSDs.
Re:Linux already has this (Score:4, Informative)
noop scheduler isn't SSD support. Seems like you didn't RTFA, which means that you didn't understand what TRIM is.
From the article, page 4:
"If the drive broadcasts itself as a solid state drive (which can be done through the latest ATA specification), Windows 7 can make adjustments to ensure that the drive performs at its best. For example, if Windows 7 can verify that you're running a solid state disk, it will disable defragmentation for that drive (as defragging puts un-necessary wear on SSD's and doesn't help performance). Windows 7 will also enable support for "TRIM", also known as DisableDeleteNotify, an add-on to the ATA specification which allows for enhanced performance and decreased strain on the drive. According to Microsoft, here's what TRIM brings to the table.
* Enhancing device wear leveling by eliminating merge operation for all deleted data blocks
* Making early garbage collection possible for fast write
* Keeping deviceâ(TM)s unused storage area as much as possible; more room for device wear leveling.
Basically, Windows 7 will send TRIM commands down the storage chain, but it's up to the drive to accept the commands and utilize them. In order for TRIM to work, you not only need Windows 7, but you'll need a solid state hard disk which has support for TRIM via its Firmware."
Re:Linux already has this (Score:5, Insightful)
You've quoted the marketing fluff from the article about what Microsoft says TRIM support in Windows 7 will achieve. Do you think that this is a demonstration that you understand TRIM?
I'd refer you to the link [anandtech.com] higher up the thread. Now it's a hell of a long article, but at least it explains what TRIM is. It allows blocks to be invalidated on the drive directly. Without waiting for them to be overwritten. Note that this explanation is two short sentences and explains *exactly* what TRIM is. Your quote is a marketing attempt to explain what TRIM will achieve.
So the noop scheduler would be the correct choice for a drive that supports TRIM, as the GP claimed. Although the scheduler itself will still need direct support for sending TRIM commands to the storage.
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Unfortunately SSDs do work better with a bit of write reordering/grouping, due to the massive erase blocks. noop isn't the ideal scheduler for SSDs that you claim.
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I didn't claim that it would be ideal. The description of noop suggests that it leaves most of the logic up to the drive controller - which is an improvement for SSD over scheduler logic tailored to a mechanical drive.
So given the massive erase blocks what is the best scheduler for an SSD?
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There isn't one, really. I've heard good things about CFS.
An ideal SSD scheduler would need to perform read/write grouping, but only within the SSD blocks (with a read block and a write block being different sizes). Grouping across a block boundary is pointless for an SSD, you'd be better off letting the request at the top of the queue go. For a spinning disk, grouping is important all the time, thanks to it essentially being one continuous spiral track (close enough anyway).
Finally, it's about as fast as XP was! (Score:2, Insightful)
Platter based hard drives and high-end solid state drives, all run faster on Windows 7. Solid state drives see the largest performance boost, which showed up to a 35% improvement in read performance and up to a 23% boost in write performance
About as much after as Vista was slower than XP. Perhaps a very marginal improvement. At most a third faster reading, and a quarter faster writing than the most hated OS of the millenium so far.
Those who like to bash Microsoft at every turn will have to find some new reasons to hate on Windows 7, as low, machine-halting performance won't likely be a factor when Win7 comes into the mix.
Nope. Same old reason to hate them. They set back operating systems on the majority of the world's PCs by half a decade.
We should be jeering not cheering.
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er... I thought they were comparing it with Vista, not Windows ME.
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But file copy performance is pretty much a pure kernel and IO subsystem function. I don't give a damn how fast my pretty menus redraw, if it takes 4 days to delete a ton of small files on a USB drive, rather than 4 minutes with XP.
I seriously think that's why Microsoft improved the cache so much on Vista. Drive performance has gone so far to the dogs that everything needs to be in memory for any reasonable performance. That was the only way to get the UI to seem responsive to the end user, while doing wh
Control test? (Score:5, Informative)
Failure to compare with XP (Score:5, Interesting)
Why did they fail to compare performance with Windows XP?
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...because the benchmark is still running :)
Re:Failure to compare with XP (Score:5, Informative)
Well, maybe they did. However, if the article's opening paragraph was:
Windows 7 accessed data noticeably faster than Windows Vista, although still not as fast as XP. However . . .
Most of us would never get past that first line there.
More SSD Benchmarks (Score:5, Insightful)
Phoronix has some Linux 2.6.30 Kernel Benchmarks [phoronix.com], some on SSD. Not surprisingly they forgot to include comparison with Windows 7, as that HotHardware article forgot to include comparison with Linux. Are they both biased?
Anyhow, SSD is the future.
Wrong, no SSD (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, I mistook the "160GB Western Digital WD1600JS-00M SATA 2.0 hard drive" for a SSD.
Still, I don't understand how HotHardware can write: "At this point, everything seems like it's moving in the right direction with this new operating system, and Microsoft is finally showing that it can better compete in terms of usability and user-experience in today's computing environments against OSX and Linux, providing a compelling case why the Windows operating system is such a dominant force." without having compared it with OSX or Linux.
Sorry for the mixup above.
Re:Wrong, no SSD (Score:5, Insightful)
And in benchmarks linux beats windows in, you'll have the windows crowd screaming murder because windows 7 isn't finished yet.
fuck getting in the middle of that gun fight....
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If they were worrying about that (doubt it - it'd just mean more page hits for them), then they shouldn't bring OSX and Linux into it at all.
Faster disk speeds: what's the usability impact? (Score:2)
Still, I don't understand how HotHardware can write: "[...] Microsoft is finally showing that it can better compete in terms of usability and user-experience [...] against OSX and Linux [...]" without having compared it with OSX or Linux.
Did they discuss the impact that different disk timing has on usability and user experience?
Here's a bold statement: if you can write to disk faster than the network can send you data, you don't care how much faster. Here's the argument: you cache the data you want to write in memory, and then write it whenever the user isn't doing anything important.
What you really want to care about is read speeds. Either your read is small, so it's going to be fast anyways, or it's big, and then your biggest win is to
Fresh new light? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course Windows 7 will seem like a completely different OS if you look at it in a "new light" as MS says. OTOH, if you look at it the same way, admitting that Microsoft hasn't changed its customs and see the same bullshit as in 95 - Vista, you can't argue with them, because they can just reply "but it's different this time, just look at it with new eyes." Of course you can't compare it to anything if you try to forget what you've saw before.
I've seen bugs that have been around since Windows 95 in Internet Explorer (since 4.4 until 8.1, there's a limit of 32 <style> tags per page and MS still insists that its only a 4.4 - 6 without saying anything about 7 and that the limit is 31) and in Windows Explorer (when you try to minimize and focus applications, in certain conditions they won't listen. They have changed the way the UI looks, the kernel and added some drivers. Otherwise, I see absolutely no point in trying to analyze Windows 7's performance or compare it to previous versions of Windows. If you look at the bugs, you'll see that there have been bugs around in Windows sincefor 15 years and nobody touched them. I have given them the benefit of the doubt and installed Windows 7 RC1, hoping for a change in attitude from MS, but now I don't want to see anything about Windows again because the only change MS ever made was in the UI.
Please stop "analyzing" what Windows 7 can do and go after what's more important: what Windows 7 really is.
dont give non-IT morons mod points (Score:2)
lest they use their mod points to mod down such important and relevant stuff :
I've seen bugs that have been around since Windows 95 in Internet Explorer (since 4.4 until 8.1, there's a limit of 32 tags per page and MS still insists that its only a 4.4 - 6 without saying anything about 7 and that the limit is 31) and in Windows Explorer (when you try to minimize and focus applications, in certain conditions they won't listen. They have changed the way the UI looks, the kernel and added some drivers.
im a web developer and such stuff still plagues us in this industry, EVERYday, making our daily lives harder.
what the parent poster said above says millions about the philosophy of this corporation, and one of you morons modded it down.
next time if you dont know what something is, or if you cant evaluate that the sentence 'since 95 internet explorer 4.4 UNTIL 8.1' does not mean '10 years ago' but SINCE 10 YEARS UNTIL !!!! NOW !!!!
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Tell me why you'd possibly need 32 style tags in a HTML document?
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Why would you possibly need more than 640 KB of RAM ?
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That's besides the point. The point is that they're using old crap, putting it in a new package and pushing it to everyone as something completely new.
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That's besides the point. The point is that they're using old crap, putting it in a new package and pushing it to everyone as something completely new.
Are you seriously trying to suggest Microsoft is the only OS vendor who a) builds on previous codebases and b) has some long-running bugs (or "bugs") ?
"Fresh new light" (Score:5, Insightful)
Going from XP to 7 Beta1 (and now RC), am I the only one who feels that the improved performance issues of Windows 7 may actually work? I installed a copy of the RC on my laptop, and it worked beyond what I expected. The Laptop was "powerful" enough for Vista, and it couldn't even compare to the performance my laptop was giving me currently.
I installed the Beta on my desktop, and only had one issue that isn't worth the words to complain about.
I know Vista may have been a flop to some people, but this just seems like a repeat of about 8-10 years ago. When ME came out, users found it abyssmal. But the solution seemed to be to go from 98SE to XP, and everyone was content.
This just seems like repeated history to me, as everyone jumps the XP ship for 7, because Vista is still taking water.
P.S. It's rather late here, apologies in advance. I'm probably rambling by now.
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Really? I liked the first service pack; the second service pack broke enough that was keeping me using Windows (such as a few games I liked) that I finally made the switch to using Linux full time, and I haven't looked back since (well that's not true, I've often glanced back and gone "phew, there but for the grace of Linus....")
Even the turfers... (Score:2)
I don't know if I should laugh or cry. It certainly is a glowing review.
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You were able to successfully install Win7RC onto a laptop? Damn you must be a ubber geek. My attempt on my Compaq laptop (vista capable) failed miserably with the damn installer looking for a CD/DVD driver that it didn't need since I was able to see the blasted drive and files on the disk.
I'm sorry to say it, but until MS makes it as easy to install as Gentoo, then it's simply not going to work for me.
Re:"Fresh new light" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then ditch your Windows anti-virus [msdn.com]. I've been running Windows XP for 2.5 years without it and it's great !
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Use an efficient antivirus like NOD32 and the performance hit will be significantly smaller, if detectable at all. The Symantec and McAfee real-time scanners bring most systems to a crawl, while ESET's engine is extremely lean.
TRIM is not a final spec (Score:5, Informative)
The TRIM spec is not yet final, and most SSD's will not support it until it is. It's also a safe bet that the WIndows 7 RC does not yet issue TRIM commands (for the very same reason). My testing suggests TRIM is *not* yet at play in the 7100 build of 7. The *slight* gain in write performance seen in the linked review is likely due to the fact that they used two different firmwares for the supposed TRIM enabled / disabled testing. TRIM on a Vertex would give you more than the gain they saw.
Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective
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More importantly, TRIM does nothing for fully encrypted disks, because unused blocks must be treated like in-use blocks or you'll reveal information about the disk's content. You do encrypt all your data, don't you?
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All you would reveal would be how full the disk is. Is that a serious concern? If so, you will have to accept the cost of slowed encrypted discs.
Re:TRIM is not a final spec (Score:5, Informative)
According to one of the Win7 developers blog post, the TRIM is already being used in the Windows 7 RC release.
It's just a matter of getting firmwares that support said TRIM command out in to the existing SSD's now.
Yes, Trim is already in the Win7 RC.
Trim is enabled by default but can be turned off. You can use the "fsutil behavior query|set DisableDeleteNotify" command to query or set Trim.
from the comments section of this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx [msdn.com]
SSD analyzed according to OS (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows XP does not support SSDs like this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
and (Score:2)
cant these tweaks be implemented in Xp with a service pack, instead of a whole new o/s ?
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Unconvincing (Score:4, Interesting)
Having struggled with two Vista PCs for many months, I am perpetually on the lookout for a better solution. (I've even considered running XP in a VM under SuSE Linux). I have a pretty powerful desktop machine, with a 2.9MHz 4-core i7, 6GB of fast RAM, two Velociraptors and an SSD. This machine is very sluggish running 64-bit Vista SP2, and I am sick and tired of seeing everyday applications like Firefox flagged "Not Responding" (and living right up to that) for as much as minutes on end - while Task Manager shows the idle process running 85% of the time. My laptop, a ThinkPad T61 with 2GB RAM, shows similar symptoms but (oddly enough) doesn't tend to stay out to lunch quite as often or as long.
So I glommed right on to this review, hoping to see some impressive figures. But it seems to me they aren't. Improvements in disk read performance of around 10% might not change overall user responsiveness enough for you to notice it.
Why can't Microsoft simply produce a scheduler that understands the key principle: when the user wants to do something, everything else must get out of the way? Their trouble is that they just don't agree with what seems to obvious to me. It's MY computer, not theirs. I paid for it, I own it, I use it. So I want it to pay attention to ME, first, last, and foremost. Not some unnecessary housekeeping task that seem Microsoft developer or marketing chum decided to impose on me. It's ironic that an IBM mainframe should be so much more responsive than a supposedly end-user-centric "personal" computer whose OS is completely dominated by its UI.
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Well i can say this: Windows 7 rocks.
I use Windows 7 64-bit on a dual-core AMD X2. 4200+
4GB RAM. And i have two USB drives: a Seagate 250GB external drive and a Flash Drive for ReadyBoost.
Two internal drives: Hitachi 7200 RPM and a Seagate velociraptor as primary drive for OS.
I must say that Windows 7 is much much faster than even XP ever was.
The external drives are able to write/read at 20MB/second considering that they are USB 2.0 and i have four peripherals dangling out of same USB rack.
Internal drives a
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Go for it. (Score:2)
When I first got my mac pro (2 times 4 core Xeon 2.8 GHz with 8GB of RAM) I installed XP in Virtual Box, just for kicks. That was the fastest install of Windows XP I have ever witnessed and it ran way faster that on my previous PC (3.2 GHz Pentium IV with 2 GB of RAM).
I don't really need XP for anything, so I didn't keep that setup, but it was good to know that running XP in VM is a viable option for all but the most power hungry apps (I would not run video processing apps like that for example). But then a
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With that kind of performance you're definitely "doing it wrong." I've got similar specs, but without the crazy hard drives (I'm running a single 7200.10 250GB Seagate drive) and notice no performance issues. I'm running McAfee Corp. Ed. antivirus, have 4 VMs running with F@H along with a GPU F@H (for the times I'm just surfing online) and still notice no slowdown.
Does Linux support TRIM? (Score:2)
Does Linux support TRIM?
Moving off-topic a little (Score:5, Funny)
Does windows still abandon file-copying operations when one single file out of a huge directory structure one is trying to copy from one volume to another fails?
This always annoyed me. I would fantasise about paying for my microsoft products thusly "£200? No problem. Here's the first penny, here's the second penny, here's the third penny, Ooops! I dropped the third penny! Well, that is the transaction completed, goodbye."
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No, Vista changed this so all files that are successful will complete, then at the end any files that failed or need user interaction (like asking to overwrite) come up at the end.
No more hitting 'Copy" on gigs of data and coming back hours later to find a prompt came up 30 seconds in.
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NTFS is a journaling file system. Vista introduced Transactional NTFS which improves reliablity further.
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Only power users that consider Vista to be slow are the ones who use XP cause they've never used Vista.
Or those of us who use Vista everyday. But not ignoring us would destroy your point.
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LMAO!!
I consider myself happily centered -- I don't get all googly-eyed over Linux releases, OR over Windows or OSX releases for that matter.
As a person who regularly uses two computers (work and home), one with XP32 and one with Vista64, I can honestly say that there's not really that big of a difference. My Vista machine is 64bit Ultimate with 8gb of RAM. And, not surprisingly, it runs everything like a dream. Also, that level of hardware is NOT that expensive anymore. For under a thousand bucks you c