Windows 7 Performance Guide
by Ryan Smith and Gary Key on October 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
The Only 3 Editions You’ll Care About
With Windows Vista, Microsoft split up the 2.5 editions of Windows XP in to 6 editions of Vista. It was confusing, it was pricey, and if you were an Ultimate user it was downright infuriating (see: Ultimate Extras). For Windows 7, things are going to get slightly better from a logical standpoint, but as there’s going to be 6 editions of Win7, we’re not going back to the simplicity of XP.
Microsoft has simplified things from Vista in two major ways. First and foremost, all editions are now supersets of each other. In particular this means that Professional (née: Business) now has all of Home Premium’s features, as opposed to cutting out certain entertainment features like Vista did. This makes each edition “better” than the previous edition in a straightforward manner, and removes the slight schism we saw between Vista Business and Vista Home Premium users. It also makes Win7 Ultimate an oddity; in Vista it unified the feature set of Business and Home Premium editions, but in Win7 it simply adds the niche features that keep Enterprise and Professional editions differentiated.
The second simplification is that Home Basic is gone from the market of developed nations, period. Home Basic is now Microsoft’s “emerging markets” edition, offering a more limited feature set amid a significantly lower price. But as far as we’re concerned, what this means is that the only home edition is now Home Premium, as opposed to having a few Home Basic machines sprinkled around to make things frustrating.
This leaves us with 5 editions we’re going to see in the developed world: Starter, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Starter is now the “super cheap” edition for OEMs (and only OEMs), but we don’t know much beyond that. We still haven’t seen it appear on any computers, and quite frankly we’re not sure how Microsoft is going to push such a feature-castrated version to OEMs that have previously been enjoying cheap full copies of Windows XP. Meanwhile Enterprise maintains its status as the volume license version of Windows, and as such it’s not something that regular users can buy (if you need its features, that’s what Ultimate is for).
| Win7 Home Premium | Win7 HP Family Pack | Win7 Professional | Win7 Ultimate | |
| Retail Price | $200 | X | $300 | $320 |
| OEM Price | $110 | X | $150 | $190 |
| Upgrade Price | $120 | $150 | $200 | $220 |
| RAM Limit | 16GB | 16GB | 192GB | 192GB |
| Notable features | Windows Media Center | 3 copies of Win7 Home Premium | Remote Desktop hosting, WinXP Virtual Machine | BitLocker, VHD booting |
This leaves us with the 3 editions you actually need to care about: Home Premium ($110/$200), Professional ($150/$300), and Ultimate ($190/$320). Given the prices in particular, I expect to see Home Premium being the most common version among techies and regular users alike, but this does mean giving up Remote Desktop hosting and Windows XP Mode (the WinXP virtual machine), among other things. Ultimate has very little going for it unless you’re going to use BitLocker or boot off of VHD files. But then again at retail it’s only $20 more.
Meanwhile Microsoft has finally taken a page out of the Apple playbook by offering a family pack. The Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack ($150) is a set of 3 Home Premium upgrade licenses in a single box and using a single key, for those of you who want to upgrade every computer in the house at once. This brings the per-license cost down to $50, more than half-off the price of a single license. Now if Microsoft would just offer Office in a similar manner… (Ed: Turns out they do)
Finally, there’s a pretty big difference in hardware support that we should note: Home Premium tops out at 16GB of RAM, Professional/Ultimate top out at 192GB. The ramifications of this being that if you’re considering throwing Home Premium on to a high-end Core i7 system, or even just intend to carry forward a retail licensed copy for a number of years, then it’s possible you’re going to hit the 16GB cap of Home Premium.
Finally, while we’re on the subject, we’re going to once again remind everyone that Microsoft has locked out the ability to install multiple versions of Windows with the same disc (One Disc mode). This will have little impact at the most for regular users, but techies are going to want to burn a disc with ei.cfg stripped out to make fixing computers easier. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, locking out One Disc mode is an extremely disappointing move from Microsoft.
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Matt Campbell - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Many people are having problems with the unpacker itself - and you still have to create the iso from the setup files.http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/26/microsoft_...">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/26...osoft_wi...
JimmyJimmington - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
No, it doesn't violate anything.Pjotr - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
[quote]a 25% advantage over XP and 34% over Vista,[/quote]New reviewers, same old math error!
Windows 7 is 51% faster than Vista and 34% faster than XP, according to your graph. Windows 7 performs the job in 34% less time than Vista and 25% less time than XP, according to your graph.
ProDigit - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
I'm sure those numbers are relative to which program you use; from battery point of view Win7 uses more battery to complete the task too.ViRGE - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
No, they have it right. It's a lower is better test. Win7 completes the task in 75% and 66% of the time as XP and Vista respectively. That's 25% and 34%; 100% faster would mean the task is done instantaneously, and 51% faster would mean it's done in less than half the time.ddriver - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Hi there, I have a question/proposition for including those DPC latency issues Windows 7 is suffering from...I recently installed it and noticed the unsocially high values in the DPC latency meter. It manifested as awful audio drops and clicks in my DAW applications.
It seems there is some issue with power management drivers in Vista and 7, and while 7 seems a little better compared to Vista, the latency is still very problematic. The very same configuration in Windows XP is running at very low DPC latency, about 20 us (micro), while in 7 the machine idles at about 300 us, and even the most basic processor load results in spikes up to 3000-4000 us, which for an Average Joe that's watching movies or browsing the net will not be an issue, but for real time processing of audio or video, or capturing, it is critical, and the system is basically useless with Windows 7
So I guess this article is a nice place to investigate this problem, that seems to affect PCs with UPS or just a regular laptop, maybe given enough publicity the issue will be resolved.
ProDigit - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
ASIO drivers take care for the audio part for you!I have little to no experience using live capture of video, but perhaps you will prefer a Linux or MacOs for that purpose (if video Latencies are that important).
chizow - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Its nice reading an honest account of the oft-marginal differences between Vista SP2 and Win7. I think far too much is made with regard to Win7's improvements, and while I do like Win7 for what it is, I agree its far less of a change from Vista than Vista was from XP.Basically it comes down to there's no really compelling reason to upgrade from Vista to Win7, but at the same time, there's no reason not to other than cost. Win7 is as most of your graphs show, about 5% better than Vista across the board with some UI tweaks, its a new and shiny toy with a new box and packaging.
As for a question you had about built-in e-mail programs:
Its just more of the same annoying anti-trust concerns that prevent Microsoft from bundling useful software that would benefit the end-consumer for the sake of fair competition. Its the same reason they can't bundle any variety of other useful and often free programs out there like codec packs, anti-virus, compression software, blu-ray playback, imaging software, photo viewers etc.
MS can't bundle them with the OS to give the other providers that offer them for free a chance to compete, and in the end it just ends up being a less pleasant experience for the end-user. This is probably the biggest difference imo compared to a Mac, with Mac this basic functionality you expect just works without having to search high and low for a working solution you expect to work for free out of the box.
davidhbrown - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
It's interesting that no review I've yet read has mentioned that, if you turn off the GUI boot in msconfig to see the text status, Windows 7 identifies itself as version 6.1 compared to Vista's 6.0.I think that says a lot about the differences between Windows 7 and Vista. I'm very happy for the improvements, and I'm really starting to like the "peek" functions (way more functional than Expose). But it does feel more like an update than a whole new OS.
InternetGeek - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
This was explained in a lot of usergroups and similar events in which MVPs and similar took the time to describe the numbering behing Windows 7.It turns out many software vendors write and compile their applications with conditions set to limit the versions of Windows on which their software run. In this case many developers who wrote software for Vista added a mask such that any revision of Vista (6.x) would run fine.
If Microsoft went forward in their usual way and changed the version of the kernel to 7.0 a lot of software would just brake or refuse to run even though the Operating System supported all their operations normally. To prevent this from happening Windows 7 uses a version number of 6.1. No one wants another Vista, we want Microsoft to look good from now on.
At the same time many Microsoft Evagelists, MVPs and similar have gone out of their way promoting the idea of not using this kind of technique and use feature discovery so programs can keep running as new versions of the operating system are introduced in the market.
Practices such as using newer APIs are being encouraged among software vendors and hopefully they will take the hint and make things easy for users. It is understandable they want to sell new copies with new OSs but they should do this on top of new functionality, not just some re-compilation and re-package.
On this sense, Microsoft often goes out of its way to accomodate some develoeprs requirements such as including software-specific and sometimes software-version-specific logic to accomodate functionality. This bloats the OS and starting from Windows 7 this will no longer be the case.
Check the engineering Windows 7 blog for more information on this, however, your local usergroup should be able to provide more details about this.
Hopefully, this post wont be lost in the hoopla.