Windows 7 Performance Guide
by Ryan Smith and Gary Key on October 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
What’s New since Win 7 RC
Unlike Vista, which was furiously being developed right through SP1, there’s very little to report for Windows 7 when it comes to what has changed between the release candidate and the final version.
Internally, the issues we encountered with the RC and mentioned in our RC article have been resolved. Our stuttering HTPC no longer stutters, and Windows 7 now recognizes the JMB363 drive controller in one of our test systems correctly. At this point we have yet to encounter any issues that we can chalk up to a bug in Windows 7, which is a very promising sign.
There have been no notable changes to any of the programs or components of Windows 7 compared to the RC beyond simple bug fixes, so if you’ve use the RC then you’re going to find that the release version behaves the same way.
The only new bit of information we have is that last month Microsoft revealed that Windows 7 has greater CableCARD support, which we believe is a product of the new Protected BDA driver subsystem. Unfortunately the Digital Cable Advisor tool needed to enable this feature, and the associated firmware for the ATI Digital Cable TV Wonder (the only CableCARD tuner currently on the market) missed their release date of the 22nd, so there is no way to use this functionality at the moment. We don’t have any idea of when these will become available.
Externally, Microsoft’s hardware and software partners have been getting their houses in to order. Since the driver model s aren’t changing this time around there’s not nearly the kind of churn we saw with Vista. AMD and NVIDIA are the outliers here: they have been pushing out new drivers to support DirectCompute, Media Foundation Transcode, and the other features that are coming with 7 and/or DX11. Anti-virus vendors are the other group that stand to be most affected by the launch of 7, as they have been publishing new versions of their suites that include official support for Windows 7.
Finally, battery life, one of the sore spots with the RC, has finally gotten the kick in the pants we were expecting to see. We’ll get deeper in to this later when we look at benchmarks, but for the time being we’ll note that while the RC offered a battery life similar to Vista, the release version of Windows 7 offers battery life well ahead of Vista in all cases, and depending on the exact hardware used similar to if not better than battery life as compared to XP. It looks like Microsoft and driver authors have finally come through on significantly improving Vista’s lackluster mobile performance.
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Spivonious - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Vista/7 have I/O priorities. If the game needs to access the hard disk then the AV scanner (assuming it was written to take advantage of priorities) will pause. Should be little to no performance loss.The default auto-defrag setting is once a week, not daily. I find it really helps with overall performance.
ibarskiy - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Just WTF are you talking about?!1) Browser is much more essential for an average user, so by extension, if bundling the browser (a more essential component) is viewed as anti-competitive, it is certain that bundling less essential components would also be viewed as such. In that respect, it was completely reasonable to anticipate it. It is entirely silly / idiotic (you pick, I pick the latter), but it is not MS's doing, it's the EU regulators'. Bitch at them.
2) You don't need to manually defrag (it has been background since Vista)
3) You don't need registry cleaners
4) You don't need layers of malware protection and, factually, it is more difficult to compromise than OSX, that's been shown
5) You don't need various 3rd party utilities - difficult to guess here what you are talking about since no specific reference is made - but then again, that's how you bashers typically operate
6) It is one of the more reliable systems out there; again, please talk specifics. Since Vista, Windows very rarely crashes.
What is pretty sad is that morons such as yourself with clear misinformation are allowed to impact other people's opinions.
The0ne - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I would like to see more tests on laptops if possible. The snappy UI of Windows more than makes up for it's performance/lack-there-of. This is especially true of replacing Vista. Regardless of the performance, Windows 7 has the driver and snappy-ness to warrant the replacement of XP and Vista.This test is where one truly finds what a joke Vista OS is.
The0ne - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Tom's hardware has the conclusion for what I'm asking for. I'll wait to see if Anandtech can do something similar as Tom's is litter with script junk. Thank God for noscript.ATWindsor - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
"To that end, I certainly wouldn’t recommend running Win7 at the default UAC level for any computer connected to the internet."That depends on the user, frankly, all you need is an updated OS and a firewall, and one should be resonably safe, those two things will in most cases limit attacks to the types where the user has to manually execute a file. People got by on XP without problems, Win 7 with UAC level 2 is much more safe than that. Of course there will be less skilled users who run into problems, but as a skilled user, one should be fine.
Griswold - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
"That depends on the user, frankly, all you need is an updated OS and a firewall, and one should be resonably safe, those two things will in most cases limit attacks to the types where the user has to manually execute a file."No, because:
"And that’s a risky proposition when a UAC prompt may be all that’s left between malware executing and running amok or not."
No firewall or AV is going to protect you if all it takes is a brand new little trojan using this flawed security concept to gain highest privileges. And thats why I set UAC to level 4. I got used to it by having vista do the same for 2.5 years.
Genx87 - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
IMO my biggest disappointment in Win7 was Microsoft gave into the XP whiners who love no security with an admin account. They tuned the thing down and gave the user the ability to elevate its protection. Personally I run with a user level account in Win7 and left the default settings. When Win7 shows up on our network Ill have to configure a GP to stick the thing at the highest setting and disable the ability of the users to change it.But for mom and pop. They will either turn it off or get infected with something that disables it. The end result is basically XP level security which is a huge step backwards.
Zoomer - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I installed vista with UAC off, apps automatically run as admin, and it was fine. Since n/vlite wasn't quite ready for w7 a few months ago, I just disabled UAC.Don't see the point of these. I'm still looking for a good command line av or at least something that does not install services. Getting tired of the java AV scanners.
Devo2007 - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Looks like you used the wrong graph on Page 11 (the first graph). That one compares different motherboards, rather than Win7/Vista/XP.darwinosx - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Most of the graphs are meaningless anyway.