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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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.