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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DominionSeraph - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
"I just don't understand why holdouts on XP like to argue how good it is in comparison to Vista"Because they tried to cram Vista on to a PIII with 256MB of ram, and they're too young to have known REAL speed: Windows 98SE.
chrnochime - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Yes but with that REAL speed came frequent BSODs for me. I stuck with 98SE until end of 2002(!) and after moving over to xp, no more BSOD. Exact same hardwares too.ProDigit - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
What are you saying?Vista runs slacky on just about any laptop with specs lower than Core2Duo T5500, or Core2Duo's with lower than 1MB L cache, and a drive slower than 5200rpm.
Even on an AMD dualcore 2,4Ghz with 4GB of RAM, I noticed the OS being sluggish!
It performs worse than MacOs, XP, Linux, and Win7!
It is possibly the worst OS ever created!
Genx87 - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
I think just about any OS will slack when you stick it on a 4200 RPM drive. I am assuming you meant 4200 instead of 5200?I had Dell laptops back in 03-04 that performed like 386's because some bean counter figured we can save 20 bucks a laptop using 4200 rpm drives. Idiot didnt think about the wasted productivity when the user waits 10 minutes for the thing to boot and 2 mins to open outlook.
DominionSeraph - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
XP ain't no sprite. When my Vista box went down, I ripped out its X2 5200+ to replace my backup XP box's 3200+, and with that huge leap it now equals what my Vista box was like.There really ain't a difference once you go dual-core with decent specs.
Compare this to Win 98. Whereas XP dogs a 3200+ with 2GB, 98 has sub-10 second boot times on a PIII 700MHz, and you aren't gonna notice a difference in snappiness from a Celeron 400. (You don't get any faster than 'instant'.)
XP is bloatware and really doesn't have a hardware niche. Anything that can't run Vista would be better off with Win98.
poached - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
but you can't get drivers for windows 98. The installer will probably crash if you tried. plus, 98 was really unstable (compared to OSs of today) because programs could corrupt the memory easily. Not to mention no security of any kind. There is a penalty to make OS secure and stable.pullmyfoot - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I bought Vista when it came out and dual booted it with XP. I didnt really like it, and Vista almost never got used. It was like that for a year and a half, and then I installed the W7 RC. I have not missed XP one bit.As for the people who say W7 is less snappy than XP, well in my own experience W7 feels more snappy than XP to me any day.
ProDigit - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
I noticed the opposite when testing XP VS Win7 RC and Beta.I found XP to be more snappy than Win7, running it from a lower specced laptop.
I did have XP optimized though. Perhaps if I give the final version of Win7 a Win2000 theme, and optimize it a bit, it will be as snappy as XP.
ProDigit - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
I noticed the opposite when testing XP VS Win7 RC and Beta.I found XP to be more snappy than Win7, running it from a lower specced laptop.
I did have XP optimized though. Perhaps if I give the final version of Win7 a Win2000 theme, and optimize it a bit, it will be as snappy as XP.
andrewaggb - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
I'd be curious if you can get it to feel as fast as xp on a really slow laptop. I sold my netbook a year ago (1024x600 didn't cut it), but now that you can get ones with a better resolution screen I might consider getting another one with win7 if it doesn't run awful.