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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medi01 - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
I have 32-bit WinXP on PC and 32-bit Vista on notebook. I simply HATE the latter. No matter what I do, it takes longer. But I recall every new OS from microsoft was SIGNIFICALLY (tens of %) faster then the previous one (according to Microsoft ads) yet I never experienced it myself.So, why should I upgrade to Win7 again?
1) Because Win7 is slightly faster in some apps and slightly slower in others? (significally slower when hibernating)
2) New flishy-flashy effects?
3) Puzzling changes in UI, that, I guess, were supposed to make it "even more user friendly"?
4) DirectX 11? Oh, bundling those only with new OSes what a clever move.
And that for about 200$? Are you serious?
MrPete123 - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Better battery life?Better security? (than XP)
Better stability?
Better performance?
Also the hibernate benchmark is skewed when you consider that 32-bit XP is storing less memory to the hard drive than 64-bit Vista/Win7. 32-bit XP only had to persist ~3 gigs of RAM to the hard drive, while 64-bit Win7/Vista had to persist the full 4 gigs. Hibernating speed is fairly similar in speed between XP and Win7. It would be a better comparison to either limit all machines to 2-3 gigs of RAM for the hibernating test, use 32-bit Vista/Win7 (yuck), or 64-bit XP.
medi01 - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Better battery life? Even if I would care about battery life, 200$? How much does spare battery pack cost?"Better" security? Huh?
"Better" stability, what's that? Does your XP/Vista crash? Well, mine doesn't. So, if I get resource hungry Win7 it will be "even stabler", huh?
Better performance? A few percent more where it doesn't matter much and huge performance hit, where it does (to me) - hibernate/wakeup?
Why would I care about internal details of who needs to persist what?
So to summarize
If you aren't a gamer who absolutely needs DX 11, you should find better ways to waste your 200$.
rs1 - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
And Homegroups. They puzzingly fail to even mention them in the article, but if you happen to have more than one computer, then Homegroups are awesome, and enough to justify the upgrade all by themselves, in my opinion.damianrobertjones - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
HEY ANAND!When are you going to run this story like you did for OSX the other month?
"Amazon's biggest-selling pre-order product of all time"
That would be Windows 7
lightzout - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Snow leopard sounds sexy. Windows 7 has the brand appeal of a pocket protector. That said I have to throw my vote in as a very satisied former XP champion. I swore I wouldn't leave XP which still seemed to work fine unless it was for a true upgrade. I am using the Win7 Ult64 RC and its pretty amazing. Example: I installed the analog Media Center Edition TV tuner from my MCE2005 box and hooked up a new DTA that comcast sent me (for free I might add) and when it booted I was worried because I didn't see the familiar "Found new hardware" dialog window. What happened? It was already installed and working. Comcast activated the DTA amd minutes later I realized why I stopped watching TV 10 years ago. 100 channels and nothing on worth watching! At least now I record the few things I do like and watch whenever I want streaming flawlessly through the Xbox 360. The MCE interface with Win7 and the 360 is really well done. Microsoft should have just picked a sexier name.jtleon - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
I wish one of these review sites would compare FLP to 7 - across the board! Microsoft is keeping too many secrets! FLP is much newer than XP, and imho a superior OS to XP in all respects!jtleon
Voo - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Well only for old hardware.With modern desktop pcs or laptops (I'm not talking about netbooks here), there's no need to pass on the many features it lacks.. it doesn't even has a .NET 3.5 framework as far as I know.
That's far away from "a superior OS to XP in all respects!"
jtleon - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
.NET 3.5 is not supplied with XP - you must download it!jtleon
Voo - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Afaik there's no .NET 3.5 framework that works with FLP - at least it was so some time ago and wikipedia agrees(well that's not the best source, but the first I found)