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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Voo - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
That's strange.. I just tested it and it neither updates progress in my VM, nor does it show anything if I'm looking a video in FF.Maybe the windows internals like file copying or similar things, but definitly not everything
Win7 Professional x64.
rs1 - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Here's a quick screencast that shows the window preview updating in realtime, for both Firefox+Youtube, and the Windows Task Manager:http://goview.com/?id=3c96284e-ba48-475e-a314-d8ef...">http://goview.com/?id=3c96284e-ba48-475e-a314-d8ef...
...the only time I can get the preview to *not* update in real-time is when I have explicitly minimized the window I want to preview. I practically never do that in Win 7, because the improved taskbar makes it really unnecessary (which is probably why I never noticed the cases where the preview would not be updated).
Voo - Saturday, October 31, 2009 - link
Ah that's it - I virtually always minimize my windows, so I never noticed the different behaviour.Yep if you don't minimize the window explictly you get the realtime preview, didn't know that.
coachingjoy - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
While obviously a corraborative effort this article is well balanced and a good read.The authors are windows users but are not fanboy-ish in their observations.
Well done.
vistakah - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Every time windows releases a new version the naysayers go " I WILL NEVER UPGRADE!" Their loss i suppose. Window XP was a great OS. Was it as good as Vista? Not at all as long as you had the hardware to support the OS. No dated systems would not run it and that was its downfall. I built a system for Vista and i had no issues at all with it at release. Windows 7 is much improved with some cool new things. Sorry i like the coolness factor in computing. The only difference between installing Windows 7 and Vista other then 7 was much faster was that every piece of hardware had W7 drivers already.Everything on my computer worked at first boot to include my wireless hotspot. Mac can still waste their money on TV commercials. We live in a PC world that will and Mac like Linux will just be small time which is ok as an option. MS did a great job this time as far as i can tell.
yyrkoon - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Compared to XP, Vista was an abortion. Vista may have had an updated Architecture, and things like UAC ( I actually like UAC; it really is not all that intrusive ). But everything that was supposed to make Vista better was not working, or was not functioning correctly. Just as one example, the new TCP/IP stack was supposed to increase Gigabit networking performance. Instead, it made it worse.Then, you have processes like the trusted computing process that can not even be disabled without all but disabling the operating system. The OS will run, but you can not doing anything with it other than look at it. Microsoft, and its partners have no right to tell us what we can run, and when. No matter if it is illegal, or not. That is a mater for our individual governments . . . to govern. And yes, I have found at least one legitimate reason to have this process disabled.
However, on the other hand it is not all that terrible. At least not as terrible as all the BS spread all over the net. Likenesses made to Windows ME are purely absurd. It is functional, and it is stable, and hell, it technically is more secure out of the box. That is for users who have no clue.
I personally only use Vista because a laptop I bought came with it. Eventually I will retrograde to Windows XP *only* because of the gaming performance difference. You know what though ? I Beta Testes Vista since the beginning, I know Windows XP ( Pro ) very well, and I *know* what I want. Does this make Windows XP less secure ? Not for me, but *your* millage may vary.
Pay attention to what you're doing folks . . .
yyrkoon - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Windows7 AND Vista *BOTH* outperforming Windows XP in Directx 9 titles . . .? Something tells me someone, or something is not right. I had done all my own testing from Vista Beta, to RC, and it was *ALWAYS* slower in Directx 9 games compared to XP. Even if only by a frame or two a second. A lot were 7-10 FPS slower. Right now, I am playing a 5 year old + game in Vista that constantly stutters . . . Something that ran fine on current hardware 5 years ago.It would not surprise me if Video card manufactures are doing something to their hardware, and / or drivers. It is not like this sort of thing has not happened in the past. Maybe, it is just a matter of implementing new technology, that just happens to work with the newer OSes. But I doubt it.
The network performance increases are something that were *supposed* to come with Vista, and honestly annoys me more than impress. Only because I had to wait for the next iteration of Windows to see this improvement come to pass(and it really is not that huge of a difference really). Throughput figures would have been nice, instead of a timed test. The new TCP/IP stack is supposed to be there, as well as a load of other architectural improvements . . . but nothing improved between XP and Vista ( actually got worse ).
Now I have to say that security has never been an issue for me in Widnows XP. Then again, I am not some idiot, clicking yes on every dialog that pops up in my browser, or doing other equally stupid things. Any system is only as secure as the user using it. Period. Arbitrary code can be run on *ANY* system were the user is ignorant. There are many Linux boxen that have been rooted, and Linux has a much more robust kernel architecture. The difference here however is that these machines were mostly highly visible as servers. My point here is; Do not blame the OS, blame the user / administrator. Vista, or Windows 7 may be more advanced compared to XP, but they pale compared to Linux/Unix.
Lastly, I would like to dispel the belief that computers automatically get infected just by connecting to the internet . . . Downloading illegal ( and virus ridden ) software, visiting porn sites, and opening emails from people you do not know ( or even those you do know ) I would have to put high on the list of ways to become compromised. Joe hacker ( Joe script kiddie ? )may be looking for a way to compromise any number of highly visible servers for numerous reasons, but he has no idea who Joe blow even is. Let alone what Joe Blow's IP is. Even if he did, he would have to find a way to connect, which is virtually impossible on a hardened system. So sure, perhaps Windows compared to Linux, or any other Unix like operating system ( this includes OSX ) is architecturally inferior in this respect; It still can, and does happen to any operating system. But not *_just_because_* you've connected to the internet.
Torment - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
"Lastly, I would like to dispel the belief that computers automatically get infected just by connecting to the internet"
Hahahahaha...Sasser? Blaster? Are you really that clueless?
Beyond the network security holes those exposed, browsers need to be sandboxed. Period. It would solve 99% of the virus/trojan/malware problems home users experience.
yyrkoon - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Are *you* really that clueless ? Seriously.*IF* you let your system respond to IDENT, then *maybe*. However, this is *not* just because you connected to the internet. This is because you connected to the internet, Joe Hacker was looking to exploit you(and others), and because "you" did not harden your system. Browsers have nothing to do with this matter per se. What does have to do with this is getting an executable on a machine in hopes of exploiting it. Using Internet Explorer was just a means to accomplish that end.
Now do you care to know how Sasser was caught ? Those of us who *know* which processes are running all the time, and that 99% CPU utilization is far from expectable most of the time. e.g. those of us who know what processes we run, and how much CPU we *should* be using at any given time / situation.
Still, this really is not that much different from exploiting Apache on a Linux server. Only difference is delivery ... only. Now *if* Apache were sand boxed . . .
By the way, many of *us* were never affected by Sasser. That is, those of *us* who pay attention.
Torment - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
And what were XP's settings out of the box? And how many people were infected by just those two? Dumbass.My point about sandboxing IE was apart from the previous point. In my experience, it is the primary vector for infection. And there have been exploits that allowed infection when visiting "safe" sites that had been compromised by yet another security flaw. If browsers were sandboxed, 99% of problems would be solved. Microsoft is slowly moving in that direction.