I think this sort of FUD (Speed Test: Windows 7 May Not Be Much Faster Than Vista) is exactly what certain naysayers would like everyone to believe. IMHO, Windows 7 will be a resounding, unqualified success, perhaps more popular than any of its predecessors.
Wow, I mean XP is formidable. It had an extremely long run on top, was always considered stable. Win7 would need a long stretch before 8 ever came out to even stand a chance to compete with that. Second place, or perhaps in year to year numbers or first year numbers, but to sell more copies than XP ever had, I don't know the numbers but it must be a huge number
I agree, I think Windows 7 will break all previous sales records, I have build 7201 running on a 5 yr old rig with Amd 64 X2 4400+, 2 gigs ddr400 ram and a 6800GT 256 meg agp vid. It runs better than it ever has, even better than XP x64. Windows 7 corrects one of the biggest mistakes MS made by making Vista hardware hungry. Windows 7 Home Premium will run on a good percentage of XP machines and Windows 7 Basic will run on the remainder. So both XP and Vista users will be upgrading.
The fact that XP has been out for close to 10 years without a decent competitor in the windows market will make it hard to beat sales numbers. Maybe if you take out vol licensing and OEM distribution then it might stand a chance. I think 7 is a great OS and superseeds XP by far but the numbers and industry trend are against it. if you look at those screen shots the memory footprint used by Windows 7 is substantially smaller. Speed might not be that different but memory makes a big difference. Cheap or not I don't want the OS consuming almost 2 gigs of RAM.
Win 7 x64 With 8mb of ram is a great deal faster than Vista x 64 8Gb. Everything is including Firefox.
Well to reiterate: 1. Paged memory is slower, stresses all components more. It is and always has been a stopgap method for running more apps in little memory. It's processor intensive, it needs a quite complex algorythm on top of the already severely stressed windows multitasking manager. (which is already not to hot to begin with) 2. Beauty is still in the eye of the beholder. The difference between win7 and vista sp2 in measurable performance is minimal. so it just comes down to the too wellknown psychological mechanism of prejudice. If you expect Win7 to be better it'll be better for you. So pay the extortionate price (yes i know price is not known but anything over $100 is highwayrobbery for a patched up Vista core with some mediocre gui adaptations) and feel good. And to those who reason that Win7 runs so well on outdated computers, give me a break. Run DOS it runs fastest ever on a pentium.
LOL, I installed Win95 once on a P4 out of curiosity, wow lightning fast, but didn't make the os any better, Start installing, uninstalling programs, hardware, pretty soon BSODs, But yes out of the box, extremely fast, can't find Win95 drivers for most of my newer hardware though
I installed every old OS i could get my hands on using Sun's Virtual Box. OS/2 Warp really warps . Even running a win 3 app in OS/2 warp in the Vbox was like click/ BAM in your face. But more to the point, Given that the human eye has a has a minimum response time of 0.1 s per eyecell in the fastest region of retina, and up to seconds in the slower regions i challenge anyone to actually see the redraw speed diff on the same hardware/drivers using win7 and vista sp2. But suggestion is a great instrument, that's why placebo's work. Having put out win 7 in the first instant with almost every background device stripped it gave the impression to be quicker and more responsive. Now that it's fully loaded, it's just Vista with a different gui and some dooda's. Should i buy a new computer preinstalled i'll sure use w7, but upgrading? Don't see the point, waste of money. Better buy some faster RAM.
"...i challenge anyone to actually see the redraw speed diff on the same hardware/drivers using win7 and vista sp2." It was widely accepted that Vista RTM build 6000 outperformed Vista SP1 on virtually every benchmark presented to the OS. Did you personally feel that Vista RTM felt subjectively "faster" than Vista SP1?
At my age i'm lucky to remember what i did yesterday. Still all benchmarks do is tell how good your hardware is at doing benchmarks. A bit like the IQ test. It doesn't tell you anything except you the test well. (or not) The example of graphic card producers introducing code to make the card seemingly perform better at the benchmarks. We are now at the point where the Formule 1 racing is at. The difference between win and loose is 0.01 sec. Yes the one with 0.01 sec less won, but hey in all reality what's next? Same for homecomputers, if they do 5 tflop or 5.1 tflop who cares? Even the difference between 5 or 10 tflop makes no diff in everyday average usage as most people do.
Yeah I'm an old timer myself @ 45. In fact, It's way past my bedtime. I completely get what you're saying. However, it is my opinion that when users say that Windows 7 > Vista SP2 > SP1 > RTM (in terms of "fast"), what they really mean is responsiveness of the GUI. While I really believe what benchmarks bore out about Vista RTM, that it was indeed faster in almost every regard over SP1, it had issues that made it almost unusable in certain situations. The inordinate amount of time that it took (or seemed to take) to copy files from one physical drive to another comes to mind. Even though benchmarks proved that RTM was faster at moving files around, people perceived that Vista SP1 performed these operations faster. It is my opinion that the GUI on top of the OS has become progressively faster - from Vista RTM up through Windows 7. And if you use a very high performance video card, the Aero acceleration of Vista and Windows 7 (with all of the useless eye candy disabled, yet with Aero still enabled) can actually speed up the opening and closing of Windows. Most every Vista tweak guide on the net suggests turning off Aero for better performance. Yet, if you have a "fast" video card (high-end), you'll find that windows snap open much faster than is possible than in (yes, even the Holy Grail) XP. When Vista debuted, I thought the GUI seemed very sluggish when compared to XP. It seemed I could count "1001, 1002" after launching most any app or OS utility. These lags and log jams seem to have been all but eliminated in SP2 and Windows 7. To cite a specific example, the launch time of Firefox in Windows 7 has been improved dramatically over Vista. While Internet Explorer launched virtually instantaneously in Vista, it was my experience that Firefox took quite a long time to launch (a few seconds). The same Firefox build in Windows 7 launches practically in an instant. My experience was echoed in a news report on BetaNews.com recently, which I can no longer find. I guess it boils down to semantics, but if we did a survey asking what folks meant my "fast," I'll bet what they really mean is GUI responsive; rather than the OS's potential to extract work from hardware.
53 here Yes, that's what i meant in my previous post.It's all perception,prejudice. You trick out a certain part of the OS which gives the impression of 'speed' and automatically you are prejudiced to the rest of the OS as being 'better'. And, assuming it was on purpose, by putting out win7 first time as a stripped vista SP2 core it was perceived as way more responsive. Once that notion was settled in the hearts and minds, it spread like wildfire and everybody installed it. Now that the real deal is coming out, it's evident by the numbers that the emperor wears no clothes. But since most everybody is already convinced that Win7 is faster (i.e. better) one will see it being faster, even if it where actually slower. And copying is still rediculous, either on Vista or W7. I've installed Teracopy, it copies like a racehorse. Using the default OS better get some coffee. All said and done, a very impressive usage of psychology by MS this time around.
Yes, that is right. It does "feel" nice though and on a slower machine and Win7 you don't have to wait that 5 - 10 seconds for the sidebar to open, on vista it runs by default, on Win7 you have no sidebar and no gadgets by default. of course you can activate some gadgets (or deactivate the sidebar on Vista) but the first impression is of course faster because of this and I suspect most people keep the defaults. But it also seems to me that some of the startup items have been ordered better or given lower CPU priority because I can start working with folders, clicking on stuff sooner because of this. It is still a bit sluggish at first because it is still loading, but the fact I can start using it at all gives the appearance of faster.
No doubt - I remember how slow loading that gadget bar was in Vista; it was pathetic! Now now in W7 it's like no big deal - whoop! It's up and running. They still have some work to do - just for giggles, I've been trying out Media Center - when you point it to your music library, the whole system comes to a staggering crawl, and Media Center becomes unresponsive - even on a dual core. Sheesh MS - try lowering the priority a bit.