Windows 7 Beta Faster Than Vista, XP
In a completely unofficial, although somewhat well organised test, ZDNet have discovered that the Windows 7 beta appears to be faster than a fresh intsall of Vista and even XP running on the same hardware. The test consisted of 23 “real world” tasks including booting up, big network transfers, installing Office, moving huge volumes of files, and opening large documents. For fairness, they compared the 32-bit editions of each OS as there is no 64-bit version of 7 available yet.
The test machines were as follows:
- An AMD Phenom 9700 2.4GHz system fitted with an ATI Radeon 3850 and 4GB of RAM
- An Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.2GHz fitted with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS and 1GB of RAM
Surprisingly, Windows 7 won in 21 of the 23 tests, and came 2nd in the other two (on both machines). Of the runners-up, XP was quicker on the lower-specced machine and Vista was quicker on the better-specced machine, as is to be expected.
The simple scoring system consisted of a score of 1 for being the fastest, 2 for second fastest, and 3 for slowest. The scores are as follows for the AMD machine (obviously lower is better):
- Windows XP: 61
- Windows Vista: 52
- Windows 7: 25
And for the Intel machine:
- Windows XP: 56
- Windows Vista: 57
- Windows 7: 25
Of course, there’s always the argument that 7 will get slower as Microsoft add more features, but there’s also a very good counterargument that the code will get more efficient as they optimise it. We’ll have to wait and see until 7 is released, but these early signs are very promising indeed, especially for anyone who had bad experiences with the Vista betas… Myself included.
I doubt the xp ratings are true.Vista is alot slower than xp thanks to its extras that are not needed but just put in the OS as eye candy.Its basicly impossible to actually take off those extras unless you are the person who made/help make it.However now my concern is the future.If microsoft makes windows 7 as good and fast as everyone says…well, it will be amazing.As far as I know there have been no complaints about bugs,glitches,or anything.If this new OS is that perfect it will certanly be amazing and i will be happy to see it.My final concern is how gamer friendly windows 7 is.When i say gamer friendly, i mean it should be very possible and easy to play higher end games or play games at all without spending alot of money for a very high end computer.I also mean that windows 7 should not make it where the system requirments go up for games,like vista did.Hopefully they will make the system requirments go down for games instead,now that would be amazing.
I did find it odd that Vista was almost as fast as – if not faster than – XP in some of these tests. It’s a slower at any kind of file operations (this is a pretty well-known bug) and it does have the overhead of the Aero interface to think about.
That said, in any PC with a dedicated 3D graphics card (as with both of these machines), the UI stuff is entirely offloaded onto the GPU in Vista which may actually be where the difference lies.
Anyway, 7 is shaping up to be very good. I don’t actually use Windows for anything at home (well, except testing websites out in IE) but as an OS fanatic I am intrigued at how well Windows 7 seems to be going.