Win7 Enhanced Experience

I remember hearing about the Windows 7 "Enhanced Experience" as provided by Lenovo and Matt Kohut created a multi-piece set of blog postings about the advantages herein.

This forum seems to have no information or discussion about this program. As someone who always reformats a new machine as step 1 and carefully applies only absolutely needed applications, I'm wondering what kind of a benefit I would see with my T510 by accepting the default Win7 (EE Enhanced) image.

Has anyone run any real world benchmarks on what this is all about? The whole "registry optimization" bit has me scratching my head. As soon as a new System Update gets installed overtop the EE Win7 image, doesn't this possibly wipe out those optimizations?

 

The good news is that you won't really care if you have an SSD.
Renee

 

Not all of the improvements mentioned are disk I/O-bound. In watching some of the videos, a good portion of what they do is around hardware initialization/de-initialization.

I'm wondering if I should do a clean install of Win7 and then just switch to the Lenovo driver stack and override what comes preinstalled by Microsoft.

 

"I'm wondering if I should do a clean install of Win7 and then just switch to the Lenovo driver stack and override what comes preinstalled by Microsoft."

Or install the Lenovo drivers.
Renee

 

"As soon as a new System Update gets installed overtop the EE Win7 image, doesn't this possibly wipe out those optimizations?"

Any changes should be added. This does not wipe out any changes at all.
Renee

 

I'm pretty interested in this functionality and know next to nothing about it, so good thread add.

I've got a Sony Z with an OCZ Vertex Turbo and a Lenovo t400s with the craptastic 1.8" Samsung 128GB SSD. The OCZ obliterates the Sammy in all benchmarks.

The Lenovo shuts down and boots MUCH faster. It's not very scientific, I know, but it's much faster with a similar boot workload. Throughput and access times aren't everything.

I'm wondering if they aren't using something like the "HyperBoot" software from Diskeeper. It's only available to OEM's.

 

The Windows Enhanced Experience is nothing more than Lenovo marketing BS. I bought a T400 over a year ago and did a clean install on it. Boot time is 30 seconds. Then I bought another T400 about a month ago, with Windows 7 built in (and the Lenovo Windows Enhanced Experience), and the boot time is also 30 seconds. Mind you, my original T400 is also doing BitLocker—so I expected the new non-BitLocker machine to be a little faster—so the Lenovo Windows Enhanced Experience might actually be SLOWER THAN A CLEAN INSTALL.

If Lenovo did anything here, it appears they only made certain the Lenovo crapware DOESN’T SIGNIFICANTLY DESTROY THE PERFORMANCE of a brand new system—and you now have a shiny sticker that says Lenovo marketing pulled the wool over your eyes.

More detail at http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=439638...

 

I did some very informal testing on my T410s before sending it back to Lenovo (exchanging for a W510). It's not a perfect test, but here is what I did.

Hardware:
2801CT T400s
44C7942 SBB I.C2DPSP9600(2.53GHZ,6MB
45M3090 VBB GENUWIN7PROFES.64
43Y4797 VBB 4GBPC3-8500DDR3SDRAM1DIMM
42X6326 SBB INT.TURBOMEMORY1.6 2GB

Hard drives:
1. 44C7962 120GB,5400RPM (Toshiba MK1229GSG 1.8")
2. 41W0519 128GB SSD (Samsung MMCQE28G8MUP-OVAL1 1.8")

Test cases:
1. Normal - Normal reboot with all startup items
2. No Startup - All startup items disabled via CCleaner
3. Diagnostic - Diagnostic boot via MSCONFIG

Test Protocols:
- Clean system recovery from Lenovo media, install all Windows Updates
- Fresh installation of Windows 7 Pro x64, install all Windows Updates
- Install BootRacer 2.0
- Install CCleaner
- Apply test case config
Reboot system 3 times, time recorded on 4th reboot

Results:
SSD, Normal, Lenovo build
Time to Logon: 00.00.18
Time to Desktop: 00.00.31

SSD, No Startup, Lenovo build
Time to Logon: 00.00.17
Time to Desktop: 00.00.20

SSD, Diagnostic, Lenovo build
Time to Logon: 00.00.15
Time to Desktop: 00.00.17

SSD, Normal, Clean install
Time to Logon: 00.00.12
Time to Desktop: 00.00.20

5400RPM, No Startup, Lenovo build
Time to Logon: Not run (sorry, forgot this one)
Time to Desktop: Not run

SSD, Diagnostic, Clean install
Time to Logon: 00.00.10
Time to Desktop: 00.00.14

5400RPM, Normal, Lenovo build
Time to Logon: 00.00.21
Time to Desktop: 00.00.34

5400RPM, No Startup, Lenovo build
Time to Logon: Not run
Time to Desktop: Not run

5400RPM, Diagnostic, Lenovo build
Time to Logon: 00.00.18
Time to Desktop: 00.00.20

This isn't conclusive by any means, but does show a trend. The trend being that EE doesn't do much.

These tests are not complete. With more time, I would have tested with and without the Intel Turbo memory, loaded the Lenovo apps on the clean Win7 install, etc.

 

Very informative - thanks, Zoinks!