This guy thinks Windows 7 is crap and Vista is better

This was posted at another forum which I frequent. I thought I would want to see how some of the experts here are reacting to this. :laugh:

 

My 2 cents: XP is better suited than Vista and Windows 7 for netbooks with Atom/1GB/160GB. Simply because it needs less memory, less hard drive space and less CPU cycles.

Actually I think he may be partially right. Windows 7 looks like a new improved Vista to me. Nothing wrong with that because Vista runs fine after the last service pack.

 

The difference comes when you try to run Vista on a Pentium II PC with 96MB of RAM (someone managed to do that with Windows 7).

And:

"vista manages its resources well thats why if you have 2gb ram it uses all 2gb... xp is the one that doesn't know how to manage its resource..."

Now we aren't talking about IT knowledge, we are talking about common sense.

 

I agree with him. Taskbar = less usability than before. Libraries = bad implementation of a quite nice idea. New UAC = following the cryings of the blogbabies instead of relying on a trustable system = bad.

so yes, he's partially right.

still, i would even use vista on a netbook. because i have used vista on atoms quite some time now, and it works great. only needs enough ram (cheap), and, at best (but that's for any os, and any notebook/netbook/desktop/server) an ssd (not that cheap).

 

Well. I am not an expert. But I can see this guy was pointing out a few CORRECT points but also INCORRECT points.
Keep in mind Windows 7 is currently superior than other Windows.

Actually, this guy is an idiot though. He said "even if you have 200gb ram it only takes up that 100+mb... all that extra ram space is wasted... so how does vista waste its resource?" and "once again, if your argument is that vista has a higher hardware requirement than xp, then you are contradicting yourself".

This would mean that vista have same system requirement as XP does. Just that XP is stupid and don't know how to utilize RAM and Vista is clever to utilize RAM.
If XP and Vista are the same, then and 128MB RAM machine should able to run Vista perfectly.

He get it wrong. The services and start-up/processes that Vista need to run is more than XP. This shown why Vista consume more RAM than XP.
The only significant/obvious different between XP and Vista is the Superfetch.
Vista with Superfetch uses a lot of RAM but the RAM used would improve and maintain system performance overtime(the longer you use the computer, the faster it becomes until it reach it maximum).
On the other hand, XP do not have Superfetch. So, obviously the RAM usage is low.
Vista is recommend on at least 1GB of RAM due to its services/startup/processes are too much.
XP is recommend on at least 250MB of RAM due to its services/startup/processes are less.
Example to show this GUY theory is wrong("once again, if your argument is that vista has a higher hardware requirement than xp, then you are contradicting yourself"):
OK. Let's say, Vista used 500MB on the services stuffs and XP uses 100MB on the services stuffs.
There is a machine about 256MB. Very clearly 256MB ram is not enough to run Vista because its startup processes already more than 256MB ram. But XP could run on 256MB ram machine because it only uses 100MB++ ram.
WHY THE HECK THIS GUY SAID THAT VISTA USES HIGHER SYSTEM REQUIREMENT IS WRONG?

 

I don't know what you are saying but the sentence in quotes is actually true afaik.

 

He's both wrong and right.

Vista needs more ram by default, but it, as well, uses more ram.

If you have 4gb ram on your system, vista will most likely never really page out.
XP will, all the time. as it will all ram above 2gb (easily done by having f.e. photoshop open with a 2gb footprint), xp will panik and try to page out because of "low ram". while there is still enough ram left for it + the apps.

and that is a big problem for current downgraders: they won't get good performance of xp on machines with more than 2gb ram. xp doesn't handle that limit well and paniks, resulting in useless todisk flushing of ram, and the resulting reloadingfromdisk.

 

Yeah I was one of the front people trying to explain "unused ram is waisted ram" when people were crying about how they had little free ram in Vista.

So many threads on that back in the day rather than type out the whole explanation I just started posting this picture I made:

From Misc

As for Win 7 vs Vista, I dont think a fair view on the new UI can be given yet. Everybody thinks new stuff is slower and worse at first as you have to get used to it. When I moved from XP to Vista I thought Vista sucked at first, the folder navigations were strange and in new places and it has the UAC and stuff.

Now Win 7 users that have used it for a while I think in larger quantity say the new taskbar is faster/better once your used to it.

 

interestingly, i never had issues to get used to the new stuff since win 3.1. this time, win7, is the first time i don't see the changes as good.

but i will have to get used to them of course one day. but i've stated several times what i think is wrong in the new design. so i wait for the final release, and then try out again. but, contrary to vista, i won't get a wow, that's cool. just a bah, that's crap, i'm getting used to it.

edit: nice pic btw

 

Yea. I did mention he is partially correct and partially wrong.
Again. XP is surely not as good as Windows 7.
XP and Vista, I would choose Vista. I know XP has it own good but still Vista have more advantages.
Vista and 7, I would choose 7. 7 is the improvement of Vista.

 

Without the support of a decent graphics card Vista is quite heavy on the old CPU, but then it has some nice features and also though thanks to an improved design its gaming performance is far better (I'm assuming that like me people aren't suffering blue screen issues etc in vista).

Windows 7 is in fairness just a modification of the Vista Kernel AKA Service Pack 2. I don't even like some of the changes. However I hear they're rewritten some of the behaviours of Windows 7 to be a bit friendlier to the battery life and slow hd spin speeds of laptops, such as less frequent file indexing etc

I think I'll wait until the final version is out until I pass judgement.

 

yep, for vista, you need a certain baseline.

dx9 capable gpu. 2gb or more ram. the faster the hdd the better.

those are the base requirements for vista and win7. this does not mean fast pc, this does not mean much cost. but it does mean some elder notebooks can't really work with it. pc's, not so much. you can find nice agp dx9 cards that work perfect for really low amount of money (radeon 9600 was 50$ or soback when it was new, about 5 years ago?! and works great).

i wait until final win7 to judge, too. but i've the same thought you have.

what i like about win7: the new font rendering is great, dx11 is nice to have. new tweaks for ssds, and event-triggered services are nice things.

i hope for a vista skin on win7, with the default taskbar

 

Basically a modern computer can probably run faster on Vista or Win 7, but if you have an "elderly" machine with slower components and only 1gb or less of RAM then XP will run better on it.

Netbooks currently are on the border, they run better on XP stock but with just 2gb of ram they handle Vista & Win 7 very well.

Though I find out of the box 720p video plays fine in XP on my EEE, but in Vista I had to optimize it a bit for 720p seamless playback. Not that it matters lol as the netbook itself doesnt even have a 720p screen.

 

DX9 is only for Aero right? Better disable all the visuals because it takes too much time anyway

 

Actually Aero speeds things up since the CPU isn't taxed with window and menu composition. A ton of people call it "eye candy" while it's actually a very powerful system within the OS. It can actually save battery power since the CPU doesn't get throttled up just to compose windows... Apple has been using this kind of tech longer for a reason.

The guy has a point but he doesn't make it too well. I actually don't like UAC being toned down by default. It's a big security feature - Linux and UNIX have this sort of thing hardwired very deep for a reason. People who turn off UAC, well... actually, I was reading a thread on Macrumors yesterday where a bunch of Mac users who have obviously never touched Vista were bashing it and the only point they could make was that UAC popped up every time the OP would try and open a browser. Yay for knowledge.

 

as enternight replied: aero is a performance gain for your system. what's better at drawing? cpu or gpu? exactly. better enable it to have a fast, snappy system.

 

Well my point was to disable the animations and visual effects which take a little time

But now you're saying Aero on GPU is faster than Windows Classic at CPU. I would love to see some benchmarks to prove that.

It's true that all the see through effects are rendered by the GPU but Windows classic has no see through effects, so I would think it would be faster.

If you have hard numbers please show me.

 

no hard numbers right now, but since years the biggest issue was that the whole gui was cpu drawn. filling large rects takes time, and the gpu is much better at it.

and your cpu can do real work instead of filling rectangles, so it's like a "3rd core" in your dual core system. one for drawing, two for computing.

it's well documented in presentations and documents from microsoft about windows vista.

i've seen hard numbers, back 2 years ago during the vista beta. i just know it's true, and it does make sense. the workload reduction for your cpu is (espencially in atom worlds) quite some (espencially on crazy big resolutions ), and the whole gets reduced to 0.

the fact that glass has transparency is sort of the free-lunch effect. now that they moved to the gpu, freeing the cpu, they have the gpu active, and, while it's drawing, why not draw it fancy, too? because the gpu is fast enough to handle it anyways.

aero with transparency in general performs better and more snappy than no aero at all.

but, it depends on the gpu, of course. if you have an atom with a huge gf7200 on (or what was that beast with the airplane-fan? ), you don't want aero there, as the gpu uses 50x or so more power to .. just draw

but espencially on integrated gpu systems, aero on is best.

 

If we were talking about Aero on GPU vs. Aero on CPU you would be totally right. But we're talking about Aero on GPU vs. the most simple 2d graphics on CPU.

At best Aero at GPU would not be slower. But there's no way it's going to be faster. At least, that's what I believe untill I see hard numbers.

 

aero on gpu draws the same amount of pixels as "simple 2d graphics" on cpu.

the content of your windows don't change. and the content of your windows is what makes the most amount of fillrate that gets consumed.

and the gpu is so much faster at drawing the content of your window, that it can spend some more computational time to compute some nice glass for the borders.

btw, pixelshaders are completely free to use while you're bandwith bound. which is the only thing windows could ever be bound. as it does nothing else than render stupid rectangles, and do some tiny bit of pixelshading on the edges. that does not cost much performance, the pixelshaders would just simply idle around. they can render much more complex work, so it never is a bottleneck.

 

I prefer Windows 7 over Vista. I think it runs faster and smoother than Vista did, at least for me. Plus, my cousin has a PC better than mine with a Core 2 Quad and 4gigs of RAM running Vista, and I have a Core 2 Duo with 2gigs of RAM with Windows 7 and my computer runs faster/is more stable than his.

 

i bet his is not a clean installation. that kills vista performance often. same will be for win7. i hope not, but it was always that case for every windows so far..


btw, Phil:

i just made some raw numbers up for a window with 1024x768 size, and a 10pixel border around it. the content : border ratio is 22:1. so if you can draw the content 2x as fast (and a gpu can be much faster than just 2x as fast than the cpu), you can do about anything shiny you want on the border. not that the glass borders cost much, but even if, it would not matter. the content of the window is 22x more pixels than the border. in higher resolutions, the discrepancy gets even bigger.

 

thanks Dave, but those are not the number i'm looking for. I'd like to see some application or scipted tasks benchmark in a windows environment. PCMark 05 might be suited.

 

it sounds to me like this guy is being sarcastic.

 

Oh man MrJacky you are here too =(

 

Phil... you don't need raw numbers. I've tested it on this here laptop. The difference is night and day. I keep my CPU at the lowest state (~800MHz) when on battery. Everything performs nicely... except for window composition if I turn off Aero. Choppy, awful. With Aero on my Intel chip it's great.
I do have the maximize/minimize animations off.

The transparency checkbox is three clicks away from the desktop. I love transparency on my desktop and big screen but it's just a waste of a small sip of energy on my laptop.

 

I can test next week. I'll let you know.

If you were refering to me the word would be skeptical.

 

It is just to soon to make any good judgments on Vista vs W7, other than that the majority finds that W7 implementation in regards to Vista, is much better than Vista to XP.

In regards to net-books, no one has seen how W7 SE (starter edition) will work on them yet.

cheers ...

 

I usually agree with you on just about everything but this is where I draw the line.

The new Taskbar is way more than a "taskbar"; it's a combination taskbar and dock. Having been using 7 since January I've got so used to it that I now dread going back to using Vista and seeing all the clutter on the taskbar. It'll just take time for people to get used to it; it's new, looks and acts differently which puts people off. But remember, you can customize the new tastbar to look and work the same way as Vista; what a waste that would be though IMO.

Can you elaborate on why Libraries are so bad in 7 compared to Vista? Try dropping a picture in the public pictures folder in Vista and see what happens to it... nothing. Do the same in 7 and that picture will appear under every users' pictures virtual folder and is fully accessible without any further actions, as though it was originally saved there. Brilliant imo.

I find the UAC just as effective in 7 as it is in Vista but they just made it more transparent. Why does a user need UAC prompts to simply defrag the HD in Vista?

But it's all subjective really. Some will like it and some won't. IMO 7 is a huge step up from Vista, a lot more than just new looks, and this is coming from someone who quite liked Vista.

 

I know the new taskbar is way more. but imho, this is a backstep, a huge backstep. i explained detailed reasonings in the big article about win7 on the mainpage here. btw, my taskbar has 0 clutter. thanks.

i like the idea of the libraries, as stated. i just don't like them yet in the way they're implemented. haven't tried the RC yet, though, and it should be different.

UAC got proven to be less effective as in vista in the defaultmode of win7.


edit: btw, except for the UAC thing, this is my personal opinion. but still, i base it on usability facts on what i've seen. so it's not out of thin air.. (and my friends around so far dropped win7 after a while and noticed how snappy vista is, afterwards )

 

Wow, just plain WOW! Talk about fanboyism. I like vista, but thats nuts.

 

That's only for Vista.

I bet you know as well as I do that Vista won't run good on a PC with 512MB of RAM, but it's different in Windows 7 case.

And that fact that Windows 7 can even run on a PC as old as Pentium II with only 96MB of RAM.

I don't know what you mean by "page out", but XP will always set the size of the page file at 1.5 times of the amount of RAM installed (e.g. 1.5 x 2048MB).

 

Who cares? I mean, seriously, how many people want to run any general-purpose OS on that kind of hardware? Any laptop I buy these days will come with at least 2gigs of RAM standard, if not 4. Even netbooks aren't as crippled as that. As a matter of fact, the next generation of netbooks (which is the hardware that is relevant for an OS coming out this fall) will have no trouble at all running the current incarnations of Vista.

And that 96MB Pentium II? Wow, I am sure Microsoft will sell millions of copies of Win7 to people who have been dying to install the newest Microsoft OS on just that kind of hardware...

 

Read my post again, he mentioned that Vista and Windows 7 have the SAME requirements, and I used that example to prove that it isn't.

Yes, probably no one would run Windows 7 on that kind of hardware, but this also shows the line that separates Windows 7 and Windows Vista.