Vista vs. Win7: two more data points

Yesterday I did an upgrade install of Win7 over the Dell factory install on my M6400 (quad-core, 16GB RAM). So this is not a clean install, but it is almost clean, with all the basic drivers and a little bit of extra functionality (a light edition of Roxio Easy Creator, Dell's Connection Point software, and the Wave security suite). No antivirus (of course), and no trialware garbage at all, though.

Here's two first data points on how Win7 compares to Vista on this machine:

• The boot is a little quicker, shaving off a few seconds over the about 30 seconds it takes with Vista. Nothing major, but quicker is better, so there is a (very slight) advantage for Windows 7 here. It seems, however, that some of the disk activity is now moved to the log-in process, but it may be too soon to judge.
  
• What was more interesting was memory consumption: Windows 7 used exactly the same amount of memory as Vista did (about 1.7GB right after booting). Thus, at least on this machine, the alleged lower memory consumption does not exist. I hasten to add that I don't mind; like I have said before, memory is there to be made use of, not to sit around empty.

My guess is that Windows 7 has some built-in heuristics that reduces memory consumption when there is not much available, but on a machine with plenty of memory it acts exactly the same as Vista.

Otherwise, the user interface has some polish added here and there, but also some things I dislike. Again, too early for me to make a call. My feeling is, call it Vista SP2 and be done with it. If they offer an upgrade, it should be really low cost. There seems to be very little that was added over Vista, as far as I can tell right now.

 

maybe some behaviour based on the update from vista. a clean win7 normally uses less ram (tested it on a 4gb ram machine).

 

That could be; I'll try a clean install too.

 

Just one question - at 16GB of RAM I bet it was 64 Bit (and it makes a lot of sense too) - at 4GB - was that 32Bit or 64Bit?

(There are arguments for 32Bit on a 4GB system)

 

Yes, on my machine I installed the 64bit version; it would make no sense to install a 32bit OS on a machine with more than 4GB of memory.

 

Others who have upgraded have said similar things, try a clean install.

Greg

 

I'm sure a clean install of Win7 will yield much better results.

 

7 uses less than a gig on my comp, a little more with fire fox open.

 

Alright, did a clean install now. Memory usage is the same as with the upgrade install, about 1.7GB. I repeat, that's not an issue at all for me: This machine has 16GB of RAM, so I don't mind Windows trying to make good use of it.

There are a few little glitches here and there, but overall, and for a Beta, Win7 works o.k. This clean install feels a lot faster than the previous one, but in fairness to Vista I have to say that the upgrade install was based on the god-awful factory install that Dell had put on my machine. I'll have to go back and do a clean install of Vista on this machine first to compare performance.

In case it matters, I get WEI scores of Processor: 7.2, memory: 7.2, Graphics: 7.9, Gaming Graphics: 5.9, and Primary hard disk: 5.9 on this Dell Precision M6400, quad core processor, 16GB RAM, twin-7200RPM drives in RAID-0 config.

Oh, and IE8 seems to work alright here. Lots of sites that require compatibility view, but otherwise it works fine from what little I have tried so far.

P.S.: Waking up from sleep in Win7 sucks dead bunnies through a straw, though. Vista was awful in that regard already, but Win7 is worse: Takes ages to load certain drivers back in, with a lot of hardware connect/disconnect noise, and the wireless network connection also takes a long time to get going again. Given that XP was perfectly fine in this respect, this situation is a bad joke: One might hope that a modern OS can deal with a laptop going to sleep and waking up these days, but it seems Microsoft managed to screw this up completely, and seem unable to fix it, too...

 

You should have taken some screen shots of the memory usage. For me, Win7 uses 400-700mb less. When the same programs installed.

Also, I notice that my video thumbnails loads much faster in win7 than vista. And does so while using less ram. Wow!

Like I said, with the notebook running on idle, it uses about 700mb less.

 

What for? That would be a complete waste of bandwidth. If I type that it's 1.7gb, that uses about all of 5 bytes, versus a couple thousand bytes for a useless screenshot

What machine? 32bit or 64bit? Like I said, I assume that if memory is more at a premium, then the OS will try and use less of it.

 

FWIW, I have zero issues here (with the exception of LCD blanking issues that I’ve worked around). Sleep and awaking from sleep is super fast—faster than Vista—and I have no hardware enabling/disabling chimes during the process.