Windows 7 is overrated - No difference in terms of performance compared with Vista

Ok after installing Windows 7, I became a bit skeptical when I didn't really notice any differences in performance compared with Vista. I never had any problems with Vista but because of all the hype around Windows 7 I decided to give it a go. Is it just me or are people seriously noticing a difference? Are you all sure it's not just the placebo effect (thinking it is faster because you're expecting it to be faster)? That's what I thought initially after running some games, but I've installed Vista again to compare and it is just as snappy and my fps in games is the exact same.

In both cases, I did a fresh install, installed some games and defragged the computer to ensure maximum performance. I recorded videos of L4D with the same settings and same campaign and the fps is the exact same. Any differences of 1-2 fps can simply be due to the AI director placing less or more zombies on the map and this 1-2 fps difference is seen sometimes in Vista's favour and sometimes in Windows 7's favour. And guess what, Vista doesn't even have any of it's service packs installed. It's just not clear enough to say one is faster than the other. I even did a fresh install of XP and I was surprised to see the fps the same in XP as I was expecting XP to be clearly faster.

I also did the same for Tomb Raider Underworld and to my surprise Vista was 1-2 fps faster.

The laptop at the time to do these tests was an XPS M1530 (C2D T8300 @ 2.4GHz, 4GB DDR2, 8600M GT). It's more than powerful enough to run Vista smoothly. I'm beginning to wonder if the difference people see in Windows 7 is only seen if they have slow or old computers that haven't been defragged.

I like Vista and I like W7 for its new features but I hate it when people bash Vista, saying W7 is so much better when I can't notice any real differences. W7 even gave me some problems as my mic became all static. I installed different audio driver but it stayed the same. I'm not sure what the problem was but with Vista it's fine. I also get a lot of programs crashing in W7 randomly such as Windows Gadgets and Steam which will just randomly crash and close respectively.

Anyway I think I'll go back to W7 now that I've tested the games but just because I like some of its new features. But apart from that, for me there's really no noticeable differences.

Edit: Mic problem fixed. For some reason the 'levels' slider for microphone array was set up to 100 by default, making the mic ultra sensitive to sound (vibrations from fan etc). Put it down to 10 and it's working fine.

Edit: I have a new laptop now as seen in my sig. It came with Vista but was eligible for the free W7 upgrade. As with the M1530, after installing W7, the difference wasn't really noticeable but I think it's a bit snappier on the G51. Still, there's no drastic difference.

 

Hmm. Well I came from Vista on my 1530 to Win 7 Ultimate 64..and I really noticed a difference. I won't bash Vista, either...as I still like Vista ~ have no qualms. But, Win 7 is a marked improvement on my 1530 vs. what it was with Vista......

I really haven't had any performance issues at all. As @Core2Duo stated some of things are similar in essence! It's awesome!

Cin...

 

only thing better about 7 for me

1. FASTER USB TRANSFER SPEEDS
2. FASTER DEVICE INSTALLATION
3. SNAPPIER. definitely snappier. like max and minimize

definitely more options, right click and sort by type is NOT in vista, you have to look for it in more options or something.

also definitely cleaner, i felt vista was sluggish, also World In Conflict was incompatible with vista and CoD4! you need a mic plugged in for CoD4 and in 7 not anymore.

overall windows 7 was definitely an UPgrade

 

Wow, time space continuom is warped. After having to replace my son's failed Seagate 7200.4 hard drive, temp workaround was the original HD, dual booting Vista and Win 7, both x64...my son went into Vista and thought something was wrong with the computer, booted into Win7 was like going from PII to a P4HT...even my little girl's dv6000 (t5500 core 2, 5400 rpm, 2gb ram) runs Win7 x86 better than it did XP Media Center

I'd check drivers, hardware, etc, cuz everyone notices a difference, at least until now

 

Which OS occupies the outer tracks? The outer tracks are faster. Right there it becomes impossible to say it is a fair example. And that is before you consider the settings, whether the drive is defragged, page files and the list goes on.

As for whether Vista can run faster than Win7, well yes it can if well optimised. Really well optimised.

The big news would be if either could beat Server 2003 Enterprise.

 

This is what I mean. For me, Vista is not complete POS because it's worked perfectly for the past 2 years. I don't have any old computers to test it on but I'll assume it's better optimised for older computers than Vista was.

So if I don't notice a difference in performance, is there something wrong with my computer? Was my computer the only one in the world that was magically optimised for Vista while it ran like crap on everyone elses?..

Do people's games actually run faster on W7? Because like I said, my fps is the exact same.

Since my opening post, I've put W7 back on...but that mic problem still exists.. Bit off topic but I've attached a recording of 'Kalimba' from the music samples which is playing from my speakers while my room is silent..

 

I don't really care for either...they both give me driver problems with work.

 

The overall product is so much better that I couldn't think of switching back to Vista. There are so many improvements to the OS that it's not even funny.

 

I think this is a good example. I think many people jump to the conclusion that W7 is drastically faster after they've installed it but don't take into consideration that it's a fresh install so it's going to be faster. Also, some people may have been running Vista for ages without a recent reformat or defrag, meaning their system performance might have been slowing down, falsely adding to their certainty that W7 is drastically faster.

When I did my comparison, I did fresh installs of both systems along with defrags to make it fair and found that there was no difference in performance. A lot of the comparison videos on youtube aren't fresh installs for both, but only W7, which isn't fair.

 

well 7 has been a great change for me
the overall speed of system is really improved vista was too slow.
i guess 7 really proves its worth when u have lesser system configuration i mean lesser ram and stuff.

 

I think it doesn't matter to me wether I use vista or 7, I just need a 64 bit version to be able to acces more ram to have a better game experience.

 

I've found that XP is faster than Vista which is about as fast as 7.

The reason why I like 7 more than I like Vista is because it has a handful of frivolous yet nice features like a title bar that stays transparent when the window is maximized, or how your gadgets don't get minimized when you press the show desktop button.

 

Am i the only one who thinks that the "transparent when maximized" 'feature' is annoying?

 

When I have a window open underneath and can see it because of the transparency it is a bit annoying too.

 

no. i don't like it, too. but got used to it and actually see some benefits (when doing some work, i see the chat windows and facebook start to blink in the top, so i get notified as the buttons at the bottom don't have text anymore, i would never see that info anywhere else..


and yes, it's fun how people now bash that at vista, while it was specially designed, and made sense. things that make sense, people can't understand those


and win7 is a bit faster in my case, but vista was great, too, so there can't be much gain.

 

When I got my SZ World In Conflict is possibly the only game that I used my 8400M GS for - and it ran under Vista Business - with SP1 though (if I remember correctly).
Since then pretty much haven't played any games on my laptop...
So that wasn't Vista but something else.

 

both untrue. wic works great on vista, and cod4 only needs a mic plugged in if you have a stupid soundcard driver that disables inputs and outputs that aren't needed. and, you can disable that "auto-detection" in the driver, and then it works without soundcard.

we have a vista based lan-gaming-center. had to get those two to work

 

The only postive thing I can thin of having vista is that I can play halo 2 with it, don't you love being forced to buy new windows versions to play microsofts top games -_-'

 

i find it much faster to boot, and software that wasnt compatable with vista now runs on 7. drivers are much faster to load and find, and it stopped trying to "update" my drivers to an older version like vista did.

 

I switched from XP on my desktop to Windows 7 Ultimate and while I know what the differences are in terms of OS structural and efficiency gains, to me as an end user, the difference was honestly marginal. Boot times weren't all too different, speeds were roughly the same, performance didn't really get any boost as far as I can tell. The only real differences that stand out to me as an end user are the interface which isn't all that much. Oh that and I can't user my printer anymore because they only made XP drivers for it lol

In the end, for an OS which is more complex than XP(a more minimalist OS) to accomplish the same level of performance/speed, it is something in itself, but in terms of actual gains, to me as a user, it wasn't any stellar.

I'll update my post though once i switch my Vista machine to Windows 7. Then I'll be able to tell if Windows 7 really runs well on aging machines(Celeron M with 1 Gb of RAM).

 

Try running Windows Update with the printer connected - if its USB and there are any drivers it should find them...
(At least our Canon from the XP age works with Vista and Win7)

 

Read the bolded part here

 

Microsoft might have some generic drivers - I just checked for mine... there is actually something from Canon available...

But on Vista it used a driver that the OS carried - have you at least tried - if you have then OK - if you haven't then do. Who knows, maybe you're in luck.

 

Does running Windows Update rather than the generic driver installer change something? I thought using the driver installer checked the internet anyways. Well I'll try what you said, but I honestly don't think it'll work because I checked around and people couldn't get this printer working on neither Vista nor Windows 7 due to lack of proper drivers after XP SP2.

There are a few fixes such as installing other printer drivers, but I'd rather not do that.

It's a Panasonic KX-P7100 btw.

 

I think Windows Update is better... I've never had really success with the driver search via the device manager...

See here: (for 64Bit but might help...)
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-print-fax-scan/41181-printer-problem-panasonic-kx-p7100.html
and see if there is anything interesting is here - http://help.lockergnome.com/vista/er-Problem-Panasonic-KX-P7100--ftopict33531.html

 

I dont really find 7 that more amazingly faster than Vista, but it does feel more snappy.. Besides things like the "Connect to networks" dialog in the tray area is much faster than Vistas.. Small things like that does it for me.

 

Well, your experience is really what one would expect from a fair assessment. A few points are pertinent here: First of all, again as one would expect, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Vista. Given that simple fact, it is clear that you should not notice any significant difference in the performance of individual applications, no matter what OS you are using. It is worth remembering that the performance at which the application code runs is only affected by how much CPU time is taken up by other code that the OS runs in parallel (the "OS overhead"). It turns out that on reasonable modern CPUs, that overhead is very small, at the low-end of the single percent range. Once this is understood, it is entirely clear that it is impossible to obtain any meaningful differences in applicatiuon performance from one OS to the next. After all, even if, somehow, magically, Windows 7 had no OS overhead at all (which is impossible, of course), the most you would gain is maybe one or two percent in performance. That is really not noticeable.

So, why do so many people claim Win7 to be "so much faster" than Vista? The answer to that question is not simple, but it ultimately boils down to subjective perception, and a few tricks. For one example, you might want to try turning off Window Animation in Vista, and see how all of a sudden the OS feels much "snappier", simply because windows pop up immediately. Nothing has really changed about the performance of the OS, but it "feels faster". Without going too much into details, it turns out that you can have animated windows and still get the feeling that the OS is fast, depending on how precisely the animation is scripted. Finally, when judging the "responsiveness" of an OS, people can perceive minute differences of tiny fractions of a second. Such differences are of no practical consequence, but they can fundamentally alter the way the responsiveness of an OS is perceived.

Bottom line, Win7 is really Vista 1.1, meaning Windows Vista plus a few minor tweaks. But those minor tweaks were carefully chosen so as to, in marketing speak, "improve the customer experience". Together with choosing an entirely different name for the new OS, this resulted in a radically different reception of MS' new operating system as compared to Vista. Nice trick...

 

I also don't find 7 faster than Vista. Vista on my laptop ran smoothly without any problems but I did a fresh install of 7 and it doesn't seem any faster, including boot time but I'm not complaining.

7 still runs smoothly and the new tweaks makes the OS more enjoyable to use.

 

w7 is much faster at identifying networks. for me to get wifi working on my uni it took like 5 minutes to identify and get internet access. in W7 i only take less than 1minute. and thats a win win in my book.
everything else is the same Vista wans't bad at performance 1.2g of ram consume vs 900megs in w7

 

Could that have been related to the Wi-Fi driver?

 

it's the same for me and my friends, we all tried windows 7, and we noticed no difference at all, so we went back to the tried and tested windows vista. you could put a new skin on windows me and say it's windows 7 and people would've found all sorts of performance boosts! placebo.

 

it's not a placebo. but the optimisations don't apply to all situations.

one thing i really like is the great performance of homegroups (and the design of them). very nice. networking really got painless for the most part.

but of course, the bad press for vista and good press for win7 together let a lot experience the placebo of it being much better

but going back to vista made no sense, as win7 is just as tried and tested as vista. it's the same codebase

 

Of course, if you use a tablet, you'll love a few crucial differences that you keyboard pounders will never notice.

The Input panel goes translucent when it loses focus. Before, you would have to close it or move it to see text behind it. A pain when your screen is already full of important text you are trying to annotate or comment on.

The Math Panel. Plain ol fun.

The buttons on the taskbar are far easier to hit than the tiny tiny icons of the Quicklaunch bar in Vista.

New gestures are easier to discover in the new Input Panel.

Multitouch is overrated.

 

nope same vista drivers
is the way w7 handles networks connectios is faster is improved

 

i hope to get multitouch one day, to put it to good use for my live music playing

 

Performance varies from system to system.
I noticed that the boot-up sequence for example with Win 7 is lower compared to my Vista installation (both freshly installed), plus the desktop is usable much sooner in comparison to Vista.

Aside from that, file transfer rates seem to be much better in Win 7.
Application and game performance is generally the same though.

Ultimately, Win 7 is nothing more than an incremental improvement compared to Vista SP2 on the surface, with most changes being 'under the hood'.

Nothing really to get yourself hyped over I agree, still, a notable improvement in some cases.

 

The differences you are seeing in that area can have any number of reasons that may have nothing to do with "the way w7 handles network connections". What I do know is that my Vista laptop here initializes network connections in seconds...

 

yes, if everything works fine, it's very fast. problem is, it sometimes is very slow at "network detection", a.k.a. finding out if it knows the network, and it's a private/work network.

win7 improved there quite a bit (but can be buggy on crap networks, just as well).

in general, win7 improved a lot to fight worst cases. best cases where great on vista, too. it's the worst cases, where vista sometimes failed (unrelated to networking).

 

Well to me it was actually a difference. I used windows vista with my intel core 2 duo 2.9 4 gigs of ram and I can tell you I felt the sluggish (yes it was a clean install to). I felt it slow some bugs. I installed windows 7 and I can tell you it does make the difference. I think it would just depend on what you are running it. If your running it on a very powerful computer or a weaker one. Personally windows 7 is very different in speed and gadgets and well vista to my impression was just like a lot mentioned not all there since windows 7 fixed the errors done on vista.

 

Win7 has the same core as Vista... the real changes are the neato user interface changes, code cleanup and stability over and above what Vista's latest service pack accomplished.

EVERY time I do a file transfer I start by dragging them to the sides to the screen and quite frankly, its annoying if the system doesn't do it now...

Win7 works on lesser machines than Vista ever would. (when relieved of its extra prettyiness.

Vista is now quite fine, but Win7 is indeed an upgrade.

1-2 fps is margin-for-error level difference... but make sure you install Win7-updated drivers if you have not already. I've seen no noteable difference whatsoever in frame rates.

 

Much faster at making a wireless connection for me as well. And I believe I am using the same driver I was under Vista since I did an in place upgrade to Win7. I also notice that file transfers are a bit quicker as well.

Gary

 

Notebook Performance and Mobility across Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

Conclusion: the OP is wrong. Just wrong.

 

World In Conflict Soviet Assault with patch and max graphics settings on 1600x900 it would crash randomly on vista premium

World In Conflict Soviet Assault with patch and max graphics settings on 1600x900 and 1680x1050 it would crash randomly me and my brother had this problem on VISTA PREMIUM,

See the thing with vista and CoD4 is that my soundcard isnt stupid because it worked for 7 NO PROBLEMS, no adjustment or editing, i can use the mic on my webcam to voice chat. CoD Mw1 and 2 work flawlessly.


Also ground control a very old classic game WORKS on W7 lol i just wanted to try it for the fun of it, didnt work in vista though.

Although my brother says sim city 3000 doesnt work on 7, id try that myself another time.

 

Could be the graphics driver that was crashing it...

You just assume Vista is bad - well, its not!
Win7 is essentially the same - yes they tidied it up, but its still pretty much the same.

 

well, you just had a stupid soundcard driver installed on vista. and you didn't on win7, so it took the default one, which doesn't have that habbit of disabling itself if there is nothing plugged in.

cod4 crashes if you have no soundcard driver. on win7, too. you just have luck, that your driver doesn't disable it's own soundcard on win7. which it does, by default, on vista. but you can change it in the drivers options.

it is NO fault of vista. it's a fault of cod4 to crash, and a stupid premature optimisation of the driver you installed on vista.

 

Uhmm, pray tell, where did you get that conclusion from? Have you actually read the article you were linking to? According to this article, using MobileMark as a test on some Sager laptop, WinXP performed best, closely followed by Vista, with Win7 coming in last. The differences are small, however, conforming the OPs observations.

 

Those benchmarks are performed while the system is unplugged, so Windows 7 has the most aggressive power savings. Note that it delivers much better battery life while losing a small amount of performance compared to XP.

 

Yes, that is correct, but nobody has talked about battery life in this thread so far. The OP's original point stands.

 

Yes, you win.

Battery life doesn't matter.

 

Wait, I remember now... this is a NOTEBOOK forum!