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

Are you serious?

 

Serious? About what? That the OP has not mentioned a single word about battery life? That his only concern was about the relative performance of Vista versus Win7? That there is no significant difference in application performance between Vista and Win7? --- Yes, to all of the above, of course. I repeat again, the article that Bog linked to does, in fact, confirm this point of view.

Now, concerning the silly allegation that I had said something like "battery life doesn't matter", that is complete nonsense. I neither said nor implied anything of that sort, but I might add in parentheses that it is possible that Win7 buys its superiority in that area with the decreased performance described in the article we discussed earlier. I could also say that, whether or not, and how much, a person values battery life in a notebook would depend on that person's typical usage. I happen to run my main laptop very rarely, if ever at all, on battery. In the case of that particular machine, I really couldn't care less if Win7 gives me somewhat better battery life.

 

How is an OS supposed to improve application performance, aside from how quickly it loads the program?

In case you've been living under a rock for some time, Windows 7 does outperform Vista in many areas, including boot time. It also delivers these benefits while running on more modest hardware, which is merely another demonstration of improved performance. The following article by the same site confirms all of this, with more extensive tests that are perhaps a wider representation than what I linked earlier: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/windows-7-performance,review-31751-10.html

Also, simply because the OP feels that 7 isn't faster than Vista is a subjective opinion. Your belief that battery performance relative to performance is unimportant is likewise subjective, as you base its importance on your usage and habits. For that reason alone it can be dismissed out of hand.

 

Which is exactly what I had discussed in my first reply to the OP's post.

Well... That is one of those cute little tricks: What really happened is that Microsoft streamlined the bootup process some more, by setting a bunch of services to delayed start, giving the impression of faster boot-up times. But, yes, Win7 does outperform Vista in that area. It does absolutely nothing to fix the issue of excessive disk activity on startup, where Win7's SuperFetch, just as Vista's, may spend several minutes with its startup activities. Overall, if you measure the time it takes from power-up to the point where all heavy disk activity has ceased, you'll find, again, no significant difference between Vista and Win7. But I readily agree that Win7 tends to reach a usable state faster than Vista. Maybe I should also point out that I am not here to knock Win7 at all. All I am saying is that quite often, its benefits over Vista appear somewhat exaggerated.

It is a demonstration of the fact that Win7 was more carefully tuned to adjust itself to moderate hardware capabilities. That's nice if you want to run it on some dinky little netbook. I happen to not care, but, like I said, this is a plus for Win7.

There was nothing subjective about the OPs "opinion". He provided hard data for his perceptions, data, by the way, that are confirmed in objective tests, including the article you linked to earlier. In addition, you seem to be acknowledging that point yourself. In your own words, "How is an OS supposed to improve application performance, aside from how quickly it loads the program?"

I apologize for being so blunt, but while I am aware that reading comprehension is not your strong suit, I thought I had just made it abundantly clear that I hold no such belief. All I was saying is that the OP had not commented on battery life, so this issue was not germane until you brought it up.

 

The soundcard is installed DEFAULT on VISTA and DEFAULT on W7, if Windows 7 disables it on default and Vista DOESNT which is better for the user? duh Windows 7! i dont need to mess with options and stuff, its just much more user friendly.

my graphics card is an at 4850 and smokes all current games on max with aax4 and af x4 1600x900.

i KNOW vista is worse than Windows 7. ive used vista and i like it but when its time to UPgrade its time to UPgrade, VISTA is not the New XP! LOL whats wrong with you.

when vista came out i UPgraded to vista from XP, now your whining like Vista is the new XP xD and W7 is slow and bad thats so fail, wake up to a better windows man

 

well i noticed that vista's superfetch starts caching right after you log in, but windows 7 starts caching after about 6 minutes, in a way that is good, because the system is more usable after startup rather than waiting for superfetch in vista to load a ton of things after you log in. Also w7 superfetch is less intensive, it lasts for about 2 minutes for me, while vista's superfetch lasted for like 5-6 on the same machine.

 

Well, me and the thread starter have the same opinion. I tried W7 on another laptop and i'm still figuring out if it is faster then Vista. I did notice some improvements with the design of the UI but other than that the speed is about the same with all animations enabled.

The only thing i noticed in W7 is that W7 doesn't take all my RAM which i feel is better than Vista. Start up time maybe faster by 1-2 sec. and shutdown time is the same. But i plan to install W7 on my laptop for the sake of curiosity next time. But right now Vista is very much stable for me.

 

it's not vistas fault that the driver of the SOUNDCARD MANUFACTURER was crap they got (well, had crap default settings). that's not vistas job to care. it's the manufacturer ones. and they got a lot of bad rep due to it, and thus changed the default settings over time, right in time for win7, as it seems.

don't just point fingers and blame if you don't understand what really was going on. drivers are NOT a thing of vista, they are a thing of the manufacturers that coded them.

win7 is a bit better. the rest is huge placebo effects due to marketing, and sheep behaviour. you make it worse than it is, blaming everything that was wrong in your setup to it, while it was not it's fault.

 

we all love to believe that, not?

yes, they improved ram usage in one massive case (they rewrote gdi.. or was it gdi+? to not have two copies of the window-contents). other than that, they just made sure that cached memory looks like free memory. as people got crazy about it on vista, not understanding that free ram is lost ram.

 

Performance wise I found little difference between the two. The main downside to Win7 is that some software (which runs fine on Vista) doesn't run, or has a tendency to crash. So after a trial I went back to Vista. As always, I suspect this is the usual problem with trying to be an early adopter... maybe try again in a few months when software versions are better written for Win7.

 

Are you saying that Win7 does not actually use less RAM than Vista does but the way it calculates its usage is different from Vista?

 

That's what Dave is saying - except that he doesn't even say its calculated differently - all he says is its shown differently.

Like putting a 3 series badge on a 5 series.
(Cars, BMW)

 

it has both real optimisations and optimisions on perception.

ram used for caching data was "used" on vista, and now isn't "used" on win7 anymore. as it's free available for all other apps, but it just has something maybe useful in instead of nothing.

actually, i'm just guessing. i thought they changed it that way, but i'm not really sure.

see in the resource manager, you now have "standby" which counts to "available".

 

it's actually quite awesome to have that window on the side, and watch it react while i use the system one can see how in use grows, and when it gets released, standby moves to the left, and then step by step fills again.. awesome superfetch live in action

one thing to see superfetch in action is to have nearly no memory "free" but in standby, having the resource window open, and go to hibernation. after restoring from hibernation, there is no standby memory, just free memory (and this shows that hibernation now really only writes used memory down instead of everything).

after coming back from hibernation, you can see how it step by step fills the standby memory.



it's really fun to play with that stuff

 

Huh, I never knew about that diagram. Cool, perhaps I can learn something from it. +rep

Anyways, I wish Vista/7 would improve memory management further by not dumping Superfetch contents on every standby and hibernate. I understand that this is extremely difficult to do for hibernate as that would require writing far more to disk, but it shouldn't be the case that the hard drive has to wake up and go crazy every time one moves from class to class.

 

it depends on what you want. fast hibernation, having to recache afterwards, or slow hibernation, not having to recache.

and in times where people have 6gb ram, and more, hibernation would take ages without this optimisation.

 

Yes drivers are faults of manufacturers BUT W7 makes it a hell of alot easier why mess with something thats already been taken care of? thats exactly what windows 7 does takes care of such problems that vista had, better ram and superfetch management as well as compatibility why they even threw in an XP Emulator so everyone would be happy.

im glad windows 7 took care of my driver problem which is another reason why its better

 

Better RAM and Superfetch management?

You mean because Win7 doesn't show you how much RAM it actually uses?...

You are not forming and argument based on logic.

You are saying "I don't care, why, something didn't work in Vista and works in Win7, therefore Win7 is better"...

That's like saying... hmm... the audio in my car doesn't sound right, I bought a new car and it sounds better, hence the new car is better.
(now, the new car could be used with a custom sound system while the old car was a little car with the cheapest sound system on the market) - yes, you had a problem on Vista - but that's not Vista, and because something didn't work for you on Vista and works on Win7 it doesn't mean Win7 is better.

 

win7 nevr cared about that particular driver and it's settings. it's the VENDOR that changed the defaults because users complained. win7 has many new nice features, that is NONE of it.

 

actually, yes. improved on the features vista brought in. superfetch is much less "disc-trashy" for example.

it does.

yep that part is stupid

 

You mean after log on? - But that was only a problem if you restarted regularly rather than used standby, and even then not that much of a problem.

In an obscure hidden performance tool not the task manager that all people always look at

 

THIS

and please no more car metaphors

i was on Vista SP1 too, you'd think theyd take care of that, it wasnt just MY problem it was global enough that it became a common problem

 

well, superfetch had such behaviour which wasn't liked. superfetch on win7 doesn't => it is improved.

doesn't matter if it doesn't matter to you, it's still a fact.


an obscure hidden performance tool one which is directly in the taskmanager with a button? amazingly well hidden

other than that, they show what ram is used, and what is free for apps to use. they don't need to show if there is anything else in that ram. the quick look only wants to see if there is enough free ram. both standby ram (a.k.a. superfetch filled caches) and 'free' (a.k.a. ram that has no useful data in it) are FREE RAM.

so they don't fake anything. it shows exactly how much ram is used, and how much is available to you. for details, performance monitor shows more info, on how the memory gets distributed.

 

which is why YOUR SOUND CARD VENDOR FIXED IT.

you make it believe that win7 fixed it. while it didn't. as it's no fault of vista. this is the wrongness of your statement.

i know it was an issue with people using that particular driver, had to change the settings on enough systems to know exactly how annoying it was.

but it's NO fault of vista.


and that cod crashed without soundcard, again, is no fault of vista

 

What software runs well on Vista and crashes on Win7? There is no such thing as "better written for Win7" vs Vista. The requirements, from the developers standpoint, are pretty much identical.

Gary

 

Thank you!!! That totally confirms my suspicion I had just by observing the disk activity during hibernation and waking from it.

Gary

 

"No difference in terms of performance compared with vista"

Fair enough, but remember vista is matured, and 7 even from the beta stages was where vista pretty much was today (was for me anyway and i was build 7100, flawless running on that.)

I have noticed good performance gains with general usage on 7 though, im not going of statistic here, but i can definately say 7 is much more responsive on my end then vista was, and i loved both O.S .

 

Agreed. Especially given the fact that by not writing the SuperFetch stuff, the system wakes up and is usable quicker as the SuperFetch reload occurs as a background task.

Gary

 

Windows 7 & Manufacturer FIXED it enough that installing W7 STRAIGHT on to the computer REQUIRED no need to change settings and what not and default works perfectly. few months ago i installed straight from vista and upgraded to Sp1 and the problem was not fixed. Why would i have to disable sound card on and off to play 1 game? lol

Anyway i play Mw2 more now, if it wasnt for my bro whos new to CoD4 i wouldnt be playing it as much haha.

 

no, sir, win7 did not fix it. ONLY the manufacturer.

and you could have easily fixed it with about 3 mouseclicks in vista (or by getting a newer driver from, dada, the manufacturer..

as said, win7 fixed quite some things, but that's not one of them. you can wind yourself around it, it doesn't make it true.

the only thing that you had luck with was, the manufacturer changed the default settings for the driver that got used in win7. but no one in the win7 team cared about that. they just took the most recent driver from the manufacturers page. which you could have done yourself before, too.

 

Guys,

Reading this thread I am getting an impression that suddenly, after the big boom that Win 7 caused and everyone was happy it came, now everyone is unhappy and Win 7 is poo now.

I had used Vista and then Win 7 on my previous computer, before I bought the all-in-one, and Win 7 was definitely better, even though the laptop had really good specs.

When I bought my current all-in-one system it came with Vista and I could not even look at it. I reformatted, deleted recovery partotion, forgot about ever having Vista on the PC. To me Win 7 is nicer and snappier than Vista and installs much faster.

You want to bash Win 7 now, well, your problem. I am not changing my mind as having used from the very beta stage I think this is a great operating system with a lot of useful tools.

 

na, we don't want to bash win7. we just don't want wrong statements about stuff. espencially random vista bashing for stuff it wasn't at fault. it's hip to do that, but wrong. vista is what made win7 what it is now. knowing the roots, it's ridiculous to bash vista, or win7. they are so tight related.

and yes, moving to win7 is an improvement. but it's no magic bullet. a good system before will only still be a good system after. it helps on bad systems, though.

and the op might have had a good config, so he had no gain.

 

Well, Windows 7 was marketed as this great new OS - by Microsoft, by newspapers - and you get people who use it and brag how good it is.

At the same time - the small group that actually follows events has always been saying that Windows 7 is at its core pretty much the same as Vista.

And I think category 2 is quite strong here on NBR

 

This is not exactly accurate. Microsoft tried very hard not to raise expectation on Win7 in order to avoid the "Wow starts here" marketing failure in the release of Vista. I've read most major reviews from NYT, CNet, PCMag, etc., but they all describe Win7 something like "solid improvement" or "Vista that should've been", but nothing like "revolutionary" or "great innovation". David Pogue @ NYTeven said, if I recall correctly, there is no compelling reason to upgrade if your Vista PC is working fine. So, if there is any "hype," it is really coming from the mouth (or fingers?) of some of the enthusiastic Win7 users.

 

Hmm....

Well, personally I won't use Win7 actively unless I buy a new laptop... I have it on my old one instead of XP Pro running as a server and sharing a printer...

I might even skip Win7 (for my daily usage) and end up getting Windows 8 once it comes out... (provided I buy no new laptop before Windows 8 comes out - and buy a laptop when Win8 is out)

 

it doesn't matter who created the hype, or if it's based on right or wrong statements. the hype is there, and hype is always that: too much. it's not awesome. it's a nice progression over vista. so was vista over xp.

but the hype in both cases was, in one case, random bashing an os, and this time, random praising an os.

good for microsoft this time. after getting randomly bashed for years for about everything they do, they deserve it.

 

That's true, revolutionary products are so rare that any degree of hype should be silenced with frowning disapproval.

 

LOL said the XP user about Vista for W7


Still W7 means less bothering about drivers and compatibility issues are more on important issues such as work and gaming... esp gaming

 

Where do you turn off windows animation in Vista ?

Leaving your subjective perception behind, what do tests tell us ?

 

ya... I came from vista 64-bit so i didnt see much of a change in proformance either, but the gagets are much easier to move, its more pleasing to the eyes than vista was, etc... it was worth it!

 

Windows Live Messenger 9 crashes on occasion on Win7... scrolling in Picasa doesn't function in Win7 as it does in Vista... I had quite a bit of trouble sorting out a software to play Blu-ray on my laptop. Also, some older versions of some software like Skype (3.8) won't run on win7. Sorry, I have to disagree. The requirements are clearly not identical. I suspect the software is still catching up with the new OS.

 

I know my my DOS copy of B17 doesn't work on Win7 either. And when I get it to work, the window is so small (EGA!).

If only Microprose could get their act together...

:laugh: :laugh:

 

Control Panel -> System (or right-click on "My Computer", and click on Properties), click on "Performance", then on "Adjust Visual Effects"

 

I don't even need to read any of this. Just reading the title made me remember how choppy and more memory consuming Vista was in comparison to 7 with the exact same hardware and softwares like antivirus, etc.

It's not to say that Vista was bad. With the right amount of RAM (because 1gb was a no-no), it's better and safer than XP for most applications & uses. 7 just fixed everything up and now it can run on PCs with 512mb ram.

 

yes we can blame vista for lots of stuff. vista (alias microsoft) should not have been released (esp 64-bit) without proper support for at least most current hardware. windows 7 is alot improved but really its vista rtm. or, vista was windows 7 beta.
they got there in the end (mostly). but its ok, before they finish windows 7, windows 8 will on us and they (us) can start all over again. have to keep those upgrade $$$ rolling in.

 

i ran vista 64bit on 2gig of ram from march 07 till this year when i went to win 7 64 bit beta and there was a definite improvement in speed

 

zero crashes for wlm since moving to win7, and it runs on all systems that run.
picasa i don't use.
bluray software, i tried different ones. all play without issue.
older version of skype? maybe. but the actual one works without a flaw (that is os related.. i think it has some design flaws).

but the requirement-changes are really minimal.

are you on 64bit? as the requirements to move from 32bit to 64bit are more steep than from vista to win7.

 

on one part it was clear that the switch to vista will be hard. on the other hand there is major blame towards the om's, which failed to be fair and only sell stuff labeled vista-capable that actually ran well with vista. that was the major issue that made it look so bad.

 

Win 7 is better than Vista even though i never ever had a single problem with Vista. I installed it on my now familys DV5z and i noticed a very noticeable performance increase especally with the boot time, hibernation and a bit of a increase of battery life. I'll install it on my Toshiba laptop the next time i decided to reformat so im not gonna rush it since i never had a problem with Vista

Btw here some good advice this should help for some:
Never ever install drivers that windows update offers you most of those drivers are generic and can actually screw up your computer performance even when playing games and other things you do on your computer.Always install drivers from your computer manfacturer only

 

The key word is for some... sometimes its the opposite, Windows Update drivers can be better.

Also, sometimes there are no drivers from the manufacturer available - my old laptop with a 910/915 Chipset and Intel graphics - no official drivers exist, Windows 7 found some it can use.

(Server and shares printer at home)

Its really something that needs to be decided on a case by case basis.