Windows 7 running faster or slower then Vista?

I'm curious about if 7 will run smoother then a current Vista machine. Gaming numbers would be great, but even just running windows itself with multiple programs.

 

From just some recent general use (browsing and word processing, Youtube, etc):

W7 feels subjectively much quicker than Vista (I've used 32 & 64b vers of both).

 

Define "smoother"

I have Vista on several machines and I don't have any issue with smoothness of applications.

 

I agree with S.Subzero. There is no problems for me with "smoothness of applications" in Vista, Windows 7 is no better on my machine than Vista. The only differences that I've noticed is the speed at which things like the control panel, and libraries opens is faster with 7 than Vista. "Smoothness" is probably in the eye of the beholder and as such is very subjective. Personal opinions are what counts. You either like it or not. I can't tell you that only you can find that out with experience.

 

I dual boot Vista and Windows 7. I can tell you that from my boot screen Windows 7 finishes loading in roughly 1/2 the time it takes Vista. Overall everything 'feels' faster. Power usage is also lower with Windows 7 (about 15-20% improvement). But reports of this occurance is not consistant.

 

Don't have any numbers but feels a little snappier to me.

 

faster by far. boot time is in the low 20's, everything loads instantly when you sign in (as opposed to one at a time for vista).

games work well, i've played cs 1.6, halflife 2, xmen legends 2, chronicles of riddick, all work fine.

the only that happens is an occasional explorer hang up, though that usually happens after you put the laptop to sleep/hibernate. according to another thread taht was due to virtual clone drive installation so i just downloaded an update taht should fix it.

 

alot faster shaving 20 sec off my boot with my laptop and with my old desktop AMD 2.4 ghx athlon x2 and 1 gb ddr2 ram it shaves like 30 off

 

Yep 7 is much faster than Vista and a usually faster than XP. For games the difference is probably insignificant but bootup and apps load almost instantly on my desktop PC.

 

coming from Vista SP1, i would say HELL YEAH its faster
I'm Loving it

 

For me, 7 definitely boots more quickly and uses less processes, didn't check RAM, however I had never had any major problems with smoothness of programs, mostly just poorly written drivers BSODing me every few months.

 

drivers for w7 are the same as vista ???
in both 32 and 64 bit versions???

 

Boot time, no question, 7 is faster. As for browsing and such, it's about the same. I can't honestly say W7 is running faster because it's probably just my subconcious thinking about how it's new and supposed to be faster.

If it is faster it's negligible. Still nice though.

 

Generally speaking, yes. Or at least, "often".

I'm not sure I understand the question. 32b drivers run on 32b OSs and 64b drivers on 64b OSs, and they do not interchange. However, as I stated above, the correct bit depth driver from Vista will usually work on it's W7 counterpart.

 

Way faster than Vista - Noticeable Difference.

 

Add me to the list, Win 7 feels much better.

But I have to wonder, are we all experiencing a striking difference between Vista and Win 7, or are we all experiencing the benefits of doing a fresh install and dumping all the crap the OEMs load on your system?

I made a Dell laptop a lot faster once just by removing their huge bloated ControlPoint Connection Manager.

 

A lot of you are citing boot time as being markedly faster in Windows 7 than in Windows Vista - but, are you comparing two brand new, clean installs? Or are you comparing the Vista install loaded with your programs already, to a clean Windows 7 installation that merely has a few games installed? If it is the latter, that comparison is hardly accurate.

EDIT: misterbk beat me to the point, while I was searching for some fair benchmarks

 

The Vista x64 machines I use tend to boot very fast. Once upon a time I benchmarked my laptop (Sager 5793) and from power button to fully logged in and having Windows Live Mail open took under 60 seconds.

 

0 difference here. but it takes a bit of trial and error to find out why vista boots slow. it booted in 2.5min at the beginning. now, with disabled card reader, it boots in 30sec. so does win7.

0 difference, as i said.

 

yeah that was what i meant thx

i have another question about the hard disk space
when i used to have vista i noticed that my 80 gb partition almost became full and i don't know why
it's just like the hard disk free space kept shrinking or something LOL
this happens with w 7 too ????

 

That's possibly due, in part, to system restore points and shadow copies accumulating over time.

To reclaim your free space, select (highlight) your system disk (in windows explorer, etc), then:

right click/properties/disk cleanup/cleanup system files/more options/system restore and shadow copies/cleanup/delete/ok/delete

This will remove all but the most recent restore point and duplicate files and folders. This will also free up considerable HDD space if you haven't done it in a while. Check it out, you might be pleasantly surprised!

And yes, W7 appears to behave similarly to Vista in this regard.

 

W7 is snappier but not a lot if you know how to config Vista. Bootwise and memory wise I cannot argue. W7 > Vista in that regard. I was talking overall...

 

i've fresh installed win 7 and vista and win 7 is by far faster. everything works out of the box, and windows update found all of my drivers for win 7.

the only prob is that the drivers win 7 found sometimes weren't the best (ex. nvidia drivers). daemon tools doesn't work either, but use virtual clone drive (the beta one for win 7).

other than that everything else works! i'm using it as my primary os (its the only one installed on my laptop) and it hasn't failed on me yet. sleep, hibernate, everything works.

my laptop if you're wonder is a hp dv6563cl.

i highly recommend win 7, the beta is so nice. the libraries function is 10x better than what was on vista