Windows 7 Called Slower than Vista

Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system boots slower than its unloved predecessor, Windows Vista, a PC tune-up developer said today.

microsoft windows 7The claims by iolo Technologies, a Los Angeles maker of PC software, contradict Microsoft's boasts that Windows 7 starts up faster than Vista.

According to iolo's tests, Windows 7 starts up 42% slower than Vista -- one minute, 34 seconds versus one minute, six seconds -- on a brand new machine when the time trials are run to the point where the machine is usable, at least by iolo's standards.

Windows 7 does seem to start faster than Vista, said iolo, with its time-to-the-desktop measured as around 40 seconds. But iolo measured startup as the point where the computer is "fully usable," with a low load on the processor.

Microsoft has said it's dedicated significant resources to making Windows 7 boot, and resume from sleep and hibernation, faster than Vista, which has been panned since 2007 for starting slowly.

Other tests, however, have echoed iolo, and showed that in some cases Windows 7 does boot slower than Vista. PC World, a sister publication to Computerworld , for example, benchmarked the new operating system as starting about 10% slower than Vista when 32-bit versions of the two were compared, although it was 14% faster on 64-bit.

iolo also said its tests indicated that Windows 7's startup times, like Vista's, degrade over time. After several "commonly-used" applications have been installed on a new Windows 7 box, for instance, its boot time -- again, as measured by the company -- slows to two minutes, 34 seconds, an increase of 64%.

Over an even more extended span, Windows 7's boot times get more sluggish than that: By the end of a simulated two-year period, Windows 7's startup times increased more than 330%.

Boot times have become a hot topic. Last week, Chinese computer maker Lenovo said its new ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops will boot Windows 7 56% faster than when loading XP or Vista, thanks to operating system, driver, and power management tweaks it made.

iolo said it will release more details and results of its Windows 7 boot-time benchmarks on Monday.



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Speed Showdown: Windows 7 vs. Windows Vista

With Windows 7 to be released tomorrow, this seemed like a perfect time to take a final look at how its performance compares with that of its much-maligned predecessor, Windows Vista. What we found probably won't surprise you very much, if you've been following the progress of Windows 7 since folks first started getting their hands on it around a year ago: Windows 7 beats Vista—just not always by a huge margin.

Given that—cosmetics aside—Windows 7 isn't really that different from Windows Vista, this was probably to be expected. Still, it was interesting to see the areas in which 7 really walloped Vista, and those in which there was little (if any) change. I'll turn the e-reins over to Michael Muchmore, who did the testing and wrote about his findings over on PCMag.com:

...The new OS starts up significantly faster than Vista on the same machine. And it's not just faster in boot time, but on a number of other benchmarks we ran, including video encoding, the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, Geekbench, and PCMark Vantage. The only area in which the new OS didn't show at least a little improvement was in shutdown speed.

We tested on clean installations of 64-bit Windows 7 and Vista on the same machine: a Dell Studio 14z running a 2.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3GB of DDR3 RAM and Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics...

In a new OS with a lot of new features, it's impressive that Microsoft has trimmed down and sped up the code.... Most of the tests showed about a 14 percent improvement—a pretty nice boost. Of course, your mileage will most definitely vary. I performed several of my tests on other laptops as well, including 32-bit systems, and got roughly similar results. Where there were differences, they were generally in Windows 7's favor. Overall, I'm confident that most users will experience noticeable performance improvement if they upgrade from Vista.

Be sure to read Michael's whole piece, in which he goes into greater detail about his tests and lists all of results—which pretty conclusively point to Windows 7 as the winner of this speed match-up.

I definitely agree with Michael that not everyone can expect comparable results. On my self-built home PC, which has a Core i7-920 CPU and 6GB DDR3 RAM plugged into an Asus P6T motherboard, I haven't seen an enormous performance difference after switching between a relatively new installation of Vista and a completely fresh installation of Windows 7. The new OS gets to the login screen maybe two seconds faster than Vista did, and to a usable desktop another three seconds sooner, but Vista was never distractingly slow in these areas for me.

Sure, even that little bit of extra time is nice, but the rest of Windows and most of my programs run just as well under 7 as they did under Vista—certainly not worse, but also not appreciably better. The biggest speed gains I've experienced have been incidental ones: Installing Windows 7 in the first place took about half the time Vista did, for instance, and thanks to Jump Lists, the new taskbar has made me a lot more organized and productive.

Have you observed major speed gains switching from Vista to Windows 7? How about (gasp) speed losses? Leave a comment or e-mail us at editor@extremetech.com to let us know your experiences.



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Study: Vista Startup Time is Faster than Windows 7

Even if Windows 7 isn't proven by benchmarks to be the fastest, bestest version of Microsoft's operating system yet, it certainly feels a lot better. We'd use it over Windows Vista any day of the week, but new findings show that it's not the performance king – at least not yet.

Sure, there have been many tweaks under the hood to make it better than Windows Vista, but it seems that boot time is actually longer in Windows 7 – at least according to a certain standard.

LA-based iolo technologies, makers of System Mechanic PC tune-up software, sent Tom's Hardware some of its findings after spending time with Windows 7.

Windows 7 starts up slower than Vista (1:34 vs 1:06 on a brand new machine), when the actual time to usability is considered. While Windows 7 shows its desktop relatively quickly (time to desktop hovers around 40 seconds for fresh installations), its time to usability, defined as the length of time it takes for the computer to become fully usable, with CPU cycles no longer significantly high and a true idle state achieved, is significantly longer.

Windows 7 boot times slow down dramatically with the addition of common-used software and for a 0-3 month-old machine measure 2:34 (that’s a minute longer than out of the box).

The newer OS seems to keep its composure better after some real-world use, perhaps signalling a design that's better suited to perform for most computer owners.

Windows 7 only beats Vista start-up times on 3-month-old and 6-month-old machines, otherwise trailing the older version significantly.

Stay tuned early next week when iolo technologies will reveal more of its Windows 7 performance findings. We'll have the coverage first hand.




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