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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Windows Vista Boot Recovery Made Easy

We all wish today’s PC technology could be as stable as, say, your microwave: when was the last time your microwave crashed or failed to start up? Unfortunately, because of the complex nature of hardware and software, there are too many variables and internal processes interacting with each other for things to go smoothly 100% of the time, all the time. Windows will suddenly reboot itself when you’re in the middle of an important e-mail or surfing the web, or simply won’t boot up at all. You may have experienced these annoyances from time to time with XP, and until Windows 7 becomes available for public consumption, you may be having a few of these issues with Vista.

Vista failing to boot up or inexplicably crashing may be related to a whole host of problems, hardware or software. The former possibly being a defective sound card or graphics card, the latter a bad software driver acting up or missing system files that are vital for boot time. The first thing you need to figure out is if it’s indeed a hardware or software issue. Also, almost everything in your toolbox that applies to fixing an XP boot/crash issue won’t jibe with Vista, so you’ll need a whole new set of tools. So read on, and let’s fill your Vista toolbox.

Vista Won’t Boot

Vista’s failure to boot up properly is a binary problem: hardware or software. Have you recently installed any new hardware into your PC lately? New graphics card, sound card, hard drive, more RAM, perhaps? Improperly installed or defective hardware can stop Vista from booting dead in its tracks. If you’ve recently installed new components, try taking them out and putting them back in. For example, maybe your new graphics card isn’t sitting right in its slot or your new hard drive isn’t tightly connected with its cables and ribbons. If that doesn’t work, take out the culprit piece of hardware (install a quick replacement if said hardware is needed for essential computer functionality) and give your PC a boot. Also, it may seem silly, but ensure that your computer’s power cable is properly plugged in and that your PC’s power switch is set to “|” (“O” is off, and “|” is on). The process is called divide and conquer, and if your PC boots up all right, then at least you’ve pinpointed the problem.

A software issue may halt Vista at boot time, too. Retrace your steps and determine whether you’ve installed any applications that may be acting up; uninstall and reboot. If that solves the problem, you’ll know there’s something wrong with the application. Software drivers for hardware are notorious for causing headaches. Make sure that all your software drivers are updated, or you may need to roll back to a previous version if a newer one is causing Vista to crash or fail at boot time.

Vista DVD Recovery

Vista’s crash recovery options can be accessed by popping in your Vista DVD and rebooting your PC. You’ll be asked to Hit Any Key To Continue, and you’ll be inside the Vista DVD menu. If your PC skips your optical drive during boot time and goes directly to your hard drive, you’ll need to make a setting change in your motherboard’s BIOS. Restart the computer, and hit either DEL or F2 (different PC makers use different function keys) and you’ll be taken to the BIOS screen. Navigate to your Advanced BIOS options, and select your optical drive as “the first boot device”. Save the setting and restart your PC.

Once you’re inside the Windows Vista Recovery Environment select Repair your computer. The recovery environment will go through the motions and attempt to detect a Vista installation on your hard drives. The Vista Startup Repair application is rather easy to use. It can be used as a sort of panacea if you don’t want to delve too deeply and get your hands dirty. The Vista Startup Repair is very adept at fixing damaged boot records, AWOL system files, software driver issues, and several other problems that may be preventing your computer from booting normally. Also, if you’ve set a system restore point, Startup Repair can access this in the case a rollback is required to make things right. If you didn’t store your files in the usual places—User folder, My Documents, etc.–then Startup Repair may delete them, so always make sure you back up all essential files on a regular basis.

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