Windows 7 User Submissions

Date:

Comparison between Windows Vista and Windows 7

by Gabriel Fonseca
(Westminster, Colorado, USA)

After comparing Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit build to Windows Vista Home premium x32 and even the older Windows XP Professional x32 I have come to the conclusion that Windows 7 x64 is basically "Windows Vista done right".

Intallation is simpler even for non computer literate users. Faster to deploy and requires little to no knowledge about drivers, network setup or even wireless networking.

I have personally tested Release candidate builds of both Windows 7 x32 and X64 on both of my desktops as well as my laptop.

My findings:

Computer #1:
Athlon 64 X2 4800+
2 Gigabytes of DDR2 Dual Channel 800MHz
500 Gigabyte Hitachi Desktar Sata-2
Pci express geforce 8800 256MB DDR3
Windows 7 boots 18% faster, runs programs about 50% faster.

Computer #2:
Phenom 2 X3 720
4 Gigabytes of DDR2 Dual Channel 800MHz
400 Gigabyte Hitachi Desktar Sata-2
Pci express geforce 8800 superclocked 256MB DDR3
Windows 7 boots %45 percent faster, runs programs surprizingly about 200% faster!

Compter #3:
(Laptop)
Pentium M 720 (yep only 1.6 GHz)
1 Gigabyte of DDR-400 Single channel
160 Gigabyte Western digital EIDE scorpio
Intel GMA 915 Mobile Media Accelerator
Windows 7 Boots about 10% faster, runs programs about 20% faster.

The results were not noticable between the 64 and 32 bit variants. One note. There happens to be a glitch on the RTM release that makes almost anything USB think its "readyboost" ready.

Using the readyboost feature no longer actually improves performance noticably.

On my laptop, battery life actually improved by 30 minutes by using the recomended power savings in windows 7 for Balanced power and performance.

Also on a final note. I have yet to find a program that refuses to run on windows 7 besides Windows live onecare.

But thats ok, Windows Live Onecare is being discontinued and I patiently await the arrival of the release of Windows Security Essentials which has yet to be seen.