One of the reasons Windows 7 runs faster (faster start up, resume, shut down, less churn during user sessions) is due to the re-engineering of how Windows maintains and activates services running in the background. Microsoft's Channel 9 has an interesting video with a Windows kernel developer whose team designed a new trigger-based service controller that enables service developers to mark services as needing to run only when certain conditions are met. This means Windows 7 can more intelligently manage when to make resources avaiable for services that employ this trigger pattern for starting and stopping. Less code that runs at any given time means Windows 7 has more resources available for foreground processes that impact users interacting with the OS. The net effect of this for users is a snappier OS.
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Member since:2005-07-06
and? cpu & ram amount dont tell us much. What type of boot drives and their specs? how about your controller? is win7 using specific drivers or failsafe generics? there are a lot of other factors other than cpu speed and the amount of ram you have, people dont seem to get this. my ancient dual p3-600 boots xp in about 50 seconds, but I'm using a fast scsi drive and controller 
Edited 2009-01-27 13:14 UTC
Member since:2005-10-19
Member since:2006-02-05
Member since:2007-10-15
Member since:2005-07-03
The 64 bit version, inside VMware Fusion Version 2.0.1 (128865), boots from start to desktop (auto login, no password) in 55 secs aprox.
VM configured as Widows 2008 64bits, 1GB ram, bridged network.
Vista takes a little bit more tho', but my Vista install has Visual Studio 2008 installed. This windows 7 has nothing installed, only network configured.
It feels faster, and some minor changes are welcomed. It's gonna be a good windows compared to XP and Vista, provided you have updated hardware and need Windows, that is.
My Hardware is: Mac Pro with two Quad Xeon 2.8, 10GB ram. Vista VM was running with 2gb assigned at the time of the test (tho mostly idle), plus a horde of other Mac applications. Yet 5 gb of ram were free at the time of the test. Will test this night with a "fresh reboot".
Edited 2009-01-27 16:53 UTC
Member since:2008-07-15
2 minutes 20 secs to 30 secs to the desktop fully loaded, run in VirtualBox 1.4.1 on a Macbook 2ghz, with 1gb of ram assigned to the Win7 virtual machine.
A stripped down version of XP takes 1 min 5 sec with autologin. Its not really a fair comparision though, since not all the defaults are there.
Member since:
2005-10-19
I do like Windows and I'm an enthusiastic beta tester but I'm very dissatisfied with its performance. I mean it still boots in more than 60 seconds on my C2D computer with 4GB RAM. My notebook is an x60s with 2GB RAM and 7 boots in almost 2 minutes (i counted in the fully loaded desktop and running apps). What are your experiences?