Coming January, Windows 7 will make its big debut in the form of the first public beta release. However, just as with any other pre-final Windows build, it has already been leaked onto various torrent websites, and Paul Thurrot, everyone’s favourite Microsoft zealot [“…hopefully Web site owners will get serious about getting ready for the next IE and correct these issues.” Wait, what?], has written a review of this new beta. He concludes: “In use, Windows 7 is fairly unexceptional in the sense that, yes, it has some nice improvements over Windows Vista, but, no, none of them are particularly major changes. In this sense, Windows 7 is much like your typical Microsoft Office release, a nicely tweaked version of the previous release. (Cue the obvious Steven Sinofsky anecdote here, I guess.) That said, Windows Vista is clearly in need of a spit-shine, not to mention a public execution, and Windows 7 will provide Microsoft with a way to do both.”
Thurrott gives the Windows 7 beta a four out of five “Smiling Thurrott Head” rating.
I thought this sounded a little familiar, so I dug up his final review on Windows Vista, which received the same rating (and is “highly recommended”):
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_08.asp
In this review, he claims that “Windows Vista performs as well or better than Windows XP on identical, modern hardware” – this didn’t turn out to be the experience for the vast majority of users.
So in this new article he goes on to say that “performance-wise, Windows 7 appears to be in the Windows Vista ballpark”, which by his logic should put it in the same league as XP. *Sigh*
He seems to go either way with Windows pre-releases, but rest assured he’ll be fawning over the retail version.
The only noticeable difference I could tell between windows 7 beta and an up to date vista in terms of performance is the boot time. On the same machine, I would say that 7 is close to twice as fast, and doesn’t thrash the disc for a few minutes after boot.
The reason we are told, that vista thrashes the disk is to make bootups “really fast” the next time and general maintenance. That and the plague that are systray progs…
So if windows 7 doesn’t do this, it’s either because you don’t have any additional crap running (whether this is an achievement of windows 7 is debatable…wait till oems get their hands on it).
Or, maybe it starts lots of things in the background as they are needed.
Or, maybe just ‘cos vista Sucks!
Nod32 is the only thing that would seriously impact boot time that sits in my systray. But the same software and drivers were installed on the same machine, and the windows 7 install didn’t thrash the disc at boot the way vista does.
Well, Vista’s problem is that it doesn’t organize files needed at boot time in a single continuous chunk, then read that chunk directly to ram, notifying the stage 2/kernel when a resource is ready to be used.
Vista merely keeps a list of the files needed, then tries to pull them from wherever they may be as the system starts. If Windows 7 finally got smart and kept track of each file loaded at startup – and their positions and loading order, then would ‘reserve’ a section of the drive for boot-up, then re-order the physical data on the disk as it is to be read, they would see a decent jump.
Very little other than kernel/services/drivers needs memory during boot-up, so using max memory during this time is inconsequential. The process should start with the Stage 2 boot & kernel strap – first thing. Nothing else should have direct access to the disk except through the proper file system APIs. If something requests a file before it is loaded, it is given a higher incremental value which may – ultimately – cause re-ordering ( providing other files loaded into RAM have yet to be accessed ).
Basically just a clean little buffer with integrated defrag ( reserved allocations will prevent some file fragmentation ).
Oh well, I’ve decide to give OpenGL a run for its money, I just need to learn it tonight 😉
–The loon
Yeah.. problem is he’s not the only one saying it.
Additional problem: you didn’t provide anyone else who did.
Look it up yourself. It’s been said plenty of other places.
emphasis added
… as in… ?
I mean, surely, if pressed, you could just crank out ONE, right? Here’s your chance to shine! You shouldn’t pass it by. Provide a link that proves your point. However, asking me to bolster your point makes you sound either lazy or unable to do so yourself.
Neither. I am just disinterested in doing so.
If memory serves me correctly though, I can recall four articles including this one by Paul. Google it and you’ll see, otherwise asking me to somehow bolster your point makes you sound lazy or unable to prove I am wrong.
While I’m not particularly engaged by this topic, diskinetic did make a good point, and you do seem to be trying your best to avoid it.
a lot less a blushing review than others… I’ve read many reviews including the latest i think from zdnet and it was a massive blushing review calling it “the best beta of an operating system ever released by microsoft”
and from my own time with the first vista leak + bluebadge unlock i can agree i love it enough that i use it on 3 pc’s full time, no crashes, fast startup, instant resume from sleep, everythings smooth i truely love using it.
basically Vista has paved the way for 7, just like 2000 paved the way for XP. 2000 is more polished though.
Perhaps that’s why I’m still using it…
If it were not for some programs being incompatible with 2k, I would still be using it. It was nice and lean compared to XP.
So web developers have to hurry up to fix things…. just because MS decided to go with their own EEE BS (10 years after the fact). He is _indeed_ one of my favorite MS shills ever (he is in a bitter fight with Rob Enderle to get the title).
Google is just another non-html-valid site. Even their home page has 62 errors.
Sure you can blame the browser but in this case both parties might held responsible.
Edited 2008-12-30 02:56 UTC
I was commenting about this exact same sentence a day or two ago (since I saw the article long before it appeared here), since when are website owners responsible if the browser engine doesn’t adhere to standards and because of such renders webpages incorrectly?
It’s like someone telling the city council that they need to change the road pavement because their cars don’t have tires…
Oh well, seeing from who it’s coming, I’m not amazed (nor amused unfortunately).
When the browser has a _huge_ majority it is the standard. My committee of two dogs, a cat and I can declare that all breakfast cereals come in only square boxes and not rectangular ones or we will not eat them. We shouldn’t whine when we go hungry in the morning. The rest of the world would rather “get things done”.
You are right, but here are the statistics (top 3 browsers):
2008 IE7 IE6 Firefox
November 26.6% 20.0% 44.2%
By changing their standards away from what they were in an older version, MS has split their majority in half, and now Firefox should be the standard by your logic.
If you’re measuring marketshare by version number with Explorer at least do the same with Firefox.
Edited 2008-12-30 13:58 UTC
Thank you so much, Feanor. Most people humm and haw, saying things like “It depends upon what sites you sample” and “it’s hard to get a good measure of”. Thank you for finally providing us with “The Statistics”. The definitive ones. I’m having your post permaplaqued and framed. You heard it first on OSNews, folks. Firefox is used by more people than any other browser in the world.
So… what’s your source on that?
Edited 2008-12-30 14:11 UTC
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
What I was trying to get at was the fact that his argument can’t hold up because the browser market is very close between FF and IE, so if you code standard for one or the other you’re screwing half of the Internet basically. If everyone coded their browsers to a single standard and everyone coded their websites to the same standard the world would be a much better place.
And I’m no stranger to sarcasm sir.
But the browser market is not “very close” between IE and FF. The w3schools.com domain’s statistics would be about as favorable to FF as any domain on the net, except for maybe spreadfirefox.com. And IE still wins there. I hate that fact. But it is true. And denying the truth does not help us.
In the world of dynamic web pages, it doesn’t matter which browser is the so-called “standard” browser.
Plenty of sites dynamically generate browser specific code to get around broken browsers.
who to blame when both the website and the browser engine don’t adhere to standards?
Edited 2008-12-30 13:55 UTC
If your business earns from its website (be it because of online shops or just because you advertise your products on there) then it’s every bit yours and our responsibility to ensure it supports every major browser – even if it’s the browsers fault in not adhearing to w3c standards.
Not to do so is a little like cutting off your own nose to spite your face.
XP was the same way. Minor update of kernel, some window dressing(literally GUI), a few “new” shared libraries, plus a change in driver architecture.
IOW a slightly updated version of win2k. Pretty much adding those missing shared libs to a win2k install lets it run pretty much all supposedly XP only software until very recent digital restrictions management schemes started to make use of the single new funcion added to the kernel as part of their implementations, however a simple crack neatly gets around that even.
Vista was probably the biggest OS change in years, and before that win2k was the biggest change, then before that windows 95, then before that NT 3.51 the first really useable version of NT.
DOS they bought. Windows 1-3.1 was a DOS shell. NT4 was an update of 3.x, W98 + SE was an update of 95, ME was just an abortion, XP was a tweaking of win2k, and now it sounds like Windows 7 will be a tweak of Vista, but as you can see it is a typical MS pattern.
Is it just me, or is this story missing from the front page? I can only get to it via the RSS feed.
Edit: OK, I see the ‘definitive format’ wasn’t so definitive after all – we’re back to a Page 2 pane on the right.
Edited 2008-12-30 18:02 UTC