Newsletter Archives

• Windows 7 performance boost due to popularity of Netbooks?

  Posted on March 22, 2009 at 11:24 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Emil Protalinski just posted an insightful piece on Ars Technica that says, in essence, we can attribute the (significant) improvements in Windows 7 performance to Microsoft’s attempts to wean Netbook users away from Windows XP.

  Microsoft is very much aware that it’s not going to make much money offering XP on netbooks forever. So it’s really no surprise that when Microsoft announced the Windows 7 editions last month, it promised that all editions would run on netbooks. To achieve this goal, the company has been tweaking like no tomorrow. It’s never bothered doing that with a new Windows release, at least not to the extent that it is doing with Windows 7.

  You bet your sweet bippy. That’s exactly what happened – and one of the main reasons why this ol’ boy with an admittedly jaundiced eye welcomes Windows 7 with open arms.

  I’ve been running Windows 7 Ultimate on an ASUS EEE PC 1000H netbook for a month now, and it’s slick. It isn’t fast. But it’s fast enough. And compared to that monster “laptop” I used to lug around, it’s positively liberating.

  Windows News netbook, Windows 7 performance

• Windows 7 performance

  Posted on March 11, 2009 at 06:53 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  With a pre-Release Candidate out in the wild, performance testing Windows 7 is finally making some sense. (With beta builds, performance reports are just flappin’ yer gums.)

  Over on ZDNet Blogs, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has run a few tests and come to these conclusions:

  • Windows 7 is, overall, better than both Vista and XP.
  • As Windows 7 progresses, it’s getting better (or at least the 64-bit editions are).
  • On a higher-spec system, 64-bit is best.
  • On a lower-spec system, 32-bit is best.

  That matches my subjective experience, quite precisely.

  Windows News Windows 7 performance