Hi all,

We have just published a look at performance with the Windows 7 Beta
released last week - if you could post a link on your site that would be
very much appreciated.

*Link:*
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/software/2009/01/16/windows-7-beta-performance/1


*Picture:*
http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2009/01/windows-7-beta-performance/fp_img.jpg


*Quote:
*/Generally speaking, the performance is almost identical to Vista with
an exception made for gaming, but we're putting that down to driver
optimisations at the moment.

For the most part the benchmarks flicker back and forth between Vista
and Windows 7 with no outright winner. There are a few concerns we have
at this time though - file compression tests are notably and
consistently slower and network copy performance is very slightly slower
as well. However, on the plus side, the simple file copy testing is
faster than in Vista and boot times are notably improved.

Windows 7 is supposed to be much more lightweight, too, and we've seen
it running on Atom-based machines without too much trouble. We've
obviously tested here with an incredibly high-end system and so the
performance differences may not be as noticeable at this end of the
spectrum. Where the optimisations might make more of a telling
difference is at the lower end of the scale, where hardware performance
is very much the bottleneck of your experience with an operating system
like Windows Vista or Windows 7.

That's something we'll be looking at in the future without a doubt, but
for now we can only go on what we've seen so far.

With that in mind, we haven't seen comprehensive evidence of any
optimisation or slimming of the OS that we would have loved to have
seen, but at least it's not / /even fatter like every previous
generation of Windows has forced onto us. The additional features and OS
tweaks are generally very good and very positive, despite the fact there
are still elements of Vista-fail that need surgically removing (the
sharing options would be a good starting point)./
*
*Cheers guys!

Tim Smalley
www.bit-tech.net