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This year's edition of WinHEC, which has already demonstrated Windows 7's digital goodness with Device Stage, has more good news about Microsoft's next desktop operating system:
As Maximum PC.com readers know, better hardware support has been a major goal of Windows 7 right from the start, and it looks as if Windows 7, even in its pre-beta stage, is making impressive strides.
Engadget has posted a video from WinHEC that shows a Windows 7 machine providing energy savings equivalent to an extra hour of DVD playback: you won't have to worry about running out of power before the movie ends, and you'll even have enough juice for a special feature or two.
WinHEC also featured Microsoft exec Jon DeVaan, the Senior Vice President in charge of Core Operating System Division, performing a "boot drag race" pitting identical machines running Windows 7 and Windows Vista: Windows 7 won by several seconds. It's part of DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky's keynote address, which you can see at the WinHEC virtual pressroom.
It isn't just Microsofties at WinHEC who are noticing the improvement in battery life; at jkOnTheRun, blogger Kevin Tofel put Windows 7 to work on two systems:
I have Windows 7 on the MSI Wind and also installed it on my Samsung Q1UP last night and there is a noticable difference in terms of run-time. I can't put exact numbers on it just yet and in fairness, it's probably not appropriate since this is a very early test build, but it's looking good so far for mobile devices.
Meanwhile, Lifehacker's Gina Trapani pitted Windows 7 against both Windows Vista and Windows XP on her triple-boot PC: a 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. Even with Windows 7 running on a slower PATA (IDE) hard disk than Windows Vista and XP (which are booting from an SATA hard disk), Windows 7 ties with Windows XP and both beat Windows Vista by 20% (measured from the operating system menu to the login screen).
Keep in mind that Windows 7 is still a pre-beta, so this level of performance should continue to improve.
If you're using Windows 7, are you noticing similar improvements? Hit the Comments button and give us the details.
Comments are closed on this article
NAYRhyno
November 07, 2008 at 8:17am
Win 7 is significantly faster on my 1 GHz Tablet w/ 1.25 GB of RAM. Most noticeably it doesn't slowdown nearly as much as Vista during HDD access/writes. Handwriting recognition is also faster and better/more accurate. It reports 30 minutes of extra battery life, although I haven't done any empirical testing.
vistageek
November 07, 2008 at 9:19am
I havn't noticed a huge boot speed increase, but the OS is generally just faster. From the time you see the desktop, you can just open up as many apps as you can and they all just pop up. The OS also uses less RAM than Vista. Photoshop runs faster in Windows 7 too. Also, my framrates in crysis with my 8600 gts 512 overclock almost doubled. No, I am serious. Like from being able to play on medium, to being able to play on high to very high. Windows 7 kicks butt!!!
Marcus_Soperus
November 06, 2008 at 9:53pm
Thanks for the tip about VirtualBox. It's available at http://www.virtualbox.org. It runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS and Open Solaris. Version 2.0.x, introduced in September, supports 64-bit operating systems and offers better performance with AMD processors than its predecessors.
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It's amazing how illogical a business built on binary logic can be.
soccer1105
November 06, 2008 at 9:47pm
I'm running 7 on a virtual machine, which slows boot times to a crawl. However, once booted, I've only devoted 1GB of my system RAM to 7, and it's running great. I have a pretty old CPU (Atholon X2 4200+). Combine that with the 1GB RAM and the fact it's on a virtual machine, and I'd say 7's great performance is almost miraculus. I'd even argue that it's running faster than Ubuntu 8.10, also installed on a virtual machine. (FYI, I'm using Sun's Virtual Box program. It's great, you should try it.)
DBsantos77
November 06, 2008 at 9:17pm
That Microsoft reimburses everyone that bought a copy of the Beta OS Vista.
knexkid
November 06, 2008 at 9:16pm
I am really having high hopes for Windows 7....but then again, didn't they promise all this stuff with Vista?
