Maximum PC Engineering Windows 7 RSS Feed

Windows 7's WEI Gets a Boost

Mark Edward Soper — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:24:46 -0600

As noted by Gizmodo, Windows 7 has made quite a few tweaks to the Windows Experience Index (WEI) first introduced by Windows Vista. For those of you tuning in late, the WEI tests hardware performance of five subsystems (processor, memory, desktop graphics, 3D gaming graphics, and hard disk), calculates a score for each one, and uses the lowest subsystem score as your WEI base score.

Since just after Windows Vista shipped, users of high-performance components, especially graphics cards, have been complaining loudly about Vista's WEI top score being capped at 5.9. While the Minpaso database of Vista WEI scores calculates a "presumption score" to try to make allowances for today's faster hardware, there hasn't been an official move from Microsoft until now. The code jockeys in Redmond heard you, and the top WEI subsystem and base score in Windows 7 is 7.9.

Windows Vista's WEI scores reflect mid-2006 technologies, and a lot has happened since then. As discussed by our friends at the Engineering Windows 7 blog, rankings in the 6.0-7.9 range are designed to handle these new technologies:

As an example for gaming users, we expect systems with gaming graphics scores in the 6.0 to 6.9 range to support DX10 graphics and deliver good frames rates at typical screen resolutions (like 40-50 frames per second at 1280x1024).

In fact, you must also have a WDDM 1.1 driver and DirectX 10 GPU support or your graphics score is capped at 5.9.

That makes sense, but what has a lot of Windows 7 users who previously ran Windows Vista confused is the difference in how Windows 7 tests hard disk performance. Don't be surprised to see lower WEI hard disk subsystem scores on an identical system if you move from Windows Vista to Windows 7. Windows 7's WEI subsystem tests are designed to more accurately test how drives react to mixtures of typical operation than the tests used in Windows Vista's WEI.

As you might expect with a beta, there are still a few hiccups in the Windows 7 WEI, particularly in the hard disk test. As comments at the Engineering Windows 7 blog post point out, some hard disks get higher WEI subsystem scores if write caching is disabled (which should actually lower performance).

So, if you're running Windows 7 on the same hardware you used for Vista, how do your WEI subsystem and base scores compare? Hit Comment and tell us.

A Closer Look at Windows 7's Taskbar

Mark Edward Soper — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:18:20 -0600

After a brief look back at the original taskbar in Windows 1.0 (Windows turned 20 this month), the Engineering Windows 7 blog dug deep into the enhanced features of the Windows 7 taskbar in its most recent entry.

A More Visual Taskbar

The Windows 7 taskbar now features large icons, support for Aero Glass, and no text, and when a window is maximized, the taskbar and the window's title bar no longer turn opaque and dark.

Smarter Program Launch Options

Windows 7 no longer has separate taskbar and Quick Launch buttons for applications, avoiding duplications. Right-click a button on the taskbar, and you can open recently-used documents associated with the program. How can you tell which button represents a program that's already running? A new feature called Color Hot-track changes the color of a running program's taskbar icon when you move your mouse over it.

Smarter Thumbnails

When you hover over a taskbar button, a live thumbnail appears, but in Windows 7, you can click on the thumbnail to switch to the program it represents. Thumbnails representing multiple windows of the same program are automatically grouped together, and when you hover over an icon representing multiple windows, each thumbnail is displayed separately (you still have the option to have a separate button for each program window if you prefer the older method). Hover over a thumbnail, and a new feature called Aero Peek displays the window on your desktop and fades other windows to clear 'glass' panes.

More Manageable Notification Area

The Notification Area can now be easily customized: drag icons from an optional icon menu into the standard menu.

All in all, it looks as if the changes in the Windows 7 taskbar are the most substantial in a long time. So, what do you think? Are they genuine improvements, or just more "churn?" Hit Comment and tell us. And, by the way, Happy Thanksgiving!

Illustrations courtesy of Engineering Windows 7.

Windows 7 M3 Build 6780 Updates

Justin Kerr — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:29:24 -0500

Screenshots have been appearing all over the net of Windows 7 M3 Build 6780, and one criticism seems to float to the top every time. Users are disappointed that the UI looks exactly like Vista. This reaction although true, should be taken with a grain of salt. Microsoft has a very storied history of leaving user interface tweaks to the very end for a good reason. Popular GUI elements are always in a state of flux among fickle users. Core improvements to the kernel on the other hand, are something that can be worked on at any time while leaving the final layer of Chrome to the very end. A full layout of screen shots of M3 (milestone 3) were posted at thinknext.net and is likely going to be similar to the version Microsoft will show at its upcoming PDC in October. One trend that we can identify now however is the inclusion of the ribbon interface from Office 2007 into core applications like Paint and WordPad. Other than this, things don’t look a whole lot different. Love it or hate it, the ribbon UI seems to be the future of Microsoft applications and is likely to become a trademark of the OS. The latest builds of Windows 7 include Internet Explorer 8 and presumably, given the lengthy turnaround on IE releases, will be the final version included in Windows 7. Currently the OS seems to remain on track for its scheduled launch somewhere between mid 2009 and early 2010. This timetable seems reasonable given that ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley expressed belief that Windows 7 will enter beta 1 by December of this year. Want to see the evolution of the paint UI from Windows 98 to Windows 7 so far? Hit the thumbnails to see f or yourself just how different the Windows 7 version actually is.

Windows 98

Windows XP

Windows Vista

Windows 7

Want to read more about Windows 7 Milestone 3? Check out Mark Soper's breakdown of the new features.

Engineering Windows 7 for Faster Boot Performance

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:58:05 -0500

What can be done to help Windows 7 boot faster? According to Windows Fundamentals feature team leader Michael Fortin, blogging on the e7 (Engineering Windows 7) blog. a clean install isn't necessarily the way to go:

As the system [running Windows Vista SP1] arrived to us, the off-the-shelf configuration had a ~45 second boot time. Performing a clean install of Vista SP1 on the same system produced a consistent ~23 second boot time. Of course, being a clean install, there were many fewer processes, services and a slightly different set of drivers (mostly the versions were different). However, we were able to take the off-the-shelf configuration and optimize it to produce a consistent boot time of ~21 seconds, ~2 seconds faster than the clean install because some driver/BIOS changes could be made in the optimized configuration.

Fortin identifies a number of design goals for Windows 7 to help it achieve a high percentage of "very good" boot times (under 15 seconds), including:

Reducing the number of system services
Reducing the demand that system services make on CPU, disk, and memory resources
Device and driver optimization
Improving parallelism of driver initialization (enabling multiple drivers to be installed at the same time)
Faster prefeching optimized for both traditional and SSD hard disks

Fortin's comments suggest that Microsoft is working very closely with system vendors to help assure that Windows 7 works well in typical preconfigured systems. Hopefully, Microsoft has learned a lot from the vast difference in performance between clean installs of Windows Vista and systems cluttered with OEM products not optimized for Vista.

Don't want to wait for Windows 7 to get faster boot times? Fortin also discusses analyzing systems with the Windows Performance Toolkit for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, available here.

How do you define fast boot time? When is a system "ready to go?" Hit the comment button and give us your thoughts.

Illustration adapted from Windows 7 logo courtesy of ArsTechnica.

A Closer Look at Windows 7's Approach to System Performance

Mark Edward Soper — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:44:02 -0500

The Engineering Windows 7 (aka "e7") blog at MSDN is providing us with a useful look at how the performance of Windows 7 is being analyzed in this week's blog post. So, what are the major subsystems being analyzed? Some of them include:

Memory usage: trying to balance time versus space (disk, memory)
CPU utilization: keep it as low as possible to improve multi-user scenarios and reduce power consumption
Disk I/O: reading, writing, paging performance for both traditional and solid-state drives
Boot, Shutdown, Standby/Resume: working with system vendors to make these operations as fast as possible
Base system: balancing "on-demand" loading of resources with the need to keep performance at as high a level as possible
Disk footprint: working with the space demands of device drivers, help system, optional components, diagnostics, and logging information

What hardware is Microsoft using? In contrast to the popular view that Redmond tests Windows only on the fastest hardware, the Engineering Windows 7 group is using a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit platforms with varying amounts of RAM (1,2, and 4GB), hard disk types (5400 rpm, 7200 rpm, and solid state), and various Intel and AMD processors for performance measurements, and is also using conditional code to customize Windows for particular hardware. And, if you wondered if you should opt into the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program, the e7 folks point out that it provides useful (and anonymous) data on how systems in the field are working.

One of Microsoft's goals in setting up the e7 blog was to get a wide range of user comments to help shape the direction of Windows 7, and with over 60 comments on this blog post alone, it's working. These comments aren't fanboy "Windows rules" or "Windows sucks"-level invective, either. They're thoughtful suggestions on everything from how customizable the user interface should be to how to improve the Registry. If you're concerned about the future of Windows, you should stop by and have a look - regularly - and add your two cents through their comments feature (as well as ours).

Windows 7 logo courtesy of ArsTechnica.