September 04, 2009 by
Jason
Windows 7 is “outrunning” Windows Vista in more ways than one. Microsoft has labored to ensure that the latest Windows client outpaces its precursor in a variety of scenarios, from startup time, to common usage tasks, and to shutdown, to name just a few. Another aspect in which Windows 7 has Vista beat is upgrade performance. According to Chris Hernandez, from the Windows Deployment team, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to Windows 7 upgrades are at least 5% faster than Vista SP1 to Vista SP1 upgrades.
In fact, when it set out to do the operating system upgrade measuring contest, Microsoft was looking for at least a 5% threshold for upgrade scenarios involving Vista SP1 to Windows 7 was in comparison to jumps from Vista SP1 to Vista SP1. The Redmond-based company explained that the Windows Upgrade team monitored the Windows 7 upgrade performance during the development process, and that it compared it against its Vista baseline.
“The reason we choose to use a Vista SP1 -> Vista SP1 upgrade instead of Windows XP -> Vista as our baseline was for the following: Windows XP is a vastly different operating system compared to Vista and an upgrade from Windows XP -> Vista would not be a good comparison with Vista -> Windows 7. Read More»
Posted in Windows 7 | No Comments »
At the end of the past week, Microsoft made available to the public the results of a “browser measuring contest” involving Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.05 and Google Chrome 1.0. What the Redmond company did was to measure the browser load times for the top 25 websites worldwide. In the software company’s own comparison, IE8 managed to come out on top of its rivals, besting the open source Firefox and Chrome which were released in 2008, and not the current 3.1/3.5 version of Firefox or the 2.0 flavor of Chrome. But the real question is does it matter?
Obviously, Microsoft is rather a new comer to the browser measuring game. Simply because Internet Explorer, while considered by rival browser makers a reference point, never actually needed to compare itself to competitive products, especially from the perspective of the dominant browser on the market. IE continues to account for the lion’s share when it comes down to browser usage share worldwide, but Firefox has made a dent in its dominance that is harder and harder to ignore. And fact is that for the first time in the long life of Internet Explorer, Microsoft has a release that it’s worth comparing, as it is bound to score at least on par with rivals, if not even best them in certain scenarios. Read More»
Posted in Internet | 3 Comments »
Is Windows Vista Faster Than XP?
Our Windows Vista coverage began with a hands-on diary by MobilityGuru’s Barry Gerber, followed by an assessment of gameplay under Windows Vistaby graphics presidente Darren Polkowski, as well as a complete feature rundown of Vista. Barry took the new operating system and its look & feel with a grain of salt, while Darren was disappointed because OpenGL support was dropped along the way, meaning that Windows Vista currently offers horrible performance for graphics applications utilizing the Open Graphics Library.
We are sure that mainstream users will appreciate the improved usability of Windows Vista, and the average office/multimedia user will likely never notice the lack of OpenGL. However, a chapter on the overall performance of Windows Vista requires more dedication. In particular, two things require an in-depth analysis: Read More»
Posted in Windows Vista, Windows XP | 2 Comments »
February 19, 2008 by
Jason The Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter has been improved over the Windows XP version, but you can’t see or use all the best features unless you run it from the command line. By default the defrag tool only defragments files smaller than 64 MB, because according to Microsoft’s benchmarks, fragments of this size, which already consist of at least 16000 contiguous clusters, have a negligible impact on performance. If you still want to defrag files larger than 64 MB too, you need to use the -w switch mentioned below to defragment files of all size.
Disk Defragmenter does not defragment files in the Recycle Bin, or files which are in use. Disk Defragmenter will not degragment Bootsect dos, Safeboot fs, Safeboot csv, Safeboot rsv, Hiberfil sys, Memory dmp, or the Windows page file. Using the -b parameter will optimize these boot files. Read More»
Posted in Computer, Windows Vista | No Comments »
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