Last week, on May 5th, I downloaded the Windows 7 RC client and quickly went to work on setting up. I did a clean install and reformatted my drive and all that jazz, so no, there won’t be any duel-booting benchmarks between Vista or XP vs 7, but regardless, I can tell you about my experiences!
Keep in mind, the specs of my main machine here is the following:
Windows 7 RC1 x86
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+
Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT
3GB RAM
General Use
Being on a clean install, it’s easy for me to say the experience performing general tasks such as browsing the web (using Google Chrome) or running a few programs here and there (AntiVirus, TweetDeck, etc) was super smooth and enjoyable, so I bogged down the machine with more software and got to the task of multi-tasking.
My usual combination for heavy-duty work is, for the most part, a MP3 player (Windows Media player or Songbird), along with TweetDeck, Chrome, Adobe Photoshop, and sometimes, Adobe Dreamweaver.
On Vista, even when starting these programs, there would be a little wait, and applying filters to a 1-2MB image would take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds. There were a couple instances, especially after having Photoshop open for more than a couple of hours, where the program would crash for no reason when I would try to save the image. I just didn’t have enough RAM to do it all, so I had to close a program or two, and restart Photoshop.
For Windows 7, I’ve yet to have this problem, and loading the programs one after the other was almost instant. I also noticed the RAM usages was a bit lower for some programs, such as Photoshop, which is holding at around only using 240 MB, where as on Vista I would see it eating up to almost 300 MB when it was idle. Web browsing, using chrome, was pretty much the same, which can be attributed to Google’s fast browser. Overall though, I’ve had a far easier time running multiple programs with 7 than I have on Vista in the past.
Gaming
There’s not much to say here except that gaming runs very similar on 7 as it does on Vista. I have yet to notice any huge change in load times or overall performance while running games such as Fallout 3, Left4Dead, and Guild Wars. I can say, though, that there are minimal improvements in FPS, but it’s so minimal it’s not really worth going more into detail with. I can, of course blame my GPU, which, while decent, is, well not really decent. I’ll live though.
What about XP?
I’ll be honest, the last machine I used XP on was in High School on a single core piece of s***. But I’ve been hearing a lot of comments asking why you should bother to switch to Vista or 7 (which is coming out this fall btw) when XP is working fine for you. Well, guess what, as great as XP was it won’t be able to keep up with Windows 7. Yes, it might not have the legacy support that XP has, but that’s because you really need to dump your 10-year old printer and pick up something … newer, but Windows 7 performs faster and more smooth, which is great for power users. Also the new look of Vista scared old XP users away from it, and 7 doesn’t help that bit. At all.
Well there is that XP mode. [laugh]
Anyway, take it or leave it. I love Windows 7, I’ve loved it since the beta, and when it’s released later this year, I’ll be in line to get it. I’ve had such a wonderful experience with it all It’d be hard for me to go back to XP, even Vista. But, I suppose it all depends what you use the computer for!