Windows 7 Moving Too Fast
Friday 20th February, 2009 09:49 Comments: 7
There's an article on The Register today claiming that "Windows 7 fast track alarms technical testers". This seems to have been sparked by one forum member claiming that "One build is not enough to gather enough feedback to move ahead this quickly" (although you've probably seen how many different builds are up on The Pirate Bay, clearly some people are getting more than one build) and "There is no incentive to testing anymore, anything we get the public gets, so can someone remind me why I'm on the techbeta?" (even though Technet gives you guaranteed access to all of the beta programs, Windows 7 Beta was originally meant to be restricted to 2.5 million people, and now that they've closed it again the only way to get it is via Technet or MSDN or perhaps some sort of dodgy torrent).
Why don't I think they're moving too fast? About four years ago Microsoft had to support:
Windows 2000 is currently in Extended support (only providing critical security fixes) and this only lasts just over a year (July 13, 2010). Windows XP is only in Mainstream support for another two months (and then there will only be critical security fixes until April 8, 2014). On the day that Windows 2000 ends Extended Support, Windows 2003 (including R2) will transition from Mainstream Support to Extended Support (available until July 14, 2015). This means that as of July 14th Microsoft only offer Mainstream Support for Vista, Windows 7, and Server 2008, as well as Windows Home Server.
I know what you're thinking... four versions of Windows versus the five versions from four years ago. That's not much better, is it? Well 2000, XP and 2003 have quite different codebases. A service pack for Windows 2000 couldn't be installed on XP, a service pack for 2003 couldn't be installed on XP. This all changed with Vista, as subsequent versions of Windows use the same code. This is why Windows Server 2008 displays SP1 as it came out at the same time as Vista SP1. Equally, Service Pack 2 can be applied to Vista and 2008. This means they're only really supporting one codebase for Vista/2008. Windows 7 will be more interesting, it will have a similar codebase, but it sounds like it won't be exactly the same (hence a version number of 6.1). Windows Server 2008 R2 is meant to be the same codebase as Windows 7 (much like Vista SP1/2008); confusingly Microsoft are pushing R2 as a minor update and Windows 7 as a major update (but with a minor version number for "compatability" reasons). The fly in the ointment is Windows Home Server, which is still in Mainstream Support until January 1, 2012 (but won't have Extended Support, probably because it's not a retail product, you can only buy it OEM).
In simple terms, I think Microsoft will be moving from five fairly different codebases (4.1, 4.9, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2) to 2 fairly similar codebases (6.0, 6.1) as well as support for Windows Home Server (the same codebase as Windows Server 2003 SP2, which has quite a good track record for security). I think that looks something like:
I'm not worried about Windows 7, if anything I'm excited. I like Vista, I think I'm going to love Windows 7.
PS: You can look up the support lifecycle information here for Microsoft products
Why don't I think they're moving too fast? About four years ago Microsoft had to support:
- Windows 98 SE
- Windows Me
- Windows 2000
- Windows XP (including Media Center editions)
- Windows 2003
Windows 2000 is currently in Extended support (only providing critical security fixes) and this only lasts just over a year (July 13, 2010). Windows XP is only in Mainstream support for another two months (and then there will only be critical security fixes until April 8, 2014). On the day that Windows 2000 ends Extended Support, Windows 2003 (including R2) will transition from Mainstream Support to Extended Support (available until July 14, 2015). This means that as of July 14th Microsoft only offer Mainstream Support for Vista, Windows 7, and Server 2008, as well as Windows Home Server.
I know what you're thinking... four versions of Windows versus the five versions from four years ago. That's not much better, is it? Well 2000, XP and 2003 have quite different codebases. A service pack for Windows 2000 couldn't be installed on XP, a service pack for 2003 couldn't be installed on XP. This all changed with Vista, as subsequent versions of Windows use the same code. This is why Windows Server 2008 displays SP1 as it came out at the same time as Vista SP1. Equally, Service Pack 2 can be applied to Vista and 2008. This means they're only really supporting one codebase for Vista/2008. Windows 7 will be more interesting, it will have a similar codebase, but it sounds like it won't be exactly the same (hence a version number of 6.1). Windows Server 2008 R2 is meant to be the same codebase as Windows 7 (much like Vista SP1/2008); confusingly Microsoft are pushing R2 as a minor update and Windows 7 as a major update (but with a minor version number for "compatability" reasons). The fly in the ointment is Windows Home Server, which is still in Mainstream Support until January 1, 2012 (but won't have Extended Support, probably because it's not a retail product, you can only buy it OEM).
In simple terms, I think Microsoft will be moving from five fairly different codebases (4.1, 4.9, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2) to 2 fairly similar codebases (6.0, 6.1) as well as support for Windows Home Server (the same codebase as Windows Server 2003 SP2, which has quite a good track record for security). I think that looks something like:
- Vista/2008
- Windows 7/2008 R2
- Windows Home Server
I'm not worried about Windows 7, if anything I'm excited. I like Vista, I think I'm going to love Windows 7.
PS: You can look up the support lifecycle information here for Microsoft products
Robert - Friday 20th February, 2009 11:44 It seems The Register have an updated story on Windows 7, the different builds that are available, and how to get hold of them:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/20/windows_7_update_tester/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/20/windows_7_update_tester/
I liked the look of Vista and many of the things it tried to do. It is a hopeless O/S for games though and it really did not deal with memory well at all. All my games without exception, run much better on XP. Vista is just too bloated to do them justice. On a plus, I think Vista makes good sense as a laptop O/S. It does multi screen better than XP, but I have decided not to use it for my TV machine.
In all honesty, I do think XP is too good an O/S to want to actually give up and using Vista does feel like a backwards steps in some ways, forward in others. M$ will need to be a bit smarter and code more efficiently if they want Win 7 to be successful.
In all honesty, I do think XP is too good an O/S to want to actually give up and using Vista does feel like a backwards steps in some ways, forward in others. M$ will need to be a bit smarter and code more efficiently if they want Win 7 to be successful.
It is a hopeless O/S for games though
I've been running Vista at our LAN parties for years and I've never found a game we play that won't run on it (I've even made all of them work at a native resolution of 1680x1050!) and I'm probably the only person at the LAN parties not to have crashed/been unable to play a game. I can even quite happily play World of Warcraft on Windows Server 2008 (although it's not quite as happy since I installed TrueCrypt's full disk encryption, but that's probably TrueCrypt's fault as it seemed to be working fine before). You might find your games run better on XP, but I do wonder if that's more of a driver/64-bit issue (possibly even anti-virus software related?). DirectX 10 does make things look prettier, as long as your card's up to the job. It might be interesting to see what you make of Windows 7. Perhaps I'll install the beta onto a spare disk and let you have a play at the Easter LAN party.
Windows 7 is still basically Vista, plus a few services/features tweaked or disabled (I believe SuperFetch has been heavily tweaked, because users such as yourself were complaining about Vista using so much memory, so now the hard disk won't thrash data in and out and applications will probably run a bit slower. but people prefer to see they're only using half a gigabyte instead of one and a half), and a few new features such as touchscreen support. I don't think Vista is a backwards step. It is arguably slower at certain things, such as copying files between legacy operating systems, but file transfers of large files between hard disks or between two Vista/2008 machines is typically faster. What else do you think XP is better at? I suspect Vista would be a lot faster if you didn't have so much virtualisation going on behind the scenes to make legacy applications work correctly, and I hope that as Microsoft move towards 64 bit operating systems and get users to move away from using Admin accounts on a daily basis then they'll remove some of that messy code.
One thing I love is how Microsoft try to give the users what they want, and users then complain. They don't like "insecure" operating systems so Vista comes with UAC enabled by default, forcing processes to run at low priviliges even if you're stupid/naive enough to use an Admin account for browsing the web and writing your Microsoft Word documents. Users don't like all of the prompts (which, in my experience, is only a pain during the initial install/confguration; after that it's only whenever there's a Windows Defender update, or the monthly set of patches from Microsoft, or when I try to run a legacy game/application) so they try to reduce the number in Windows 7 (e.g. Windows Update no longer requires Admin approval to install updates such as Windows Defender definitions - presumably because the updates have been signed by Microsoft). Now users are complaining that they're not being prompted when things such as UAC are disabled - so they want to see more prompts. And the crazy thing is that it's only an issue if the user is running as Admin and runs third party code that they've somehow downloaded from somewhere/something. If they were running as a normal user or they were running Vista (which prompts, by default, for such changes) then none of it would really matter.
It looks like Windows 7 has a pretty low static memory usage of about 250MB. If you check out XP's memory usage you'll probably notice a similar amount being used up. Vista does seem to be a bit higher than Windows 7 though.
http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=20712
Tore Lervik from Mindre.net created a virtual machine and gave it 700MB of RAM. It booted just fine and windows idle with no apps were using 360-400MB of ram. (That is just 50% of the total!) Then he decided to open 10 explorer windows just to see what usage it would go up to. With the 10 windows the ram usage went from 400MB to 425MB.
He didn't want to stop there, he wanted to find out when the prefetch-applications stopped and try to find the "static" amount of RAM that Windows 7 needs. He shut the system down and set the RAM to 500MB and booted back up. Now the system used 290MB with 210MB to spare. Then he rebooted it with 300MB available RAM. The boot wasn't happy about just getting 300MB to work with and the boot slowed down for quite some time. But when it finally got into the system it went to 250MB of RAM at idle.
So it seems around 250MB is Windows 7's "static" memory usage.
He didn't want to stop there, he wanted to find out when the prefetch-applications stopped and try to find the "static" amount of RAM that Windows 7 needs. He shut the system down and set the RAM to 500MB and booted back up. Now the system used 290MB with 210MB to spare. Then he rebooted it with 300MB available RAM. The boot wasn't happy about just getting 300MB to work with and the boot slowed down for quite some time. But when it finally got into the system it went to 250MB of RAM at idle.
So it seems around 250MB is Windows 7's "static" memory usage.
http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=20712
I never said games couldn't run. But the high end games, especially the ones using DX10 just took ages to load up and I could tell because Talanzar comes gaming at mine and it was frustrating to watch him go straight into an online game while mine spent another minute loading up. In terms of FPS, games especially ones like Crysis, were much faster in XP than in Vista. The gains from a pretty DX10 just werent worth it in terms of the slowdown and loads of people were reporting this. Vista is a decent system, it is just not the system that can suit everyone and Microsoft have got to get off thinking than one O/S (coincidentally the newest and shiniest) is going to suit everyone. Its impossible to make everyone happy. Hence the machines that actually require performance use XP, while the laptop which needs accessibility and to be easy plug and play is Vista.
I am just frustrated because I now have a gaming machine that is more capable than the O/S, but there just isn't the software or drivers to make use of it properly. The fact that it is still better to use an old O/S rather than the new one is a bit of an indictment really.
I am just frustrated because I now have a gaming machine that is more capable than the O/S, but there just isn't the software or drivers to make use of it properly. The fact that it is still better to use an old O/S rather than the new one is a bit of an indictment really.
I don't know of any games I play that take a minute to load anything. Are you sure it's not a general hardware/software issue? Perhaps you don't have enough RAM and SuperFetch was having to swap memory around? Have you tried disabling SuperFetch?
Try and ignore Crysis from your argument, it's a beast. If you have to play it, either stick with XP or go Vista x64 and make sure you have lots of RAM (you can pick up 4GB for under 40 quid nowadays). Ideally have an i7 and NVIDIA SLI setup too (Crysis is optimised for NVIDIA). It's also apparently DX9 with some DX10 extensions, hence why you can enable some Very High options under XP (and why you can add -dx9 to the command line to force it not to use DX10 extensions), and possibly why performance sucks a little bit on Vista. Are there any other games you can give as an example where XP is significantly faster?
BioShock, for instance, is another DX9 game with some DX10 enhancements, and benchmarks suggest that there's little difference between Vista and XP: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/page8.asp (they also conclude that you should go for Vista x64).
DX10 allows games to have better looking graphics, but does rely on more powerful hardware. Microsoft released Vista assuming it would need to last 3 years, two years on and current generation hardware is starting to allow consumers to run at max settings/max resolutions. With slightly older hardware, such as yours and mine, you have to choose: pretty or fast. If you have high end current generation hardware (e.g. i7 + NVIDIA SLI) then you can generally have both: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-295,2123-2.html
I'd still pick Vista x64 over XP for most things, including games (in fact, audio is about the only reason I might go back, aside from a few legacy network applications I sometimes have to use). Microsoft have made a business decision to support fewer operating systems, if people want to use another OS or stick with XP then they can - but in a couple months time they'll only get critical patches. If people buy a new computer they'll probably get Vista, but most modern computers are more than capable of running Vista - the OS runs best with dual core CPUs and at least 2GB of RAM, it's hard to buy anything less than that nowadays (some places still sell pairs of slow DDR2 512MB sticks). Driver issues aren't really Microsoft's problem, or at least they're not something that Microsoft can directly fix.
Try and ignore Crysis from your argument, it's a beast. If you have to play it, either stick with XP or go Vista x64 and make sure you have lots of RAM (you can pick up 4GB for under 40 quid nowadays). Ideally have an i7 and NVIDIA SLI setup too (Crysis is optimised for NVIDIA). It's also apparently DX9 with some DX10 extensions, hence why you can enable some Very High options under XP (and why you can add -dx9 to the command line to force it not to use DX10 extensions), and possibly why performance sucks a little bit on Vista. Are there any other games you can give as an example where XP is significantly faster?
BioShock, for instance, is another DX9 game with some DX10 enhancements, and benchmarks suggest that there's little difference between Vista and XP: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/page8.asp (they also conclude that you should go for Vista x64).
DX10 allows games to have better looking graphics, but does rely on more powerful hardware. Microsoft released Vista assuming it would need to last 3 years, two years on and current generation hardware is starting to allow consumers to run at max settings/max resolutions. With slightly older hardware, such as yours and mine, you have to choose: pretty or fast. If you have high end current generation hardware (e.g. i7 + NVIDIA SLI) then you can generally have both: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-295,2123-2.html
I'd still pick Vista x64 over XP for most things, including games (in fact, audio is about the only reason I might go back, aside from a few legacy network applications I sometimes have to use). Microsoft have made a business decision to support fewer operating systems, if people want to use another OS or stick with XP then they can - but in a couple months time they'll only get critical patches. If people buy a new computer they'll probably get Vista, but most modern computers are more than capable of running Vista - the OS runs best with dual core CPUs and at least 2GB of RAM, it's hard to buy anything less than that nowadays (some places still sell pairs of slow DDR2 512MB sticks). Driver issues aren't really Microsoft's problem, or at least they're not something that Microsoft can directly fix.
I noticed the difference with Team Fortress 2, Farcry 2 and with Call of Duty 4. It was all too consistent to be a one off. And yes I do already have 4gb of ram and I was using Vista64. Maybe I could have optimised it better, but that really shouldn't be a requirement which prevents non techie people from enjoying games properly.
I may well switch to Vista or Win 7 in a year's time, just for now the negatives outweigh the benefits.
I may well switch to Vista or Win 7 in a year's time, just for now the negatives outweigh the benefits.