Windows 7 Boots Slower Than Windows Vista?

According to a study carried out by IOlO technologies ( a company who sell pc tune up software ), Windows 7 takes longer to boot than its predecessor Windows Vista. IOlO’s lab unit found that Windows 7 takes 1 minute 34 seconds to boot compared to the 1 minute 6 seconds it takes Windows Vista.

IOlO noted that they didn’t stop the timer when the desktop appeared, but rather when the CPU cycles were low and a true idle state was achieved. They say that Windows 7 can take as little as 40 seconds to reach the desktop on a fresh install, but say the OS isn’t fully loaded until CPU cycles have decreased and that’s why Windows 7 “appears” to boot faster than Windows Vista.

 IOlO also claim that similar to Vista, Windows 7’s performance degrades over time. After several commonly used programs were installed, they found that the boot time increased to 2 minutes 34 seconds. However they did say that Windows 7 did perform better than Windows Vista at the 3 and 6 month marks.

According to tests carried out by PC World, they found that Windows 7 32 bit did take longer than Windows Vista but the 64 bit of Windows 7 was faster than Vista. However the boot times for Windows Vista and Windows 7 were much lower than IOlO’s. Only 39.6 seconds for Vista and 43.6 seconds for Windows 7, but they found that on different machines, Windows 7 was in some cases faster. So it really seems to depend on your hardware.

Ina Freid of Cnet acknowledged that fact that Windows 7 has an excellent sleep mode. She finds herself rarely doing a full reboot and instead goes in and out of sleep mode, which has been greatly improved in Windows 7. I find myself doing the same, I would turn my laptop on in the morning and I would be in and out of sleep mode as I need it.

But many people disagree with IOlO’s findings on Windows 7 boot times.Mr Robert of windows 7 news wrote-

Firstly- On my laptop – A Toshiba Qosmio F50-10z, Core 2 Duo P8400 with 4GB Ram, I boot Windows 7 RC1 32 bit, in 1 minute and 20-30 seconds. I have been using Windows 7 RC1 since August and have loads of programs installed and I see nothing like the boot times claimed by IOlO.

Secondly- Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit takes about 2 minutes to show my desktop and 3 minutes before side bar widgets are displayed and my computer is useable. Whats more I have far fewer amount of programs installed as I hardly ever use Vista compared to Windows 7.

Thirdly- Once the desktop appears, Windows 7 is ready to go within 5-10 seconds. It is fully responsive, Aero effects working and all programs load just as they should. Windows Vista on the other hand is still loading for at least another minute before its usable.

The study by IOlO didn’t stop the timer until the CPU was idle. The thing with Windows 7 is, it’s intelligent. It will load essential and basic process first that are required to run the computer. It will then load the remaining unessential processes once the demand on the CPU has decreased. This is why the CPU would still appear to be rather busy after the desktop is displayed. But in fact, what i’ve found is that the computer is perfectly usable, and fully responsive after a couple of seconds once the desktop appears ( Generally once I see my widgets ).

As  mentioned earlier, the study from PC World shows that it really does depend on your hardware. But if these results from IOlO appear to be consistent, it could be bad news for Microsoft as Windows 7 is being marketed for doing simple things like start up and shut down better than Windows Vista.

Source:

Cnet

http://ioiotechnologies.com/

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