First Look: Windows 7 Beta Performance

Early Thoughts

Generally speaking, the performance is almost identical to Vista with an exception made for gaming, but we're putting that down to driver optimisations at the moment.

For the most part the benchmarks flicker back and forth between Vista and Windows 7 with no outright winner. There are a few concerns we have at this time though - file compression tests are notably and consistently slower and network copy performance is very slightly slower as well. However, on the plus side, the simple file copy testing is faster than in Vista and boot times are notably improved.

Windows 7 is supposed to be much more lightweight, too, and we've seen it running on Atom-based machines without too much trouble. We've obviously tested here with an incredibly high-end system and so the performance differences may not be as noticeable at this end of the spectrum. Where the optimisations might make more of a telling difference is at the lower end of the scale, where hardware performance is very much the bottleneck of your experience with an operating system like Windows Vista or Windows 7.

That's something we'll be looking at in the future without a doubt, but for now we can only go on what we've seen so far.

With that in mind, we haven't seen comprehensive evidence of any optimisation or slimming of the OS that we would have loved to have seen, but at least it's not even fatter like every previous generation of Windows has forced onto us. The additional features and OS tweaks are generally very good and very positive, despite the fact there are still elements of Vista-fail that need surgically removing (the sharing options would be a good starting point).

We still think Microsoft needs to stop heading down the "one size fits all" road when it's making the next Windows operating system. There are just too many needs for a single mould and too many varying degrees of savviness from completely new user, to home theatre PC enthusiast, to gamer, to power-user, to student, to office PC, to workstation, to gods-knows-what-else. Microsoft needs to sell a generic but fast core operating system and then sell modules that bolt onto it - or better yet, let people design their own modules.

Despite these idealistic dreams about future Windows operating systems we quite frankly can't wait to upgrade. We're not sure if we're possibly just numb from a year of Vista-use and almost daily OS-installs for new hardware testing, or partly because the changes are an evolution into common sense that we really, really need. We can only hope that at least some of these improvements get ported to Service Pack 2 for Vista but, even if that happens, we're looking forward to getting rid of Vista and adopting what will hopefully be a lucky 7.

We're interested to hear what you think of the Windows 7 Beta if you've had chance to try it, so why not tell us about your experiences in the forums?