Contrary to popular belief it appears a software company called Iolo Technologies feels the common discussion on Windows 7 booting up faster is actually quite the reverse. Iolo Technologies sell PC Tune up software and they state that their laboratories found a brand new machine running Windows 7 took 1 minute and 34 seconds to become usable when compared against 1 minute and 6 seconds for Windows Vista. To test this they confirmed that they did not analyse the time it took for the desktop to appear but rather the time the system took to become fully usable with "cpu cycles no longer significantly high and a true idle state achieved." These results actually match what CNET recently found in their testing of the OS. Driverheaven has asked Microsoft for their views on the matter and we are awaiting an official response later today. Unfortunately Iolo have yet to detail how the testing took place and their exact methodology so it is hard for us to confirm or deny the findings. I will say that in our own internal testing that Windows 7 is certainly snappy enough but we have yet to thoroughly analyse the situation. Allan Campbell: Heaven Media
I have both on my system, and it seems like 7 boots faster than Vista for me. Not that I've bothered to time it or anything. I do notice that when I'm switching OSs from my Vista Flight Sim or Vista Shooters partitions, that it takes a LOT more time for Vista to shutdown. Win 7 closes a lot faster when I'm booting to one of the other OSs.
Their "it's not done until the CPU load drops" rule of thumb is debatable. It reminds me of a customer who thought he should not touch the system until the Vista Sidebar application had fully appeared, as only then would any part of the system be ready for user input. After hearing that he had never used the sidebar for anything, I turned it off and showed him how to run it again if he ever wanted to.
Same here. I previously had Vista 64-bit. Now I'm running Windows 7 64-bit RTM. The system seems to boot up a lot quicker. I don't think the metric they are using (waiting until the CPU becomes completely idle) is very useful. You don't have to wait for every single process to finish upon boot up. You can easily open a browser or whatever and start working. I found the exact opposite to be true for XP. If you do not wait for the hard drive to stop churning and the cpu to finish all the boot up processes, it will be nigh impossible to open a browser or do anything else.
[sarcasm]So now that I've got 7, I need their PC Tune-Up more than ever![/sarcasm] I've got Vista Business x64 and 7 Professional x64, I haven't measured, but they seem quite comparable in this respect and reasonably fast from the OS select menu to the login screen and from there on to the desktop.
blah... Theres a considerable difference between being able to use the machine after booting up and where cpu goes into an idle state... Win7 does boot up noticeably faster to which you can emediately start loading applications vs windows vista. I just think that win7 appears to be doing additional work that consumes more cpu power until it's completely done. Vista just starts thrashing on the hardrive and cpu later after booting up.. win7 on the other hand appears to get it's hd thrashing sorted out ahead of time with relative ease.
dumb study imo ... Vista used to cache all your RAM real fast whereas Windows 7 caches slower using less of your system (vista's RAM superfetch was something like 20mb/sec and Windows 7 looks like 1 or 2mb/sec ... less cpu used... better!) dumb study indeed
I am pretty sure this is bullschnapps. It's subjective, They are not the same oiperating system, they don't have access to the low level code. Windows 7 even makes me happy with its boot time. And *I* *LOVE* MAC OS X* and *hate* microsoft, but I may actually BUY more then one license for Win 7. That's how good they finally unfudged themselves.
All it counts is how long it takes to be on-desktop.. what's next? - using the CPU's first idle signal as reference?..stop smoking weed...will ya?