Windows 7 Blog

I’ve been a notebook user practically all my life. And I’m talking about since the days of Windows 3.1 - which, like dog years, is pretty long in computer years. In those years, I saw Windows become more user-friendly, more feature-laden and with cooler UIs, but at the expense of speed and battery life.

Windows Vista was sluggish and felt really bloated for me. I’m talking about running it on relatively new hardware here - a Dell XPS with Intel Core2 Duo 2GHz, 3GB RAM and a dedicated Nvidia graphics card. I simply hated it and would’ve downgraded to Windows XP if Dell had provided that option.

So I was pretty excited that Windows 7 would be snappier that Windows Vista …and some say, faster than Windows XP too. Booting time is noticeably better. According to this blog, Windows Vista took 37 seconds to boot from the bootscreen to the login screen, while Windows 7 only took 27 seconds on a similar machine.

Battery life is also better than on Windows Vista. And that’s saying a lot because despite all the criticisms, Windows Vista did have an improved battery life compared to Windows XP. Well, Windows 7 manages wireless radios and CPUs even better, resulting in up to 15% longer battery life than Vista.

Alas, the above is based on the RC version and the guys at Microsoft may decide to tweak Windows 7 to speed it up further in the final release. Conversely, they may decide to add more codes and we end up with a slower OS.

Only time will tell.

Tags: 7, battery, boot, time, vista, windows, xp

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