Windows 7 Performance - yeah, it's faster.

Posted By: Adam Bomb | Jun 5th @ 12:01 AM | 16,947 Views | 2 Comments

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Bill Karagounis is always going, going, going. It only makes sense, then, that he's the Principal Group Program Manager looking after performance in Windows, both client and server.
I sat down with Bill on what turned out to be the day we finalized the Windows 7 Release Candidate to talk about the performance improvements. He had a lot to talk about. He talked about some of the performance mantras in the Windows 7 design, things like "Ready and Responsive" and "User in Control."
Bill talked about the memory footprint in Win7 - this is the first time we've shipped an OS with a smaller footprint than its predecessor. He spent months fighting with groups about 2k of memory.
He talked about the Beta, and the wealth of telemetry data we were able to capture, to identify places we needed to improve performance even more.
Fascinating stuff, all the way around.

Tags: performance, Windows 7

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ye110wbeard
I'm Sean - I'm a PC - and I'm ENERGIZED

Fast? That's the understatement!

I've thrown Windows 7 on Pentium III systems with 512 meg of ram and found it out does Windows XP SP2. Windows 7 runs on a smaller footprint of hard drive. If you use a DVD install vs the USB you can save 2gb of required space and get it to install on an 8GB solid state drive. It gives the Aero interface capability on an Acer Aspire One ($300 NETBOOK). It installs off USB in 8 minutes on a 7 year old laptop.

Faster? Boy you guys are holding back. Windows 7 is the greatest most incredible technological leap Microsoft has put forth into the market. The compatabilty is better. There are some things I liked being packed into Vista that aren't in Windows 7 but a lot of that has been offloaded into "The Cloud" with Live.com. So you don't actually lose anything.

Ok now I *DO* have one comment to the team regarding Movie Maker. You had an astoundingly powerful and flexible version in Windows Vista. And there are hacks to copy Movie Maker from Vista to Windows 7 (and they work beautifully) but PLEASE make "Live Movie Maker" be as full featured as it's Vista Cousin. Movie Maker 2.6 (the downloadable version) is a far cry from Windows Vista Movie Maker 6.

Yes people use Movie Maker. It *IS* an excellent video editor and a great way for a lot of people to get started.

So having said that, keep up with the performance boosts. I can't wait for RTM! It's about to get rockin' busy at work between Windows 7 and Server 2008R2! Wooooooooooooooooooohooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!

Sean

Phoenix

Great interview Adam, I love these videos with Bill - He seems very knowledgeable, and he is very easy to understand. You should get him on more often, how about another video where you concentrate on 2008 R2?

An older interview where he talked about the new network stack in vista/2008 is one of my all time favorites. You can tell he is very passionate about what he does, though he does seem a little less excited than he was last time, but I imagine he isn't getting much sleep now a days...