which one is worse, Vista or 7?

[deadrats]

seriously which sucks more? allow me to do the honors and examine this most pressing of questions.

Vista - blows and hard. despite all the effort that microshaft put into marketing that steaming pile and all the effort they put into securing positive spin via the numerous revues of the OS, the fact remains that Vista was a sub-par OS, saddled with some new takes on existing technology, given a face lift and passed off as a whole new OS.

before i go any further i should inform you guys that all impressions were gleaned from tests of legit copies of the OSes mentioned, no crap put together by some clown posting on the pirate bay. XP 64 is an oem copy bought at a computer show years ago, Vista and Win 7 were acquired via a friend of mine that works as a custodian at a community college, as part of the benefits package he gets, in addition to being allowed to take classes for free (i forget how many credits he's allowed to take per semester) he also gets an employee discount from any vendor the school deals with. long story short, he was able to get me legit copies of each OS for $20 a pop. i still consider them to be a waste of money. i should also mention that the test rig is a phenom x4 620 with 6 gigs of ddr2 667 and a 9600 gso.

Vista (all tests were done with 64 bit versions) introduced a bunch of "new" technologies, such as kernel patch protection (only for 64 bit versions) and data execution prevention (DEP), both of which existed in XP 64 (and DEP was even available on xp sp2, though i'm fairly certain that it was software enforced in 32 bit windows).

Vista was also featured a number of "changes" meant to "maintain and improve" performance over time, in theory it was supposed to prevent what most enthusiasts call "windows rot". the reality is that the "changes" microsoft made were nothing more than new polish on already existing features. "ready boost", which basically allowed an end user to insert a thumb drive and have it used to "improve" performance on systems with low amounts of ram, was nothing more than a fancy name for the ability to put the page file on a thumb drive. while those that never used win 2k won't be aware of this, 2k users were able to do the exact same thing, so long as the thumb drive used the ntfs file system, you could move the page file onto it.

when xp rolled around, microsoft made a number of design changes and one of them was when the usb ports were initialized during the boot process, since xp would initialize the usb ports (in an effort to make the boot process seem faster on xp, microsoft used to let the OS show the desktop before the OS was ready to be used) after the OS was supposedly already booted up, the OS would choke during boot up if the page file resided on a thumb drive.

the next 2 "features" meant to improve performance were "super fetch", which was supposed to learn what programs you use most often and load them into ram so that launching them would be much faster as well as actively move the associated files to the beginning of the disk for faster access as well as implementing a "new" ram management scheme that took the approach that "free ram is wasted ram" and thus would actively cache all free ram. in addition to these changes they added an automatic defrag option to the included defragger that was enabled by default and scheduled to run every 2 days, simultaneously, "super-fetch" would also run defragger in the background in order to facilitate it's moving of files.

here's the reality, "free ram is wasted ram" started with server 2003 64 bit and was continued with XP 64 (xp 64 is based on server 2003 64 which is the 64 bit version of server 2003 which is the server version of xp), on my current system XP 64 about 2 gigs of ram are being used by all programs (including the OS), about 4 gigs are listed as both being "cached" and available", Vista just continues this trend. running the defragger in the background constantly does little to maintain or improve performance, unless the drive is so heavily fragmented that having the hard drive head seek out file fragments would take more time than having the heads perform constant read/write/delete operations as it defrags the hdd.

furthermore, it continues the fallacy that somehow having data on the outer edge of the disk results in faster read/writes, this fallacy has its origins in the fact that few computer users, and evidently just as few computer programmers, ever studies any advanced physics. now it's true that if you have a disk and spin it, a point on the outer edge of the of the disk will have a faster angular velocity than a corresponding point on a concentric circle closer to the center of the disk, but the reason for that has to do with conservation of momentum and energy.

starting with a disk in an inertial frame of reference (for the sake of simplicity, assume a disk that is subjected to zero force and has zero kinetic energy, in other words it's stationary), all points on said disk have the same amount of energy and momentum, specifically 0. when you start to spin the disk, all the points must maintain the same relative position to one another, since the point on the outer edge has to travel a greater distance than the point on the smaller circle, it must travel at a faster angular velocity, but since it has to travel a greater distance (by virtue of the structure of a disk), a head moving perpendicular to disk could expect to measure a hertz (this being a measure of frequency) that has the same value for a point on the smaller circle as for the point on the outer edge. for those of you confused think of it as a drag race were the slower car is given a shorter track, if the point at the end of the race track is the point where the disk heads are waiting for the data it won't matter if the data is being carried by the slower car or the faster one, both pieces of data will get to the head at the same time. thus "super-fetch" is a useless feature and "ram caching" is a rehash of an XP 64 feature.

i should make one note, if a user used the exact same 2 or 3 programs every day, say perhaps a business using the same spreadsheet app or pdf creater or the same browser, then one could be excused for thinking that having said app already cached to ram would improve the user's experience, since load times would be reduced, but the truth of the matter is that most home users, other than a web browser, rarely use the same app day after day and even if they did loading the app isn't what takes a long time, it's the app having to load the data you will be working on that takes a long time. in other words, the media player may be only 20 mb in size, how long does it really take to launch a media player? what takes a long time is the 8 gig hi def movie file you want to watch that needs to be cached partially to the video cards frame buffer, then to system ram and then if you don't have enough resources, the buffers have to be flushed and then filled with the rest of the movie, that takes a long time, similarly the 5 mb pdf viewer isn't what chokes your pc, it's the 500mb pdf that chokes your pc. "super-fetch" won't help one little bit with any of this.

but what's more important is that microsoft, for some bizarre reason, chose not to acknowledge to real reason windows performance tanks over time, the registry. what happens is that the registry gets filed with orphaned entries over time, as programs are installed and uninstalled, and when the registry gets past a certain size it takes a while for the OS to scan the hive(s) for configuration settings, which leads to a delay in launching apps and performing various tasks. all microsoft had to do was include a registry cleaner built into the OS that ran every month or two and declining windows performance problem solved.

my feeling is that they didn't want to do this because the registry exists primarily to aid in anti-piracy efforts, i.e. most protection schemes involve placing a hidden entry in the registry for various reasons, such as enforcing a time demo limit, a how many runs limit, prevent bypassing of anti-piracy efforts by re-installing, etc. most tech savvy users already know that with a good registry cleaner, bypassing most said anti-piracy efforts is child's play, i think microsoft didn't want to include a tool that would facilitate that.

the problems with Vista don't end there, however. Vista is slow beyond belief, going from XP 64 to Vista was like driving my truck on a dry road and suddenly being forced to drive through mud 2 feet deep. while Vista features a new gui and said gui is supposedly gpu accelerated, the reality is that parts of xp's gui were also supposed to be gpu accelerated, such as the alpha blending capabilities (what most would know as transparency), yet when xp came out many user's video cards didn't support hardware alpha blending (which is funny considering the sega dreamcast supported it) and thus those users found xp to be ridiculously slow unless they disabled the gui.

i was repeatedly perplexed by Vista's performance, in most of the benchmarks i ran it was consistently slower than XP 64, at times by quite a bit. but the OS itself was also slow, in terms of every perceivable metric, such as navigating the gui (turning off all the effects and aero resulted in even slower navigation), the amount of time it took to display all the files in a given folder (even XP 64, in folders with hundreds of files, displaying them takes time but nothing like Vista) was ridiculous (and that progress bar at the top of the folder was annoying), search was slow as sh*t, even with the indexing service turned on (though having the service turned on resulted in the hdd's constantly being accessed and thus "grinding", not to mention it killed performance), and the worst thing is that nothing i did about it seemed to make a lick of difference.

i tried no service packs, service pack 1, service pack 2 (which actually took 1 HOUR to install!!!), different updates that were supposed to help with performance. the final 2 straws were the fact that DEP seemed to have been significantly changed since XP 64 and apps that ran fine under XP 64 would suddenly error out after a few minutes of run time. after looking into the stop error message i was getting i was able to discern that it was a problem with DEP for some reason shutting down the app. there seemed to be no way to bypass this behavior, no matter how i configured DEP, even going as far as adding an exception for said apps, still they would crap out after a few seconds.

the other problem i ran into is that Vista seems to have some kind of memory leak, though i suspect it was the result of one of the updates, though i gave up trying to figure out which one. what eventually happened is that Vista started behaving like an app that's out of ram, i.e. all operations slow to a crawl, mouse movements are in slow motion, with a very discernible delay between when the mouse is moved (or button clicked) and when the corresponding action is taken.

i will say right now that the last 2 problems reared their ugly heads with Win 7 as well.

the Win 7 install was an upgrade from Vista, if you can actually call it that. during the install i noticed that Win 7 seemed to have copied my Vista installation to another folder (about 30 gigs in size) and then transfered the files, folders and settings back into the Win 7 installation, thus i'm not sure one can truly say that the "upgrade" option in Win 7 upgrades anything (it's not over-writing the Vista install) so much as it uses the microsoft migration wizard, as such i think one could be justified in labeling an "upgrade" install as a "clean" install.

i will say this, when i first used Win 7 i was blown away. i wasn't crazy about the gui changes (trying to figure out how to access the "services" utility proved to be a major pain in the ass), i found that the basic arrangement of the various configuration utilities were not where i was accustomed to (i firmly believe that the changes were meant to act as an incentive for IT pros to get certified in Win 7 administration, as a way for microsoft to make more money, from testing, books, classes, etc) and despite being able to navigate and configure both XP and Vista with my eyes closed, it took me a while to figure out how to do the same things in Win 7. i also hated the fact that there was no easy way to select the "classic" menu without doing a google search and i absolutely hated what they did with the taskbar and those silly thumbnail previews, it looked to me like they simultaneously tried to copy OS X and rip off KDE, which has had a similar feature for quite a while.

be that as it may, compared to Vista's Yugo, Win 7 felt like a Ferrari. i remember trying Vista on a buddy's pc, that has an overclocked i7 920, 9 gigs of ddr3 and 3 285 gtx's in sli and still thinking that the OS itself felt slow. in comparison, while the benchmarks i ran were almost a wash compared to XP 64, the OS did feel like it had been supercharged and if i had to guess it's most likely that microsoft 3d accelerated the whole gui. for a while i was in love with Win 7, but pretty soon it's Vista underpinnings started showing.

the same apps that used to run flawlessly on XP 64 and would error out after a few minutes on Vista, would on first attempt refuse to run at all (given me the same error message that Vista gave that pointed to a DEP issue) and if running the app was attempted again, Win 7 would actually BSOD!!! i haven't seen a blue screen in ages, it's almost impossible to blue screen XP 64, yet Win 7 would repeatedly blue screen with an error message that i was able to trace back to DEP. Win 7 blue screened so many times on me that it actually brought back memories of Win Me.

at first i thought there was something wrong with the ram i was using that maybe was being masked by XP 64, but numerous memory tests, including using Vista and Win 7 ram tester failed to show anything.

of course i hit windows update and downloaded all sort of updates that were supposed to correct performance issues, but nothing seemed to work, the damn OS would still BSOD. the final straw was that just like Vista i ran into what must be termed a memory leak and much like Vista before it, it seemed that the OS was running out of ram with the same symptoms described before.

that was it for me, i grabbed my XP 64 disk and went back to old faithful, the hell with the DX10 games i wanted to try, to hell with DX Compute, i for one have had it with both Vista and 7, and it's going to take a lot to convince me to try 8 when it's released.

how about you guys, anyone have any similar experiences?

[lowellriggsiam]

I have never had an issue with windows Vista, my PC and my laptop both run it. The only issue I had was I couldn't instally my Nero 6 Ultra on it, and that is not a complaint.

[Rudyard]

Has anyone else noticed a consistant theme to this posters threads.......

[wulf109]

Since this forum is about video processing I'll agree with deadrats. Vista is noticeably slower than XP at video processing. W7 is faster the Vista,but still slower than XP. I'll stick with XP for the present. Just because you bought a computer with Vista or W7 on it is no reason to wear blinders,thay are slower bloated version of XP.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Has anyone else noticed a consistant theme to this posters threads.......

Yes that's why we call deadrats "special".

[Attachment 494 - Click to enlarge]

[davidsama]

To me windows 7 is worse than vista.

[aedipuss]

since the programs i run for video editing aren't really 64 bit yet i can only comment on the 32 bit versions of xp and 7 i use. i skipped vista completely.

everything starts, loads and runs faster for me on win7 than xp. and they all run, i haven't had a single program not work on 7 that worked in xp. no memory leaks, no bsods, searching and opening folders is much quicker also. nothing runs in the background all the time, indexing is transparent and the hard drives aren't running all the time either. the new placement of admin tools and the like did take about 10 minutes to get used to, but i think it's much better organized with everything off to the side of the start menu.

[Forum Troll]

I just installed 7 P on my laptop, and it runs better than Vista did. I quite like 7 P now, especially with classicshell installed.

[luigi2000]

Vista compared to WinXp is sluggish and a resource hog. Windows 7 is the best OS that Microsoft has released. Also the new folder structure and the user interface are great.

I am sorry indeed that there are unsatisfied Win7 users. But here are two polite suggestions. Migrate to another OS, to make your computing problems go away. Or, keep using WinXp, and complain about something else.

[wulf109]

Maybe Vista and W7 are more about Microsoft's cash flow and profit than being "New Improved OS's"

[bevills1]

I prefer sticking with WinXP myself, but most will have to upgrade eventually due to lack of software support as time passes. There's a program I use which has frequent updates, and updates would install on Win2k and WinXP until the latest update that will no longer install on Win2k but will still install on WinXP for now. It's only a matter of time before install will fail for WinXP too, and I'm sure this problem exists for other programs and will increase with time. I plan using WinXP as long as I can and upgrade only when I'm forced to by software support constraints. Hopefully it'll be Win8 or later version by then that may be better than Win7 and Vista.

[bendixG15]

What a waste of time and space ...ugh !

[slobadaca]

For me, vista and 7 are the same. Nothing new and better in windows 7.

[lordsmurf]

I find nothing special or fast about 7. Vista is fine if you have fast dual- or quad-cores. XP is best for video work, if for no other reason than video hardware/software seems to work better on XP.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Win 7 for me. Then Vista. Then XP.

My DAW + FireWire audio interface are a dream on Win 7. Not so much for XP on the same box. With 7, I have the 64-bit drivers and native 64-bit application along with a parallel 32-bit installation in case I need to use 32-bit VSTs etc. XP x64 drivers aren't available. I never use XP at home any more. I have to use it at work but we'll be moving to Win 7 in about 12 months.

As far as bloat goes, just look at the opening comment in this thread...

[CBC]

I just installed 7 P on my laptop, and it runs better than Vista did. I quite like 7 P now, especially with classicshell installed.

Classicshell? Do tell.

I also skipped Vista completely, in fact skipped Win 7 too till I bought a copy via student discount for $20, & just this week finally got around to installing it on a new PC build. So far , so good. Final verdict depends on if all my "must have" older apps will still run on it.

[stiltman]

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/