Windows 7 Starter Edition

[wulf109]

I had not changed to W7 because my own tests and every independent review I read indicated that it is slower than XP for video trans-codeing. I have now tried Windows 7 Starter Edition and it does seem to be as fast as XP. Starter is stripped of much of the bloatware that seem to slow W7 down.

[edDV]

I had not changed to W7 because my own tests and every independent review I read indicated that it is slower than XP for video trans-codeing. I have now tried Windows 7 Starter Edition and it does seem to be as fast as XP. Starter is stripped of much of the bloatware that seem to slow W7 down.

With an i7 CPU the difference will be nil. Running Win7 on a P4 may show some difference.

[jagabo]

In my experience application speed difference between XP and Win7 is very small if you have enough memory. Not worth worrying about.

[fritzi93]

No difference that I can tell. Except that under Win7, the "Extracting A/V streams" operation in BDRB takes less than half the time. I'm at a loss to explain that. Same computer.

I was a bit annoyed with Win7 at first, since they made it so difficult to change anything "under the hood", so to speak. I ended up activating the hidden administrator, made my changes (mostly permissions), then deleted the hidden administrator account to lock it back down. I like it fine now.

[wulf109]

I ran the tests on an E5200 Wolfdale dualcore running at 4Ghz with 2Gb ram. XP and W7S converted at the same speed,W7U was 10-12% slower. This is not the first time I compared XP to W7U with W7U always 10% slower. This is the first time I checked with W7S. Every independant review site confirms that W7 is slower than XP on video. Supported sites like Anand Tech or Toms Hardware always find their supporters products to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

[jagabo]

I just ran an x264 benchmark on my dual boot machine. A quad core Q6600 with 4 GB of DRAM, XP SP3 32 bit and Win7 Ultimate 64 bit. The 32 bit version of x264 was run on both, converting a 22 minute TV episode from DVD to h.264. Under Win7 it achieved 123.0 fps, on XP 125.5 fps, a 2 percent advantage for XP. That is similar to other experiments I've run with Xvid in the past. Unfortunately, I don't have a 32 bit Win7 system to compare.