Windows 7 Benchmarks Show Little Improvement On Vista

InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines Windows 7 from the kernel up, subjecting the 'pre-beta' to a battery of benchmarks to find any signs that the OS will be faster, more responsive, and less resource-intensive than the bloated Vista, as Microsoft suggests. Identical thread counts at the kernel level suggest to Kennedy that Windows 7 is a "minor point-type of release, as opposed to a major update or rewrite." Memory footprint for the kernel proved eerily similar to that of Vista as well.

"In fact, as I worked my way through the process lists of the two operating systems, I was struck by the extent of the similarities," Kennedy writes, before discussing the results of a nine-way workload test scenario he performed on Windows 7 — the same scenario that showed Vista was 40 percent slower than Windows XP.

"In a nutshell, Windows 7 M3 is a virtual twin of Vista when it comes to performance," Kennedy concludes. "In other words, Microsoft's follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues."