You’ve read the early reviews with comments like Windows 7 is a big improvement over Vista and Windows 7 is wicked fast. Sounds great doesn’t it? On closer inspection though Windows 7 M3 (Milestone 3) is being revealed as being just a “slightly tweaked version of Vista.”
When I said recently that early Windows 7 reviews based on handpicked bribes, ah high-end laptops, to reviewers and bloggers could only give results that were not a lot different from those of a rigged demo I was more right than I knew. Randall Kennedy put the Windows 7 engine on a real test-bench and discovered that, at the kernel level, “When viewed side by side in Performance Monitor, Vista and Windows 7 were virtually indistinguishable.”
In case you haven’t used Vista, that means you can expect Windows 7 performance to be lousy. Kennedy ran the same application performance tests comparing XP and Vista and found that Vista ran 40% slower than XP. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, if you must run Windows, run XP SP3.
Application tests underlined Windows 7’s more than skin-deep resemblance to Vista. Kennedy found, “In a nutshell, Windows 7 M3 is a virtual twin of Vista when it comes to performance.” There are also peas in a pod when it comes to being resource hogs. Microsoft can talk about how Windows 7 will work great on netbooks and some people can claim that Windows 7 will run desktop Linux off netbooks, but Windows 7 is no more suitable than Vista is for a netbook.