OS Showdown! Windows Vista vs 7 on modern hardware

[Speedbird]

Hi.

 

I have heard from several sources the opposite, that 7 is lighter than Vista. But most PCs now have pretty good hardware and even the cheapest PCs have 4 GB RAM. So I thought that I’d test both of those OSes in virtual machines. I tried a few basic tasks and measured the time each OS took to perform them. I used a configuration pretty similar to most low-end PCs (even lower, actually).

Here’s the hardware configuration:

VMWare Player 6

CPU: AMD A8-4500M 1.9-2.5 GHz quad-core (each VM gets 2)

RAM: 8 GB (4 GB for each)

Storage: 40GB virtual hard disks

3D acceleration is enabled.

 

Here are the results (min: sec):

Installation time – Vista: 25:52

7: 17:48

As you can see, 7 is a lot faster already. One point to 7.

Boot time – Vista: 01:05,

7: 1:35.

Both are quite long, but Vista gets a point here

Open 12MB PDF in Adobe Reader 10 – Vista: 0:02

                7: 0:02

I give one point to both of them.

Open 8MB bitmap image – Vista: 3 sec. Not bad.

                7: 2 sec.

In the margin of error, one point to both.

Open linustechtips.com in IE (clear cache first) – Vista: 6 sec (IE7)

7: 5 sec (IE11)

Both get points for this test

Shutdown – Vista: 0:28 It’s OK.

                7: 0:27

One point to both again.

 

Final Score: equal points for both!

Conclusion:  7 installs faster, but Vista boots faster. Otherwise, it’s really not that different on modern hardware.

[Enderman]

There is a huge difference in performance when using virtual machines vs a normal PC. Your tests are invalid.

[Enderman]

Next time if you want to make real benchmarks, go though the effort of testing them on a proper platform, not VM.

[flibberdipper]

Not even valid, since they were in benchmarks. 7 was being as slow as 2000 when I was using them in a VM.