“Improving performance is one of Microsoft’s design goals with Windows 7, and many early reviewers (including ours) have said that the new OS seems peppier than Vista. But tests of the Windows 7 Release Candidate in our PC World Test Center found that while Windows 7 was slightly faster on our WorldBench 6 suite, the differences may be barely noticeable to users,” Nick Mediati reports for PC World.
MacDailyNews Take: Wait, you mean Microsoft missed a goal? Say it ain’t so, Nick. 
Mediati reports, “We loaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate on three systems (two desktops and a laptop) and then ran our WorldBench 6 suite. Afterward we compared the results with the WorldBench 6 numbers from the same three systems running Windows Vista. Each PC was slightly faster when running Windows 7, but in no case was the overall improvement greater than 5 percent, our threshold for when a performance change is noticeable to the average user.”
“Of course, it’s important to remember that we performed these tests with the release candidate of Windows 7,” Mediati reports. “Though the operating system’s features likely won’t change in the final version, Microsoft’s engineers may still find ways to tweak the code to improve performance.”
MacDailyNews Take: Or not. Microsoft’s remaining spaghetti coders seem much more adept at adding bloat than improving perfomance. Each successive version on Windows seems to get slower, not faster like each new version of Apple’s Mac OS X. Don’t hold your breath for the Vista service pack that Microsoft calls “Windows 7” in a cynical attempt to fool the ignorant to gain speed; a Release Candidate is pretty much done, so Windows Sufferers have a choice: get used to it or Get a Mac.
Mediati continues, “If these test results remain consistent with those for the final version of Windows 7, the news will likely be disappointing to many Windows users. One of the major complaints about Windows Vista was the fact that it was consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 doesn’t significantly improve that situation, it may fail to convince people to move away from Windows XP.”
MacDailyNews Take: Or it just might finally convince those luddites who’ve stuck themselves with the ancient dinosaur XP to finally enter the 21st Century and get a nice new Mac running Apple’s lean, mean, 64-bit through-and-through Mac OS X Snow Leopard that will also allow them to slow way, way down and slum it with Windows until they realize they don’t want to do so ever again.
Mediati’s full article, with benchmarks, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Ottawa Mark” for the heads up.]
