I ran DX9 for all my gaming, so I could test evenly. BTW- DX10 Runs slower for all the games I tested in Windows 7.

Farcry2 – Average 20% drop in FPS using Windows 7(Everything turned up to Ultra – but using only 2x Anti-aliasing)
Crysis- Same thing.
Crysis Warhead- Same thing.
See a pattern here?

All drivers completely updated. If I’m missing something, please let me know cause I do like Windows 7 for regular day to day. But I’m just gonna keep gaming on XP. But for the record, I’m really tired of looking at XP, and Windows 7 is SO COOL!

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Vista had a rocky launch for a bunch of reasons. Primary being MS flat out screwed the pooch by trying to coerce gamers into adopting it by hardwiring DX10 in it. Plus, most of it was a re-write and the OEMs and ISVs simply dragged their heels with software/hardware support. So when it was released and people found out that there were no drivers for the printer or similar hardware they bought back when Hoover was president, they freaked out.

If you’re still rocking WINXP Home | Pro, don’t be stupid. Go directly to WIN7 Pro, do not pass Go!, do not collect a darn thing.

All those synthetic benchmarks about WIN7 being slower for games (!) than WINXP and Vista etc are just that: synthetic. Apart from that the performance drop – if there is one – is negligible, given the current state of hardware components.

At the end of the day, WIN7 is going to have an easier time than Vista because Vista already took all the flak and going from XP to WIN7 is far less painful from all aspects of driver and software dev, than going from XP to Vista. So everyone has already caught up. Which is why WIN7 is so stable and already at RC1 and ready to rock.

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If you just wanna try it out sure, but to run this as your main OS right now? For gaming? Pure folly.

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Vast chunks of everything were rewritten from the ground up, which is part of the reason why Vista sucked so hard at launch, but why Win7 is going to be fantastic (all those brand new things are actually starting to work, and software devs have had vista long enough to be able to code for it).
Most impressive for me was the brand new, coded from the ground up audio stack. UAA and WASAPI – while vendors are dragging their feet supporting it, it’s going to be awesome. I also like that Microsoft stuck the fingers up at Creative and their crappy drivers, and crappy proprietary EAX, by flat out making it not work. Though it is kind of ironic of Microsoft breaking a monopoly like that.

Still, these awesome new features were half finished, or badly implemented.

And that I think was the biggest downfall of Vista, it was just too new, had too much new code – rather than step by step iterations of previous OS’s. It was too much for people to handle at once, and too ambitious to release for Microsoft. Also too much of it was under-the-hood stuff that average Joe could not grasp, all that they could show the average user is new pretty shinies, that would need a beefy machine to do justice anyway.

I’d wager that if MS had held a year long free public RC, and used that time to iron out all the issues that SP1 and soon SP2 solve, Vista would have been viewed as the best OS upgrade in the history of the company.
Which is a title I suspect Win7 may claim.

Though the lesson I learned from the Launch of Vista (A launch I personally DID NOT adopt, I did not move to Vista myself until SP1 was released), and I’m thinking MS did also given how they are handling the build up to release of Win7 – is that of all the people who are resistant to upgrading computers, Tech/IT professionals are by far the worst. They’ll do and say almost anything to avoid the added work – though with vista I don’t blame them, I recommended against upgrading to several companies I work with also – because it didn’t really offer anything for them, and the problems of a new OS are always to be avoided. I don’t think it was until 2003-4 that I started seeing most businesses moving to XP.
The only exceptions were companies I know do a lot of high grade CAD/3D/Image work and need massively beefy machines, and Vista was and is the best 64bit OS on the market.

Linux is great, I love it, but I’d never recommend it to friends and family, or to any company (because if they are asking for advice on if they should use Linux the answer is no).
As for Mac OS… I have to use it quite often (I work a lot in audio, art and design, the “forte” of the mac) and I can’t stand it. It lacks the freedom and complexity of Linux, yet isn’t even close to the universalism of Windows. I struggle to think of anything it does that Windows or Linux doesn’t do better. Still I’ll freely admit to being a Mac hater – mostly due to being forced to use them professionally.

Anyway, you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about if you think the cache argument is a diversion – google it on a few tech sites. Pretty much every one of the major tech sites (stupid little rantathon blogs aside) agree that the new philosophy of treating RAM as a cache rather than a resource to keep empty is a good one. One which Vista’s memory management does a good job of handling now that the majority of bugs are fixed.

And here’s why (numbers from 2006 so the gap is even wider now as memory has gotten much faster while HDDs have not (for the most part, SSD isn’t there yet).
DDR (PC2700) System memory is 37x faster than HDD access, CPU Level 2 cache is 82x faster, and CPU Level 1 cache is 283x faster.

So… It’s faster, uses less power (than reading it off the HDD), speeds up the system (less load time for commonly used apps), has zero impact on high priority programs needing more memory (like games)…
I’m Struggling to think of any downside to this way of handling memory over XPs “you have 2GB free sitting doing nothing”.

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This is not a scale of bad and good and there is ONLY that scale. No, there is now a scale that looks like a cross, and on the top, there’s Linux/Mac, and on the bottom there’s XP. Most people have no opinion on the matter and simply don’t care – if they do, they don’t like it, because it’s fat and people don’t like fat.

Vista wasn’t bad or good, it just…wasn’t enough. No real upgrades to speak of (aside from DirectX 10 and pretty graphics). So most people stayed in XP, unless they bought a new computer.

I did run into many, many problems in my brief stint with Vista, and that was about a half a year ago. Just an anecdote; meaningless, of course, the grand scheme of things. But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like Vista. It annoyed me and I didn’t like using it.

The cache argument is still bogus, though. Vista’s bloat cannot be hidden inside of a cache mechanism (nice attempt at a diversion, though), which Linux and Mac has been using for years and has never had any problems running in under a GB of RAM (depending on the distro, with varying levels of bloat in there, just like in Windows).

I’d like to know where you got the notion that volatile memory is always turned on even when it’s not being used. The parts that are saving the data ARE, yes. that’s the definition of the thing.

But, yes, Vista is big. And it doesn’t have any real reason to upgrade. Mind telling me why I care? Oh, wait – I don’t. I don’t have a hate for Vista, I just don’t like it, with its annoying interface changes and bloated interior. When people ask what I think of Vista, I’m firmly in the Linux/Mac part of the cross mentioned above, with a trip down to XP for games once in a while. If Win7 continues to not piss me off, I may drop a few dollars to upgrade for prettier graphics. Until then, color me unconvinced.

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Don’t get me wrong I’m not for a moment saying Vista’s Launch was perfect, no OS ever launches perfect, XP was horrid until SP1, and didn’t really become the awesome OS we all know and love until SP2, and the same would have been true (and probably will be) for Vista.

The vilification just goes well beyond the facts though. To the point where people just spew endless hate about it, usually uninformed idiotic hate at that.

As you say though, the improvements of Win7 are great, and I do like them myself – it’s well optimized and tweaked because it’s NOT a new OS, it’s just a rebranding of Vista with some interface improvements. Nothing that Microsoft could not have implemented in SP2 for Vista.
Still smart move for Microsoft really, they now basically get to sell a service pack as a brand new OS and rake in the cash, while also getting to dump the bad name of Vista.

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Which isn’t to say that Vista wasn’t “bloated”. It simply required more hardware to do the same things. It required more hardware than XP to be as responsive as XP. That’s not “optimized for the future” (because that implies that there was an advantage to it). It was simply inefficient. And if there was any doubt on that, note how much Win7 is able to improve memory consumption and resource usage over Vista. Not by completely rewriting the OS, but by tweaking and optmizing and keeping performance in mind.

Your claim that vista 64 is the best OS for gaming (or in general) baffles me though. I can’t see a single reason why you’d say that. It doesn’t really offer anything gaming-wise that you couldn’t get on XP. It doesn’t perform better, and it sometimes performs worse. Vista is, by now, adequate technically speaking. The bugs have been ironed out, the performance is back up to acceptable levels and so on. But that doesn’t make it *good*. Just not-bad. For gaming, I’d still rather use XP, or perhaps 64-bit XP.

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That is utter rubbish. RAM is volatile memory, which means it needs a constant voltage per stick to keep anything AT ALL in memory, full or not – And spending the past 15 mins googling my are off I can’t find any data to support your assertion that more RAM usage = more power consumption. And a couple that suggest otherwise ( http://www.anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?i=3413 – last paragraph)
Vague I know, but everything else mentions the increase consumption for adding extra sticks of RAM to a system, but nothing about energy usage based on RAM utilization – which leads me to conclude that if there is any, it’s negligible.

RAM uses a tiny amount of power, 3-5 watts per stick usually (for decent DDR SDRAM or newer) 10 maybe in high voltage older ram.

So RAM is always on and costs milliamps to switch out data…

Even if you were correct (and I’d happily stand corrected if you can provide a source) the difference between empty ram and fully loaded ram would be a few watts at best.
Insignificant in face of all the other power draws on a system.

And much, much, much less than the energy cost of accessing a hard drive.

I’d be willing to wager that ready boost saves more power than it consumes.
Hey if you can find any reliable source (anything with actual data) to suggest otherwise I’ll send you £10 via paypal.

P.S. I’d not install windows Vista on a laptop anyway, not unless it was a high level laptop with over 4GB of ram; which is a waste in laptops given the shortcomings of CPU and GPU power nothing short of maybe loading massive images into photoshop can utilize it. I’d stick with Linux for productivity, and XP for laptop gaming (as piss poor as that is for high end titles).
Vista 64 though is by far the best OS on the market for modern Desktop Gaming/Home Media PCs.

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