Windows 7 Team Improves Speed of Start Button
With the huge pool of Windows 7 beta testers thanks to the publicly released build 7000, Microsoft has been tracking various performance measures and the progress its made in the latest versions.
One such metric that Microsoft is tracking is the time it takes between the click of the start button and the appearance of the menu, which is measured in milliseconds. The Windows 7 team posted two graphs showing the improvement since the beta.
“Some caveats first—the sample sizes are different (after all Beta did go to a far wider audience) and these numbers shouldn’t be taken too literally since they really do just represent a snapshot,” explained program manager Chaitanya Sareen in the Windows 7 blog.
“The different colors denote performance against the ‘interaction class’—the acceptable experience range defined by each feature team. In this case we want the Start Menu to appear within 50ms to 100ms,” Sareen explained. “A trace capturing tool running on each machine lets us investigate and fix what may be impacting performance.
“The charts shows in Beta 85% of interactions were within the acceptable range (i.e. green or yellow, but not red). After examining the traces and making some optimizations, we find 92% of interactions are this range for a more recent build.”
Last week, we went over a few of the more notable changes to the Windows 7 taskbar that we thought to be the most useful.
Although Microsoft isn’t sharing when we might see a new version of Windows 7 released to testers, the rumors are pointing to April 10 as the target date for the Release Candidate.
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Ahh...Um excuse me Microsoft.... But cant you just go into the registery and do exactly the same thing with a keystroke... now stop with all of this propaganda and get working on something that actually functions well and make something innovative.
@harveywuk:
It's nothing to do with the UI delay setting - it's about code execution. It's all well and good clicking the start button, but if the code that populates the menu, draws the UI and activates interaction runs like a pig and lags, you're not going to get a smooth, intuitive user experience, and the more you have to wait for the UI to respond to user input, the longer it takes to get anything done and the more frustrated the user will get.
Never underestimate the importance of UI design and function, and if Microsoft can get their UI to respond within a tenth of a second then they're already a long way forward in terms of product quality and user experience.
And for Microsoft, that really will be an innovation.
+1 that made me chuckle and now i can see what the article was actually stating, serves me right for skim reading.
Faster to run games - no DRM. thats all i want
I see Microsoft is now aware of what was wrong in the marketing department.
They now make the user think they are part of what's comming and that there are improvements aside from just an upgrade on your "christmas tree" OS.