Conclusion: The Platform Is Willing, But Drivers Are Still Weak
At first glance, one might come away from our benchmarks with the impression that Windows 7 is just as slow as Vista and that nothing much has really changed. However, looking only at the benchmarks doesn’t give you the full picture either. Subjectively, the release candidate feels quite snappy. Even with only 1 GB of RAM installed, the pronounced slowdowns that plague Vista on the netbook platform were extremely rare. So unlike Vista, Windows 7 may very well develop into an alternative to XP for netbook hardware. After all, performance isn’t exactly the primary concern of this platform, although newer and more optimized drivers should give it a boost.
We are a lot more critical of battery life under Microsoft’s newest OS. Even with its huge 59 Wh battery, Windows 7 shuts off much sooner than XP. This is beyond disappointing, since a newer OS should come with better and more refined power saving mechanisms than its eight year old predecessor. Then again, they won’t do any good if there aren’t any drivers to take advantage of them. See a pattern here?
This is where Windows 7 currently falls short. Microsoft and the hardware vendors have their work cut out for them. We can only hope that Intel won’t only release optimized drivers for its “revamped” Atom platform based on the GN40 chipset, but will also provide newer versions for the aging 945G chipset found in the majority of netbooks in stores today.
Aside from that, Windows 7 provides a much more pleasant user experience on a netbook than Vista ever did. While its updated user interface adds several new features, Microsoft has also made many changes under the hood that aren’t as visible to the user. Where functionality and feature set are concerned, the new version has the upper hand anyway, if not now, then in the future. At some point, newer technologies will no longer be made available for Windows XP via patchs, hacks, or service packs. Also, since Microsoft has already terminated mainstream support, companies are less and less likely to provide drivers for new products that work with the aging OS. Like it or not, the future belongs to Windows 7. Hopefully, IHVs share this view and will provide newer drivers even for older hardware.
If you’re interested in trying the release candidate of Windows 7 for yourself, you can download it for free directly from Microsoft after registering. A word of warning: we don’t recommend pulling Win 7 RC1 from P2P sites, as several versions have been shown to be infected with viruses and malware.
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Considering xp is almost 9 years, i would expect to see a huge increase. Hopefully the new service packs for 7 will increase speed rapidly.
@conzo92
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH ROFL. LOL
ooooo uuhhhhh.
Sure, increase speed in bloated OS rapidly with more bloat. Thats a good one. They can blame the drivers all they want but it is simply that there is more overheads required to run winbloat 7. With such limited resources on a netbook it will never beat XP, EVER. The article is just paid for marketing hype crap. Oh look it applies some filters faster in win7 on an app that will NEVER be used on a netbook. Clutching at straws
I can't believe how irrelevant this site has become.
Now lets compare a high performance PC, lets say icore7 920, 6GB ram,2 Velociraptor HD in Raid 0.
That will be very interesting to compare and analyse.
Only MS dreams of using Win7 on a net book.
I use Win 7 64bit everyday with Photoshop 64 and Lightroom and there is no way I go back to XP
It's good to get tested benchmarks for these things so there are some real stats, so thanks for that. But I have to say you seem almost to be writing almost as apologists for MS here. OK maybe you are just glass-half-full in attitude, but come on, the performance of Vista and this version of Windows7 is PATHETIC! As far as I can see, 7 should be released at best as a free patch for Vista (people are paying for both these OS's!!) and then the whole sorry adventure should be abolished. In 9 years hardware performance has increased by a huge amount. In the same time all MS can manage is to push out bloated gimmicky and downright frustrating monsters of OS's that cannot even match the performance of XP!! How low can our expectations of MS go?? What have they got to show for 9 years of development and all that improved hardware platform? NOTHING! I watched the video on the Windows 7 site with the two guys talking about what's new in this OS - it's embarrasing! There's just nothing to recommend it.
I'm not surprised the battery life tests are worse, because as far as I'm aware power-management optimisations tend to be one of the last things done (at least looking at linux drivers). As for the rest, isn't it a bit early to say?
I disagree with americanbrian: more features and updates don't have to mean more bloat. Besides, I'm sure XP has enough of it's own bloat, so allowing new features doesn't necessarily have to make it worse.
But anyway, isn't the point for most people "is windows 7 efficient enough to work on a netbook, without any big slowdowns?", not "which OS is actually faster?"
Btw tomshardware, it'd be useful to see how much RAM each OS leaves available, with no applications running and possibly when doing some common tasks (provided you confirm the applications running use roughly the same amount of memory on each platform).
Just so no-one thinks I'm an MS fan-boy, I wouldn't dream of doing most of my work on anything other than linux.
Hopefully the new service packs for 7 will increase speed rapidly. ANYONE READ THAT!!!!
Call me old fashioned, but I like my OS to be there to run my applications and hardware in the fastest, most efficient and most stable way. That's about it really. My applications should have as close to full use of my system resources as possible and allow me to do the work I want to do. My OS should keep out of the way. I just wish MS would release a version of Windows for users who don't want loads of gadgets and gimmicks and flowery UIs that try to run your life for you, one which is stripped down to the bare essentials out of the box. It's typical of MS to get completely lost in their own sense of importance and think that Windows is the be all and end all of having a computer. Basic things like actually improving performance and software compatibility seem to be a long way down the list of importance, below ripping off UI ideas from Apple.
slowman09, sorry for the thumbs down, meant to click conzo, but missed. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Isn't it sad that despite ALL the benchmarks going XP's way they still don't outright recommend it? The filter rubbish is just marketing crap. They don't even list which filters. They even say some go XP's way and other Win7 but then only show Win7 doing "better".
patronizing or what.
I'll be dual booting between Windows 7 and Windows XP (32-bit) on my mini-notebook for a long time me thinks :-)
Bob
Yes, an OS should never be a system resource hog (hello Vista)
If I want to use a 'feature', the system should only run it when asked, not start a gazillion of services 'just in case' I happen to click on something
I use an Advent 4211C netbook and the first thing I did to it was remove XP from it (and all the preinstalled junk that came with it) and put Windows 7 on. It boots in less than a minute and runs very smoothly. Yeah so what it only got like 2.5 in the computer test thingy in the control panel? Does what I need to do, and very well I might add.
XP has nowhere near the 'plug n play' driver support that Windows 7 has; and for netbooks with no CD drive etc, you need those drivers straight off the bat and Windows 7 did everything for me. Score.
Ummm, Windows XP has 3 service packs, Windows 7 is only an unfinished RC, that works really nicely
Let's try again after the first release before we get all excited like.