Scali wrote:That only makes it slower if your machine doesn't have the disk space and memory to cope with that. As long as you're in the 'sa […]
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95DosBox wrote:I think what made it slow was all that extra bloat. It was about 10 times the size of XP installed.
That only makes it slower if your machine doesn't have the disk space and memory to cope with that. As long as you're in the 'safe zone', you don't notice.
The same goes for XP... It was much slower than its predecessors on machines with less than say 512 MB. But once you had 512 MB or more, it ran fine.
95DosBox wrote:Sounds like I should spend some time using Aero but the Classic interface is basically the snappiest (2nd) in XP and Vista.
Not sure what you mean by 'snappiest', but Aero is simply faster with things like rendering text and drawing controls etc.
If you mean that the fancy animations in Aero feel like you're being slowed down, yea I suppose. But I guess like with XP, you can tweak those to run faster or just disable them altogether.
What I like best about Aero is that everything is v-synced and double-buffered: You get no 'tearing' or other garbage when moving windows around. Everything moves around smoothly and without drawing artifacts.
In classic mode you actually erase the screen if you drag a window over it, and you can see it redrawing.
The visual tearing issue might be true compared to earlier versions. I haven't used Vista as a constant OS to evaluate that aspect. But if you used Vista in its default look/theme with Aero which I assume that is your preferred setting and compare it to XP reverted to Windows Classic Mode with Quick Launch enabled with Clear Desktop icon to the far left next to the Start Button, Group Tasks removed so all windows have their own space rather than lumped together adding more delays and have all Visual effects set to best performance meaning removed it beats them from my experience. And I am referring to using XP, Vista, or W7 on a quad core not a P4 or earlier era which is more noticeable. I might see if I can tweak Vista the way I want and add Aero on top if it doesn't remove the Quick Launch and all my preferences. I think Aero was basically added to mimic a Mac OS at the time look to draw in more users from that crowd. Graphics usage was more taxing compared to today's 2GB-4GB graphic cards which probably barely make them wink at Vista today but then it might have been 32MB on the passive low end cards and 512MB on the high end enthusiast cards. I think another issue that steered me away from Vista aside from no Intel USB 3.0 xHCI driver support was the Blu-ray software player I had wouldn't function in it but it would in XP and W7. When Vista and W7 are similar enough and W7 had more functionality it was hard to consider Vista as a secondary OS but anymore except for experimentation. That might change as soon as the USB xHCI drivers get ported over and DX12 gets patched in it will breath new life into Vista.
Another key issue that made me disliked the later Windows was I noticed extra lag time dealing with 1000 or more video files in the same folder. If you rename one file it takes like a minute to refresh the entire folder after. Do you encounter this issue on your Vista/W7/W10? This folder refresh lag doesn't occur in XP at all and you can continue renaming files right away and don't lose your position of where you were in the folder view. Even renaming a file it does not include the entire filename plus extension highlighted so you have to add another step in highlighting the filename extension portion.
I prefer using a 128GB or less primary hard drive to partition the OS as things are much easier to setup and format for legacy support an no needs for any software patches for large capacity drives or MBR / GPT OS boot issues. So to keep things lean is a bonus and not deal with patching things that work fine if you know the limits. A few years it would have been XP 32-bit and Vista 64-bit but after tasting how fast USB 3.0s are when dealing with editing HD Videos I now changed my mind and today I would probably just use XP and W7 on the main drive. Vista and W10 could be placed on a secondary hard drive for experimentation on a 1TB. There are also issues with disk cloning in DOS when you exceed 1TB but everything else just works great keeping to this configuration. If I need really large capacity drives they are hooked up externally via USB up to 16TB each. If I need more simultaneous space I can add some USB cards with 7 ports and get another 16x7TB = 112TB per USB card.
dr_st wrote:Windows 7 did bring some optimizations for increased UI responsiveness. At least Microsoft talked at length about it. […]
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Scali wrote:Windows 7 was no better, but nobody complained about that. And even today, as we see in this thread for example, people complain about Vista for being resource-hungry, but Windows 7 gets a free pass
Windows 7 did bring some optimizations for increased UI responsiveness. At least Microsoft talked at length about it.
Scali wrote:I've always found it quite ironic that people make it sound like Vista is one of the worst versions of Windows ever, and Windows 7 is one of the best.
In reality, Vista and Windows 7 are very close together, and you're not too far from the truth if you say that Windows 7 is 'Vista SP3'.
People in general have no patience/skill/interest to research and understand things. They stick by their first impressions (or more likely, collective first impressions of others). Read my Daikatana vs Quake II write-up if you want another example.
Scali wrote:Until recently, there was very little that Vista couldn't do, which Windows 7 can. Today, things are skewed somewhat because Vista is EOL, and most vendors no longer bother to support their software and hardware on Vista anymore. Windows 7 will reach that point in the near future as well
Not quite so. Win7 is supported until early 2020, and given its popularity it is more likely that vendors will try to support it for as long as possible, versus as little as possible as was with Vista.
Furthermore, because of the technology it got, Win7 will forever be able to run IE11, Office 2013/2016, Visual Studio 2012/2015, and everything derived from it. That's half a decade of SW stack support more than Vista has (latest versions that run on Vista are 2010).
I think this is has become more evident recently for myself. At one point in the early days I dissed Vista due to the sluggish performance and the preactivated UAC nag window that wanted you to authorize each little thing I normally did which wasn't questioned in XP. Later I turned UAC off permanently. But until these HD Videos and a need to help build a W10 system for a friend I started playing around with Vista and W7 again to see their actual performance with video editing and USB 3.0 speeds to a Ramdrive. Boy was there a huge difference. I used to think from actual testing that USB 3.0 speeds were only double that of USB 2.0 so I basically scoffed at it as being unnecessary. Now after a month of video editing HD videos the wait time is tremendously cut down that sometimes it feels like all that extra wait time I used to feel in XP and Vista was unnecessary. If you aren't dealing with massive amounts of data XP and Vista are great the way they are and solid systems. But Vista has become Windows 2000, the unsupported OS. This is what made me move over from Windows 2000 back in the day because programs keep insisting XP requirement and later SP1, SP2, and SP3 became a requirement so it was inevitable. This is where Vista 64-bit now sits as a Windows 2000 32-bit equivalent now gathering more dust. Like I said earlier until USB 3.0 xHCI for the Intel USB is possible, throw in W7 SP1 compatibility, add DX12 there is no chance in hell Vista can survive any longer or resurrect itself from being current and useful. The thing that made me flip back to Vista after giving it a bad rap earlier was the entire Windows Classic Quick Launch user interface. But given how much time I now save editing HD videos recently I can take missing out on that. I just shift the entire taskbar to the far left and Show Desktop is in the bottom left corner mimicking its earlier position close enough. Quick Launch I'll have to rehack back later because the Pin to Taskbar alternative is just inferior to me.
Scali wrote:appiah4 wrote:On August 2006, prior to the marketshare of DirectX 9 model 2 and 3 code path combined was only around 60%
appiah4 wrote:To put things into perspective, Crysis wasn't released yet and the "But can it run Crysis" meme did not exist in 2006, that is what it was like for gamers.
But don't forget, Vista and DX10 were what created Crysis. We weren't exactly in early DX9-land anymore.
I had a friend who had an old laptop that came preinstalled with Vista 64-bit. Had 4GB of Ram (2x2GB). He complained it was constantly overheating and I did some research and found a slightly higher performing CPU with more cache and used slightly less wattage. Go figure but it was hard locating compatible laptop CPUs so everything is a gamble finding the right compatible socket type. Well since I liked to tinker with things and you know how laptops usually came preinstalled with bloatedware on top of the OS? I decided to create an XP, Vista, W7 MultiOS clean installation setup of each with their own partition just to do a performance comparison of Crysis 1 on all three OSs.
Here's what I found.
XP only used DX9 despite fake DX10 hacks.
Vista was DX10
W7 was DX10
I noticed for XP the 4GB was sufficient enough for the game and the FPS was higher than Vista and W7.
Vista on 4GB was a bit sluggish but I used SP2 and DX11 Patch to make it equate W7 as close as possible.
W7 was DX10 only because the nVidia graphics integrated into the laptop didn't support DX11. The FPS were lower than the Vista SP2 DX11 patched.
Later I did another test when I managed to buy expensive 4GB DDR2 memory for it. I maxed it out to 8GB and wanted to see if having more than 4GB made a difference for Crysis 1.
It indeed had a huge significance in the load time of the levels and probably leveled out some in game lag.
I would say from the results in FPS just from memory it benchmarked liked this on this particular laptop.
XP 32-bit SP3, Vista SP2 DX11, W7 SP1.
I'll probably have to do another true benchmark to gather and jot down the FPS and all those numbers but that would only pertain to that laptop. Given it's limited memory 512MB video memory and if I were to redo such a test I would do it on my quad core on a GTX 750 or a 960 with 1GB/2Gb video ram configurations and compare those three OS and their corresponding frame rates at the same resolution.
The only thing I would alter for two different experiments would be downgrading Crysis 64-bit for Vista and W7 to only use DX9 mode so it should be faster and more balanced when comparing to XP. I will also be running the game off a pure Ramdrive just to eliminate any chance of HDD or SSD interfering with lag.
But all in all during my tests I got really good at the 1st level of the game it was hilarious as this wasn't usually my type of game but when you repeatedly playing the same level over and over and over and finding news ways to kill the enemy in interesting ways that probably haven't ever been done as most people moved onto to the next level to finish the game. After all that testing I starting enjoying the game and customizing my keyboard / mouse config for optimal kill efficiency.
appiah4 wrote:
And no, I'm not challenged in any way. Windows 7 is obviously an evolution of Windows Vista and I did not deny that (I actually remarked that they are pretty similar and I prefer Vista aero in many ways), but Vista resembles XP in many ways and that has a lot to do with how the whole taskbar area, Start menu layout and several other small things work like XP. To demonstrate, Just switch to Vista Basic and look at what it becomes with Glass turned off. A good many people experienced Vista this way, by the way.
Any time they did a change in user interface, DOS to Win 1-3X, 9X/ME, NT4+. Microsoft always tried to make it different. Adding different names to the same locations as previous versions making it more confusing. Adding more steps to get to where it was previously done in less steps. But altering the main user interface desktop look they should not have done from Vista+ or at least kept it as an alternative user interface theme like previous versions. If Windows 7 had nothing special going for it, no USB 3.0 xHCI support, and the same level of gaming compatibility as Vista requirements Windows 7 wouldn't have really had a huge advantage it does today. If all programs made for W7 worked on Vista including DX11.1 support it would have been a case of which had the best user interface. Vista 64-bit would have won in my book if that happened. Maybe if they had called Windows 7 - Windows You or Windows U because a lot of their advertising claim was they had listened to all the Windows users and added the best suggestions into it on top of Vista. I think if they had a blind study Vista vs Windows 7 most might have picked Vista today. The Win You or U name would probably have sunk them worse than Win ME. Win 7 had a nice ring to it and with great marketing the rest is history.