Help... upgraded to Windows 8 and I want to go back to Vista...

[sworkhard]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Or you can put Vista on a machine that would have shipped with XP (a P4, with 1 GB of RAM, for example), be almost unable to use it. Then put Windows 7 on that same machine and it is usable again.

From your sysprob link:





Its not a huge thing, but on a machine that is running on the margins, it can be the difference between it running well and not.

A new machine, intended for shipment with Windows Vista or 7, I 100% agree that you shouldn't see any difference in 99% of cases.

Vista's aggressive caching (supercache, etc), really slowed the computer down as the months went by. While I find a fresh windows 7 and windows vista install to be similar, by the time they are 2 months old, the windows 7 machine feels much faster, despite having similar specs (Athlon 64 x2, 4GB ram, 250GB HD). Disabling superfetch goes a long ways to fixing this and I have done this on several machines now with really good results.

[TorqueDog]

You want to go back to Vista?

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by psicodude

Disagree to your disagree. We have upgraded hundreds of users from Vista to 7 and they all notice a significant performance boost with the exact same hardware. I have no stats to back this up, but we have seen drops in memory utilization by 25% or more.

I would find comparisons that are newer than 3 years, but I am too lazy.

So a fresh install of Windows improved performance on the same hardware eh? Colour me surprised..defragged hard drive, fresh install of the OS, smaller registry, newer driver set, probably a new AV engine, fewer installed updates clogging up the WinSxS symlink hell.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Rathji

A new machine, intended for shipment with Windows Vista or 7, I 100% agree that you shouldn't see any difference in 99% of cases.

Which was my point

The mistake people made with Vista was assuming it would be as good, or at least not as bad as it was, running on XP class hardware. But Windows 7 running on a Vista era machine with 512 meg of RAM, a horrible P4, and a slow ATA hard drive is just as miserable as Vista was. XP wasn't great on a machine of that spec either.

[ken0042]

I'm pretty sure psicodude means comparing a fresh install of 7 with a fresh install of Vista. I have also seen that first hand.

[TorqueDog]

Fresh install of Vista SP2 vs Windows 7 RTM, Windows 7 kicked the crap out of it in every test we did.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

Fresh install of Vista SP2 vs Windows 7 RTM, Windows 7 kicked the crap out of it in every test we did.

In which objective benchmarks?

[psicodude]

Originally Posted by ken0042

I'm pretty sure psicodude means comparing a fresh install of 7 with a fresh install of Vista. I have also seen that first hand.

Exactly what I meant. We have over a thousand 3.5 year old laptops with 1GB of memory that we upgrade from Vista to 7, and every single time the end user comments about how much faster it is. Anecdotal evidence for sure, but I am convinced. Sclitheroe, you are a great poster and definitely know your stuff, but I think you are out to lunch on this one.

[HotHotHeat]

Originally Posted by J Diddy

I'd recommend Windows 7 over going back to Vista...heck I would recommend XP over Vista or even OSX...but Windows 8 with the tweak above could save you the hassle of having to find a copy and the cost. Your only issue after that might be the odd software or driver incompatibility with Windows 8.

I prefer to wait for a service pack before I hop on an OS...even if the price is $39 now and $120 later.

This post makes it sound like OS X is somewhere just below Windows XP. Apples OS is clearly more advanced much more user friendly than any Windows release. Rerun, you sound like exactly the type of person that may enjoy a Mac. Go look at one.

As for Windows 8, I actually quite like it. Forcing people to use the start tiles probably wasn't the smartest idea... People love their Start button.

Overall the OS is smooth and hasn't really bogged down on me yet. I installed it clean on my Macbook Air. Same story about how much harder a computer has to work to use Windows as opposed to an Apple OS, but that's something you accept.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by psicodude

Exactly what I meant. We have over a thousand 3.5 year old laptops with 1GB of memory that we upgrade from Vista to 7, and every single time the end user comments about how much faster it is. Anecdotal evidence for sure, but I am convinced. Sclitheroe, you are a great poster and definitely know your stuff, but I think you are out to lunch on this one.

I'm not out to lunch - neither the synthetic nor application workload benchmarks (done using real-world apps) demonstrate a substantial performance gain for Windows 7 compared to Windows Vista.

Here's another benchmark suite measuring real world actions like application launch, just to antangonize you :
http://www.pcworld.com/article/17250...nce_tests.html

Unless user perception is the benchmark you want to measure and evaluate the success of your upgrade on, you haven't done anything to convince me, because you haven't measured anything.

One thing that Rathji commented on that is the idea of a minimums machine and the relative performance differences there, and that's important in this discussion too - when the machines your testing Vista and 7 against are practically on the ropes on a clean boot (and a machine running 1 GB of RAM in 2009 is pretty much there), and ready to hit the swapfile almost as soon as you being launching apps, then any small improvement in memory utilization is going to be much more apparent - and Windows 7 did have modest memory utilization improvements. So I will grant you that Win7 did perform better than Vista at the very bottom end - hardly the entire performance envelope though, on which to make a performance claim about the OS, since it's an edge case.

On a side note, how the heck did you end up with a thousand laptops running Vista? That's pretty impressive! I'm going to spin up a VM today and see if I can replicate this terrible performance everyone is talking about side by side with a Win 7 VM running the same specs.

[psyang]

My win 7 machine and vista machine are several generations apart in hardware, so it's unfair to compare. But I remember when I first got my vista laptop in 2007, I couldn't believe the horrible file i/o performance. Unzipping a 200meg zip file took over 20 minutes. Copying 30 files from one folder to another meant a 5 minute wait.

Vista's penchant for precaching applications, both on disk and in ram, meant that the disk was often reading/writing even during idle, and that task manager would show high ram utilization even with few things actually running. This didn't help Vista's image.

Later in one of the updates, vista file i/o performance improved, but it still felt sluggish. I remember reading a blog post by Mark Russinovich where he found that a large number of operations (half?) during normal file i/o were unnecessary duplicates. I think the i/o improvement update came shortly thereafter.

Remember, a lot of people's impressions of vista are colored by their experience. You say 1gb machines are "on the ropes", but when vista was released, 1gb was above average in the consumer market. 2gb was premium. I have a friend who loved vista, but he only used it on his work machine which, at the time, was a quad-core machine with 8 gigs of ram.

I think Windows 7 worked better on the class of hardware available during its release than did Vista. That may be the biggest differentiator.

[Rathji]

1gb machines were entry level at that point.

[Diemenz]

Originally Posted by HotHotHeat

Apples OS is clearly more advanced much more user friendly than any Windows release.

Same story about how much harder a computer has to work to use Windows as opposed to an Apple OS, but that's something you accept.

No. Those are fanboy comments that add nothing to this thread and are completely incorrect as well.

[Arsenal14]

Originally Posted by Wood

I don't understand all the hate for Windows 8, I think its a lot better than 7 and worlds better than Vista

Is it just because its different and people don't like change? Is it just the new start menu and lack of a start bar on the desktop? Because that's an easy fix.

I've had nothing but positive experiences so far with Windows 8 and have seen a pretty decent upgrade in performance on my laptop. Specifically start up/shutdown times and application start up time. Internet Explorer 10 is also a huge upgrade from 8 and 9, it might be the best browser I've ever used overall

It seems like most people have just had trouble since upgrading, maybe I'm in the vast minority?

Having just upgraded from Vista this weekend what I'm finding is that it's just an awkward UI for desktops. It's getting somewhat better now that I'm learning the shortcut keys for all of the different charms/app switching/etc. but the "move your mouse to the corner of the screen to activate a menu" is poor in general and fails badly on multi-monitor systems. On a touch device I'm sure it's great, and I look forward to getting the Surface Pro when it comes out next month but for me that's the biggest aggravation.

Other than that it's mostly just a little frustrating trying to figure out where settings are hidden or what I need to do to get to certain tools. Even something as simple as how to close an app is not at all "discoverable" - unless you already know that you're supposed to grab the top edge of the screen and drag it down there is no way that you'd guess that.

[SebC]

Dunno about benchmarks, but I noticed a big improvement in stability when I went from Vista to 7.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by Arsenal14

Having just upgraded from Vista this weekend what I'm finding is that it's just an awkward UI for desktops. It's getting somewhat better now that I'm learning the shortcut keys for all of the different charms/app switching/etc. but the "move your mouse to the corner of the screen to activate a menu" is poor in general and fails badly on multi-monitor systems. On a touch device I'm sure it's great, and I look forward to getting the Surface Pro when it comes out next month but for me that's the biggest aggravation.

Other than that it's mostly just a little frustrating trying to figure out where settings are hidden or what I need to do to get to certain tools. Even something as simple as how to close an app is not at all "discoverable" - unless you already know that you're supposed to grab the top edge of the screen and drag it down there is no way that you'd guess that.

Windows 8 on a VM with that charm bar is the worst. having to carefully position your mouse in the VM window so that the charm bar opens without overshooting it is such a pain in the ass. if they just made Start8 standard with the release and keep the tiles screen as an option for touchscreen devices, they would resolve 90% of the complaints people have with Win 8

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Rathji

1gb machines were entry level at that point.

Not in 2009, which is the Vista SP2 timeframe, no:
http://compreviews.about.com/od/budg...nspiron546.htm

That's a sub-$500 machine with 3GB of RAM, quite typical. Hell, even Apple was shipping the low end Macbooks with 2 GB of RAM at that time, a company notoriously stingy on RAM.

[sclitheroe]

Here we go...

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

In which objective benchmarks?

Before I started working at the place we're at, the company I worked for did hardware as a service, and so we had crate after crate of identical Dell Latitude E6400 models available.

Fresh install of each OS, installed the latest available drivers for each OS (Windows 7 actually had a disadvantage here as it was early enough that we were stuck using the Vista drivers in many instances), and installed all the updates that were available until Windows Update came back with the nice green checkmark that we were all up to date. We also installed Office 2007.

Using a stopwatch, we tested a variety of functions. Cold boot times (to login screen), time to log into profile that had never been logged into before, opening a large Word document by double clicking the shortcut, copying a large video file (roughly 4.3 GB) from one place to another, etc. Windows 7 demonstrated a notable improvement in most of the things we tried to do. I wish I still had the little spreadsheet where we tracked the performance, but it was one of the reasons that we ended up proceeding with our own internal Windows 7 project at the time, especially when Windows 7 had just only been released.

[chemgear]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

In which objective benchmarks?

Quickie google gives stuff like this, for what it is worth I guess. Benchmarks within:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/benchm...vista-xp/22006

Windows 7 performs better than Vista and is also faster than XP, although XP remains more capable for devices with limited memory and outdated graphics.
Subjectively, the change from Vista to Windows 7 is like releasing a car's handbrake.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/rev...eview?page=0,4

Whether you’re coming from XP or Vista, Windows 7 offers a massive leap forward in usability, security, and support for new hardware and technology, especially for enthusiasts and power users. Best of all, the new OS simply feels faster than Vista or even XP.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...e,2476-10.html

However, the most noticeable differences show up when you compare Windows 7 and Windows Vista doing everyday operating system operations. Startup, standby, and hibernation are much faster, proving that Microsoft had to turn many things upside down to reach these performance benefits. Our conclusion is not only valid for fast PCs but also for all systems that aren’t top of the line anymore. We’ve Windows 7 onto many different systems and found that the new OS is even more favorable if your system hardware isn’t particularly fast