Can Vista be tweaked to run as fast as Win7?

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biggles

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I've been researching windows 7 and it appears to run faster than Vista in most cases. I've also come across info that suggests windows 7 simply turns off certain features running in Vista in order to gain the performance advantage. So, is there a checklist of features that can be switched off in Vista to make it run as fast (or almost) compared to windows 7?

Side note: I run 64 bit windows on both my desktop and laptop and have never had any problems with it. Most likely it's because I only started using Vista around 6-8 months ago and by that time it had been patched to run just fine on modern hardware. But I have clients who will be foregoing a windows 7 upgrade due to cost and who would like their Vista systems to run faster.
 
there's a lot more under the hood than just services and tweaks that makes Win7 faster than Vista. Disabling features in Vista would cripple it, not improve it. I'm sure there will be people here that argues against my opinion, but each to their own.

On modern computers there won't be any noticeable difference between Win7 and Vista anyways.
 
I bet they are saying Vista is slow because that what they read on the internet. Vista scales well on slower and older machine quite well. Unless they are running an old style p4 with 512 megs of ram, if will run A'ok. Even a p4 1.7 with 512megs of ram Vista Home Basic runs ok....it's certainly not wonderful but it runs.

If they have any dual core and a gig a ram, either os will work. Ram is cheap, get them to 2gb and call it a day.
 
People should try for themselves rather than paying heed to the prattlings of internet whiners. Vista runs perfectly well unless you install it on an old, clunky shitbox. Windows 7 is only perceptibly 'faster' ON those old, clunky shitboxes. As Azhar mentions, on a decent modern system you can't tell the difference when you use them both.


From what I'cve seen, when pressed for details about just HOW Windows 7 runs faster the most common responses are:

1. Boots up faster.

Whoi gives a fuck? Sensible people have their rigs using Sleep mode anyway, rather than shutting them down completely!

2. Installs faster.

Again, who gives a fuck? Only a nong sits there watching and waiting while Windows is installing!




There actually is a measurable distinction between the two, which is detectable in benchmark tests. But benchmark tests don't necessarily indicate differences in real-world usage.

Windows 7 doesn't pre-cache regularly used programs as aggressively as Vista does. That makes it seem a bit more 'snappy' more quickly than Vista does on power-up, but it also makes it a tiny tad slower at time when you launch programs.
 
+1 for absolutely no difference, performance wise, between Vista/7 on somewhat new or modern machine.
 
I've been using Vista since launch. Vista had a lot of services turned on by default. The Tablet PC service, Full disk indexing, UAC, Windows Defender, the defragmenting service, etc... Many of the un-necessary services left it feeling clunky when a lot of users installed it on their new "Vista ready" PCs. The people who were competent at understanding Vista learned to tweak it very early on. In combination with the patches and subsequent service packs, Vista was able to be tweaked into being very lean and very efficient. There is not a noticable difference to me when I boot my Vista 64 and when I boot my Win 7 64 partition. The average user may notice a difference because Windows 7 is designed to be "snappy" out of the box. But I have applied many of the tweaks to Windows 7 that I also used in Vista, and the experiences are very similar (I have Aero disabled in both just because I prefer the simple look and feel of the Win2k motif).

Still there are improvements over Vista in Windows 7. Most notably the DX11 API is a much improved version of DX10, which will hopefully get widespread adoption by developers. The lack of Adoption of DX10 is what made DX10 so lackluster in the first place. Developers were developing games in DX9 and then trying to layer DX10 features on top of the code, to give their applications visual appeal at conventions, but not implementing DX10 in a way that is rooted in the efficiency it was designed for.

The features of Windows 7 are where a lot of the improvements are. UAC has been re-designed, Sidebar concept eliminated with gadgets pinned anywhere you want, Aero has been improved, other features too. To me it means squat because I wasn't running any of those under Vista, and I have no intention of running those features in 7. Performance feels the same.
 
I have all those services running even on my netbook as its running 7 Ultimate with NO TWEAKING (tablet pc, media center, etc) and it doesn't seem to affect 7 at all.

Can you tweak Vista to be 7, no. 7 is just better optimized but running less stuff in Vista can help. With 7 it seems to be all about memory. If you have the memory, unused stuff loads but it just doesn't seem to affect performance as much.
 
Where are you reading, hearing that 7 is faster than Vista. I certainly have not heard/read that. they are pretty much the same.
 
Whether Win7 is faster is debatable. I went for it because, oh, the new features like the Superbar or, more generally, the whole new UI...
 
Engine101 said:
Where are you reading, hearing that 7 is faster than Vista. I certainly have not heard/read that.
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Good grief! Are you deaf, dumb and blind? Have you not actually ever heard/read anything about Windows 7? The claim that it is 'faster than Vista' is the most commonly encountered comment about the new OS version!


:eek:
 
think this thread needs some benchmarks, keep in mind that i just googled this stuff, so i don't know if any of these are trustworthy:
gaming on "final oem 7" august 2009
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/2..._vs_windows_vista_vga_performance/index2.html
general performance on win7 rtm august 2009
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=22006&page=2&tag=col1;post-22006
gaming on win7 RC 32bit april 2009
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=4228&page=3&tag=col1;post-4228
gaming on win7 build7000
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2343319,00.asp
general performance july 2009
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/windows_7_review?page=0,3

that last general performance one has some pretty bogus network numbers, not sure if i trust that.
 
Bigbacon said:
I bet they are saying Vista is slow because that what they read on the internet. Vista scales well on slower and older machine quite well. Unless they are running an old style p4 with 512 megs of ram, if will run A'ok. Even a p4 1.7 with 512megs of ram Vista Home Basic runs ok....it's certainly not wonderful but it runs.

If they have any dual core and a gig a ram, either os will work. Ram is cheap, get them to 2gb and call it a day.
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I beg to differ, Vista home basic need at the very least 1gb to be usable. On the other hand Vista ultimates runs fine with a p4 with 512mb.
 
gravityparade said:
I've been using Vista since launch. Vista had a lot of services turned on by default. The Tablet PC service, Full disk indexing, UAC, Windows Defender, the defragmenting service, etc... Many of the un-necessary services left it feeling clunky when a lot of users installed it on their new "Vista ready" PCs. The people who were competent at understanding Vista learned to tweak it very early on.
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Wrong.

The truly competant people understands that regardless of the service being enabled or not, it's not in use unless called upon. The truly competant people leave the services alone because there's absolutely no reason to turn them off.

The truly competant people would not let their computer illiterate friends and family members run their computers without UAC and Windows Defender. The truly competant people know that indexing speeds up searching for files and running programs from the Start Menu search box given time for indexing to complete it's routine.

The people who thinks services are unneccessary and disables them are NOT competant. So what if Tablet PC is enabled? It's not even doing anything unless you call it into function. So what if defragmentation service is enabled - it does next to nothing until your computer is idling. Ditto indexing.
 
Engine101 said:
Where are you reading, hearing that 7 is faster than Vista. I certainly have not heard/read that. they are pretty much the same.
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You may not have read or heard that, but for those of us using the RTM version of Windows 7...we can see that right in front of our faces.
 
Stoly said:
I beg to differ, Vista home basic need at the very least 1gb to be usable. On the other hand Vista ultimates runs fine with a p4 with 512mb.
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Home Basic's requirements were lower than Ultimates. Neither would run very well on 512 MB of memory, but I recently put Home Basic on an old laptop for my mother-in-law, and it ran just fine. The laptop has 1 GB of memory, and an AMD 1800+ chip.
 
Azhar said:
Wrong.

The truly competant people understands that regardless of the service being enabled or not, it's not in use unless called upon. The truly competant people leave the services alone because there's absolutely no reason to turn them off.

The truly competant people would not let their computer illiterate friends and family members run their computers without UAC and Windows Defender. The truly competant people know that indexing speeds up searching for files and running programs from the Start Menu search box given time for indexing to complete it's routine.

The people who thinks services are unneccessary and disables them are NOT competant. So what if Tablet PC is enabled? It's not even doing anything unless you call it into function. So what if defragmentation service is enabled - it does next to nothing until your computer is idling. Ditto indexing.
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So to sum this up in a short simple phrase.

"Truly competant people leave it alone"
 
If you only have 1GB of ram, I strongly recommend Windows 7 because it uses about 300MB less memory. Otherwise I haven't notice a difference.
 
Short Answer: You MIGHT be able to get it close, but I don't think you'll equal it.

Long Answer:
There have been fundamental changes to some of the window handling code, which makes Win 7 scale much better, but also it helps it on newer systems especially under load, the GUI will be much more responsive.

On my Core 2 with 6 gigs of ram, Win 7 is just snappier, and I LIKE Vista, but Win 7 is BETTER. The GUI improvements alone are worth the upgrade.
 
Bohica69 said:
On my Core 2 with 6 gigs of ram, Win 7 is just snappier, and I LIKE Vista, but Win 7 is BETTER. The GUI improvements alone are worth the upgrade.
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Dunno about that. In general I've found they're about equal on newer hardware, but 7 is better for older machines, particularly anything using the Intel 945 series chipset (which includes many Core 2 notebooks and all Atom-based netbooks). I actually went back to Vista on my main desktop (Core 2 Quad/P35 Chipset/8 GB RAM/HD 4890 GPU).

My own testing with the 7 beta on an older Athlon X2 system showed that Vista and 7 were virtually identical in performance. My experiences with the RC/RTM have been the same.
 
Catweazle said:
People should try for themselves rather than paying heed to the prattlings of internet whiners. Vista runs perfectly well unless you install it on an old, clunky shitbox. Windows 7 is only perceptibly 'faster' ON those old, clunky shitboxes. As Azhar mentions, on a decent modern system you can't tell the difference when you use them both.


From what I'cve seen, when pressed for details about just HOW Windows 7 runs faster the most common responses are:

1. Boots up faster.

Whoi gives a fuck? Sensible people have their rigs using Sleep mode anyway, rather than shutting them down completely!

2. Installs faster.

Again, who gives a fuck? Only a nong sits there watching and waiting while Windows is installing!




There actually is a measurable distinction between the two, which is detectable in benchmark tests. But benchmark tests don't necessarily indicate differences in real-world usage.

Windows 7 doesn't pre-cache regularly used programs as aggressively as Vista does. That makes it seem a bit more 'snappy' more quickly than Vista does on power-up, but it also makes it a tiny tad slower at time when you launch programs.
Click to expand...

#1 I care about boot times... it's not the end of the world, but I do enjoy faster boots. OTOH, I don't see 7 being that much faster booting up. :confused: I use both on a daily basis.

#2 Coming out of standby on my Dell Inspiron is EXPONENTIALLY faster on Win 7.... on Win7, I open my lid and it's ready, with Vista it always took 10+ seconds.... not a HUGE deal, but Win7 wins here, BIG time....
 
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I don't understand all the vista hate that is being pushed recently in order to hype up windows 7. After the first service pack I never had a problem with vista and actually grew to like it more than XP. I'm sure I will like windows 7 more than vista but I don't think vista is the shitty product that a lot of people are making it out to be.
 
bencorn said:
I don't understand all the vista hate that is being pushed recently in order to hype up windows 7. After the first service pack I never had a problem with vista and actually grew to like it more than XP. I'm sure I will like windows 7 more than vista but I don't think vista is the shitty product that a lot of people are making it out to be.
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The new taskbar and the 'snap-to' feature make Win7 a worthy upgrade alone...
 
Generally speaking I'd say no. Most of the Windows "tweaks" don't do much anyway.
 
QwertyJuan said:
Yeah I noticed that a few weeks ago... maybe he died.
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Thats not very nice. Maybe he realized that we are all hopeless and stopped speaking of windows, he has found Apple computers and now lives in a dark basement somewhere in Canada
 
k1pp3r said:
Thats not very nice. Maybe he realized that we are all hopeless and stopped speaking of windows, he has found Apple computers and now lives in a dark basement somewhere in Canada
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:eek:

I'm in Canada... do you suppose he's in my basement? Maybe I should check....
 
ferrisnox said:
Holly cow, what is wrong with you people... instead of speculating "hmmm... it seems faster"... or "I paid $245 dollars for Vista its just as fast" ...

Read the documentation if you understand anything about computers/programming you can see the real improvements. The GDI performance and rewrites alone are worth the upgrade and these are real testable improvements.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx
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Yeah, and that tells you to use the Windows Experience Index for performance information, when (most) everyone knows that that test is SEVERELY flawed.
 
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vista sp2 is virtually the same thing as win7 as far as performance goes, on any system. whats nice about win7 is the lack of loose ends. every little detail in win7 works now and ms is supporting all the features.. whereas vista had quite of few cool ideas but not all of them were fully implemented. the ui is just better too, in many ways. it takes less clicks to do many daily tasks (like browing network directories).

vista has become XP to me for the most part. all my pc's are new enough to have vista drivers, so i have no XP machines anymore. vista is my cheap throw-in os. works like win7, just not as flashy and fluffy.
 
QwertyJuan said:
Yeah, and that tells you to use the Windows Experience Index for performance information, when (most) everyone knows that that test is SEVERELY flawed.
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You have proven you can see the pictures.... but read the text. It explains why no amount of tweaks will get the Vista Graphics subsystem GDI even close to what Windows 7 is capable of in a smaller memory print.
 
ferrisnox said:
You have proven you can see the pictures.... but read the text. It explains why no amount of tweaks will get the Vista Graphics subsystem GDI even close to what Windows 7 is capable of in a smaller memory print.
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Oh sorry... I wasn't realizing what you were getting at. I agree 100%.
 
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