Study: Windows 7 can boot more slowly than Vista

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Although Windows 7 has been praised for loading and shutting down faster than prior versions, according to one software company, in many cases the new operating system can take longer to get started than Windows Vista.

Iolo Technologies, which sells PC tune-up software, said its lab unit found that a new machine running Windows 7 takes one minute and 34 seconds to become usable, as compared to one minute and six seconds for Windows Vista. Iolo said it measured not the time it takes for the desktop to appear — which can be as little as 40 seconds on a fresh installation of Windows 7 — but rather the time it takes to become fully usable, "with CPU cycles no longer significantly high and a true idle state achieved".

The results are also fairly similar to those found by ZDNet UK's sister site, CNET News, in its testing of the operating system. A Microsoft representative was not immediately able to comment on Iolo's findings.

See Study: Windows 7 doesn't boot faster at CNET News for the full story.

Talkback

I had win 7 installed on an Intel 4300, core ll duo processor with 1.5 gig of ram, and it took almost 2 minutes till the hard drive light was off. This was a dual boot drive with PCLinuxOS 2009 and the Linux partition was fully booted in 38 seconds.

ator1940 8 October, 2009 12:23
Reply

I'm very surprised based on my own experience. My Netbook boots to a usable state in about 1 minute 20 seconds. However, the security software bangs away for a considerable time after that - something not experienced with Linux.

My subjective experience is that Windows 7 boots more quickly than Vista and generally performs much better than Vista.

I have friends with Vista laptops that are still slow and flaky running with all the latest service packs, and compare very unfavourably to my Netbook running Win7. In part, I have concluded that their laptop designs were not entirely *Vista Compatible*.

Myself, I was one of the many who removed Vista and installed XP on a brand new laptop which *should* have been more than adequately specified but clearly was not, i.e. it was not "Vista Capable" let alone designed for Vista - which opens another can of worms from which Microsoft seems have extricated itself despite demonstrable bad faith.

I triple boot my Netbook with XP, Win7 and Ubuntu and it is clear that Ubuntu is the OS which performs the best in almost all respects. In particular, maintenance of Ubuntu is the least demanding and easiest easiest to carry out.

Moley 8 October, 2009 14:49
Reply

I installed Windows7 on an IBMR51 Laptop, 2GB RAM, 40GHD and it takes under 2 minutes to fully boot, except for when certain programs require updates. I know that Vista wouldnt even look at this laptop and as far as I can see, Windows7 is a HUGE improvement on Vista. As for the slow bootups, it depends what else is running in the background, the more you have running at startup, the longer it takes to fully boot! Self explanatory i think.

tHeClAw 8 October, 2009 16:20
Reply

Which bright spark thought they'd stop the clock at the picture load up point?

As claw has already stated suppose it will fall down to how well each individual will have there OS configured, mind you having icons the size of mobile phone screens doesn't help.

CA 8 October, 2009 18:37
Reply

"Which bright spark thought they'd stop the clock at the picture load up point?"

Where is this mentioned? I didn't see it!

"As claw has already stated suppose it will fall down to how well each individual will have there OS configured, mind you having icons the size of mobile phone screens doesn't help."

Right click on the Desktop and set the Icon size to your preferred size. Simple!

Moley 8 October, 2009 18:59
Reply

Things like adobe reader and office are going to add start items that seriously slow down boot times. And, the golden rule is to defrag for better than out of the box performance. Also, removing 'shadows under menus' and 'show shadow under menus' not only sharpens up the appearance of Windows 7 (and vista) it also eaks out a little extra performance. The 'average' user can also get away with unticking 'allow indexing of this drive for faster searching' to free up even more resources. On an acer one we're talking 40 seconds until the wireless adapter is ready for take off. With flip 3D and all aero effects.

roger andre 8 October, 2009 19:21
Reply

"Iolo said it measured not the time it takes for the desktop to appear — which can be as little as 40 seconds on a fresh installation of Windows 7"

What did you think this meant.

MS operating systems default icon picture size's on disk these days have a larger footprint than they once did, thus contributing to ridiculous overly sized Operating system and memory usage.

I appreciate the evolution of GUI's as much as the next person, but I think 512x512 or above icons is a bit ott irregardless of being able to resize them after boot up, the pres set's still haft to be loaded into memory first.

Not to mention the increasing overuse of layers that continue to gradually creep up, thus requiring the use of more & more 3d hardware effects just to display an icon!?

Whats next DOF AF AA :#

CA 8 October, 2009 20:38
Reply

This is *what* Iolo are reported to have said.

"Iolo Technlogies, which sells PC tune-up software, said its lab unit found that a new machine running Windows 7 takes one minute and 34 seconds to become usable, as compared to one minute and six seconds for Windows Vista. Iolo said it measured not the time it takes for the desktop to appear — which can be as little as 40 seconds on a fresh installation of Windows 7 — but rather the time it takes to become fully usable, 'with CPU cycles no longer significantly high and a true idle state achieved." "

Moley 8 October, 2009 20:49
Reply

"Although Windows 7 has been praised for loading and shutting down faster than prior versions, according to one software company, in many cases the new operating system can take longer to get started than Windows Vista."

"Although Windows 7 has been praised for loading and shutting down faster than prior versions,"

"Although Windows 7 has been praised for loading and shutting down faster than prior versions,"

"Although Windows 7 has been praised for loading and shutting down faster than prior versions,"

"Although Windows 7 has been praised for loading and shutting down faster than prior versions,"

Happy yet?

CA 8 October, 2009 21:19
Reply

"Happy yet?"

Yes, thank you.

Moley 8 October, 2009 22:00
Reply

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