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• Over the course of its life, Windows Vista has taken a load of abuse—much of which is deserved. One area we’ve seen both Intel and AMD affected is power management. In AMD’s case, enabling Cool’n’Quiet technology on its original Phenom processors caused a sizable performance hit as Vista’s scheduler moved threads from active to idle cores running at half-speed in a process called migration. Why did it do this? In order to maintain the symmetry of a system under full load, you don’t want I/O to become dependent on just one core. If you keep threads rotating between cores running at their maximum performance (this whole concept goes out the window when you start talking about spinning cores down), you get better responsiveness. This was an implementation decision made during Microsoft’s Windows NT kernel design, and based on our experiences with both processor vendors' hardware, it wasn't considered a "feature" to either company. Of course, it affected Intel in a much different way than AMD. The problem Intel had in Vista was one of power consumption. For every migration, you have to write-combine the Nehalem architecture’s L3 cache, which costs power. This changes with Windows 7 and a feature called ideal core. If a task’s needs are being addressed by one core, the operating system will let you stay there. This means two things to Intel: first, you don’t use power on the migration, and second, idle cores are able to remain in a C6 state. Purportedly, this migration fix alone will yield an extra 10 to 15 minutes of battery life on Nehalem-based notebooks, though this won’t become a major issue until the mobile dual-core Arrandale launches later this year. Perhaps more interesting, though, is that processors without C6 will not realize this gain (including AMD’s CPUs). Core parking is a second optimization, based on the observation in previous operating systems that you might have four cores running background processes at 10% utilization each. The idea is to load all of those tasks onto one core and let the others idle if operating load levels allow for it. Now, you can see how these two features working together might have a significant impact on power, as ideal core prevents rabid thread migration, while core parking optimizes loading. Taken together, the pair intelligently maximizes the number of idle cores, and then keeps them from being spun up unnecessarily, yielding the theoretical power gains. If you want to know more about the changes incorporated into Windows 7, check out this interview with Mark Russinovich, a Technical fellow for Microsoft. We’re Making The Switch Based on reader feedback to Windows Vista, access to the final Windows 7 code, and great app compatibility with our current benchmark suite, we updated as many software versions as possible and made the leap to Windows 7 for our review here (along with the gaming analysis of CrossFire and SLI graphics configurations, published separately). But before we did, we wanted to quantify these power-saving claims from Intel for ourselves. So, we logged runs of PCMark Vantage on clean drives with an install of Windows Vista updated to Service Pack 2 and the Windows 7 RTM code, both x64 builds. The results were actually counter to what we expected. The Windows 7-based build averaged six watts higher over the course of its run, but finished the test three minutes faster than the Vista machine. Also noteworthy, though, is that when the Windows 7 machine has a chance to idle (which is where we'd expect to see ideal core and core parking actually having an effect), it does dip down lower than the Windows Vista box. We checked these results over with Intel, and came away with the following interpretation: the Windows 7 P-state promotion policies are more aggressive than Vista's, meaning a Windows 7 system ramps to Turbo Boost faster, resulting in the better performance and higher power consumption. At idle, the previously-discussed features enable the Windows 7 config to dip below the idle power draw of the Vista machine. Overall, though, Windows 7 actually averages higher power consumption in this experiment, even if it simply idles for the three minutes while the Vista box finishes its run. We are fairly certain of why, exactly, this is, but will hold off on comment until we're able to present power data substantiating the claim. However, that doesn't change the fact that, in this case, Windows 7 won't be cutting your power bill. In order to show Windows 7 cutting consumption, we'd have to spend a lot more time at idle (admittedly more representative of how most PCs are typically used), replace a certain component, or disable certain settings in the OS.

• Operating System: Microsoft's Windows Millennium

  On September 14th Microsoft officially released Windows Millennium Edition (Win Me), Microsoft's latest consumer OS, to the public. Most of our reviews have focused on consumer level hardware so when this new OS was released, I decided that I'd move my testing over to the new OS after a bit of validation on my part. My main concern was the general loss of performance due to the bloated nature of Microsoft's newer OSes trying to create a "friendlier" user interface. I also didn't plan to waste time on a generally unstable OS for future testing either. We'll take a look at what new features this OS has to offer, run through some benchmarks and give you some general feedback on this OS. What's New? In a nutshell, Win Me is Win98 with the addition of updated digital media support, a System Restore feature, somewhat update driver support and possibly boots faster. Of that list, only two features are of any real big interest to many of us at best. The new digital media support is basically achieved through the standard addition of Media Player 7 and Microsoft Movie Maker. Media Player 7 is already available through download so it's nothing unique to Win Me. It offers digital playback of today's most popular formats as well as CD burning and ripping capabilities. MS Movie Maker is basically what it sounds like, a movie editing tool. With this tool you can create or edit home movies with or without sound. I was able to create videos with my webcam very quickly but ran into somewhat of a wall. Unfortunately there was only one format to save as, Windows Media Video Format (*.WMV). As you can imagine I was a bit annoyed but it's further evidence that Microsoft wants to be in control of more than just our OS. Still pictures can be taken or saved as JPEG only. This is obviously nothing ground breaking but it's available for free. What's New? Continued The Microsoft System Restore allows you (and windows for that matter) to backup your system at certain points in time by creating "store points." This can be handy in the case of a troublesome installation that causes instabilities. Clearly this is Microsoft's attempt at safeguarding the not so rare crashes we've come to know and love. System Restore gives you the ability to restore your machine to its previous status without too much of a hassle. I did a few minor tests with this and it seemed to work without any hitches. However, there may be a huge drawback to enabling it. After prolonged use of System Restore, my hard disk space started to mysteriously disappear. What was the source of this problem? It was the _RESTORE directory that the System Restore program uses to store information. On an early test disk, I had installed and removed a few programs for testing purposes. When I checked the total size of my restore directory after all this, it had bloated to nearly 150 MBs of backup data! Keep in mind that this disk was clean a few hours earlier. This might not directly affect 3D performance but it will seriously hinder disk performance with tons of useless data being constantly backed up on a daily basis. Another major note was the inability to have this feature enabled while running Sysmark 2000. I had left it on initially and my _Restore directory bloated to over a GIG of data! Sysmark 2000 runs were all completed with this featured disabled for obvious reasons. Some of the other minor benefits that I noticed were the expanded driver support for system devices that was built into the OS and a slightly faster boot time. I didn't require as many drivers to get my test platform going as I did with Win98SE. My boot time on a normal test disk improved by only a few seconds but faster nonetheless. One last thing to mention is that some of you may miss is the availability of "DOS" in Win Me. Although you can still get into a DOS command window through tricky methods (like Start->Run-> "command"), DOS is no longer available on any of the startup or shut down option lists. The Install Installing Win Me was a breeze for the most part aside from a few minor hiccups. The upgrade of our normal test disk took about 20 minutes. After entering the CD key, the system installed on its own for the most part. On one of the last reboots, I did hang once but a soft reboot fixed whatever happened and the install was able to complete on its own. Obviously my test platform is relatively new so others might have varying results. Performance Expectations From the changes I can see so far, I don't expect much of a change to my 3D performance results as the video drivers are basically the same and the OS shouldn't be much different aside from the newer features. The DirectX revision on the Win Me CD is newer that what you can download currently so that may provide some interesting results. The one thing I would expect to be slower is disk performance, as the System Restore seems to be a resource hog while enabled. I found that even after disabling this feature, it mysteriously toggled itself back on at times. I find this to be very disturbing. Let's hope Microsoft can offer a patch to keep this under control. 3D tests were run across various graphics cards and at the low-resolution setting of 640x480x16 to best detect performance variances between the OSes. Sysmark 2000 was only run on a GeForce2 GTS and at the 1024x768x16 resolution. This benchmark will give a good reflection of overall system and hard disk performance.

• After unveiling Windows Vista last year, Microsoft is now releasing the server version of its operating system at this year's CeBIT alongside a new software development environment. Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 is the successor to Windows Server 2003 R2 and is built around the same kernel as Windows Vista. Microsoft expects this will increase security immensely compared to the previous version Real time savers - Sensible quick links in the administration interface quickly lead you to the desired system settings. However, the most important change found in the new Windows Server is its much simpler management, thanks to the Server Manager. Whereas administrators were forced to click their way through countless wizards and assistants in previous versions, they can now manage the entire server through a single application, namely said Server Manager. This simplifies administration and saves lots of time. Your server at a glance - the Server Manager lets you keep an eye on all of the server's features. For the first time ever, the core installation comes without a graphical user interface, installing only the components necessary to perform the required tasks. This simultaneously reduces the vulnerability to security exploits and results in higher server performance coupled with a lower system load. The core installation does away with the graphica user interface. Visual Studio 2008 Microsoft has also updated its development environment Visual Studio. In the new 2008 version, not only the programming environment is compatible with Windows Vista, but programs written in the languages C++, C# and Visual Basic are as well. The Windows Platform SDK is completely up to date and already supports Windows Server 2008. The J# platform, on the other hand, is no longer a part of the new Visual Studio. Support for J# will continue throughout 2015 through Visual Studio 2005, though. The integrated development environment (IDE) of Visual Studio 2008. In addition to improved debugging capabilities, the new environment also comes with multi targeting, allowing applications to use .NET versions 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 without requiring Visual Studio 2005 to be installed. Visual Studio 2008's debugger at work, in this case with the C++ language Visual Studio 2008 also drops support for Windows 2000, meaning the development environment is only available on Windows XP and Vista. Microsoft will once again offer so-called Express editions of Visual Studio 2008 with reduced feature sets for free that can also be used commercially. They have been available for download for a while now here. The resource editor is an exclusive part of the Professional Edition and does not come with the Express Edition. Main Microsoft stand: Hall 4, StandA26