With the huge pool of Windows 7 beta testers thanks to the publicly released build 7000, Microsoft has been tracking various performance measures and the progress its made in the latest versions.
One such metric that Microsoft is tracking is the time it takes between the click of the start button and the appearance of the menu, which is measured in milliseconds. The Windows 7 team posted two graphs showing the improvement since the beta.
“Some caveats first—the sample sizes are different (after all Beta did go to a far wider audience) and these numbers shouldn’t be taken too literally since they really do just represent a snapshot,” explained program manager Chaitanya Sareen in the Windows 7 blog.
“The different colors denote performance against the ‘interaction class’—the acceptable experience range defined by each feature team. In this case we want the Start Menu to appear within 50ms to 100ms,” Sareen explained. “A trace capturing tool running on each machine lets us investigate and fix what may be impacting performance.
“The charts shows in Beta 85% of interactions were within the acceptable range (i.e. green or yellow, but not red). After examining the traces and making some optimizations, we find 92% of interactions are this range for a more recent build.”
Last week, we went over a few of the more notable changes to the Windows 7 taskbar that we thought to be the most useful.
Although Microsoft isn’t sharing when we might see a new version of Windows 7 released to testers, the rumors are pointing to April 10 as the target date for the Release Candidate.