Windows 7 And Windows Vista: Performance Compared

Windows History

The following chart lists the consumer Windows version since Windows 95. System requirements are based on our experience and do not equal Microsoft’s official requirements, which are lower, but often result in serious system performance issues.

While Windows Vista introduced a number of improvements over Windows XP, Windows 7 was primarily designed to be “more user-centric” (Bill Gates), faster, and more broadly compatible. Still, there are several enhancements that should be mentioned.

Touch (referred to as multi-touch technology) and handwriting recognition have been improved, which should come in handy for tablet PC and keyboard-free PC solutions, such as kiosks, ATMs, and the like. Windows 7 also implements heterogeneous graphics card support, which allows users to run multi-monitor setups with completely different graphics processors (such as one card from Nvidia and another from AMD). The WindowsSecurityCenter, which wasn’t very popular, has now become the WindowsActionCenter. It includes security settings and general system management. Instead of the old taskbar, which allowed users to add application shortcuts, we now have application “pinning” into the Superbar, which helps simplify access to common applications and reordering of task buttons.

Windows 7 also implements the TRIM feature. This is a valuable add-on for solid state drive (SSD) users, allowing the operating system to tell the SSD which blocks are no longer needed. This is important because SSDs can write only 4KB blocks at a time. Deletion requires much larger block sizes. Once the SSD knows which blocks can be flushed, the entire write process of read, erase, modify, and write can be done much quicker and eventually help to maximize and maintain SSD performance.