Test Center benchmarks: Windows 7 unmasked

Measured by runtime specs and performance benchmarks, Windows 7 M3 looks like Vista, and it runs like Vista. Welcome to Windows Vista R2!

 

It's here! After months of speculation, Windows 7 was finally unveiled last month at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Through a series of well-orchestrated keynote presentations and supporting breakout sessions, Microsoft walked conference attendees through the highlights of its new desktop OS: better performance, an improved user experience, and some nifty media-sharing features. Overall, Microsoft's pitch was quite compelling, and the PDC crowd was practically salivating at the chance to play with Microsoft's latest and greatest.

Accelerating Virtualized Environments - read this white paper.

» Back to special report: What to expect from Windows 7

But after the stage props came down, and after the projectors finally went cold, attendees were left with a pre-beta copy of something that looked less like a new OS than the repackaging of an old one. At least that was my impression after I started exploring the Windows 7 M3 (Milestone 3) bits that came on my shiny new 160GB Western Digital USB hard disk (one of the better tchotchkes I've received at a conference). As I reported on my Enterprise Desktop blog, the more I dug into Windows 7, the more I saw an OS that looked and felt like a slightly tweaked version of Windows Vista.

[ Will your PC run Windows 7? Find out with InfoWorld's Windows 7 compatibility calculator. If Windows 7 is a dead end, what's next? Several new personal computing paradigms are emerging. Are Windows 7 critics rushing to judgment? Enterprise Windows' J. Peter Bruzzese says, "Just hold on!" And what's so wrong about Vista, anyway? See "Death match: Windows Vista versus XP." ]

Just what was so new about Microsoft's next Windows, apart from a rejuggled UI? Windows 7 appeared to suck memory like Vista, to consume CPU like Vista, and to have the same consumer focus. How would this product be received by enterprise customers, the vast majority of whom had soundly rejected its predecessor? After all, if Vista wasn't good enough for big business, then surely a Vista-derived encore would meet with a similarly chilly reception.

If any pre-beta software ever called for a close look and benchmark testing, Windows 7 M3 was it. With so many questions to answer, and the fate of Windows in the enterprise hanging in the balance, I rolled up my sleeves and dove in. I started by examining Windows 7's innards -- the kernel and other low-level structures -- then slowly worked my way out to subsystem behavior and application runtime characteristics. Because one of the focal points of Microsoft's keynote presentation was improved performance, I looked for signs that Windows 7 would be faster, more responsive, and less resource-intensive than the bloated Windows Vista.

Note: All the test tools I used for this article are freely available from the exo.performance.network Web site. You can also test your current PC for Windows 7 compatibility now, and then monitor Windows 7 performance on your own system when it enters public beta later this year, using InfoWorld's free Windows Sentinel tool.

Are you ready for event-driven business? - watch this webcast.

The view from inside: a minor tweak to Vista
As I mentioned in the intro, I began my exploration of Windows 7 by poking around the OS's innards. Using a combination of the Windows Performance Monitor utility and some reference data I'd gathered from Windows Vista and XP, I began comparing the runtime structure and composition of various OS processes and services.

First up was the Windows 7 kernel -- aka the System process. When comparing Windows versions, it's always good to start with the kernel because this is where the most fundamental changes take place. For example, when Microsoft went from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, the System process gained 21 execution threads in its default configuration. Likewise, when Microsoft introduced Windows Vista, the kernel gained 39 execution threads.