Windows 7 boots slower than its predecessor, Windows Vista, according to PC tune-up developer Iolo Technologies.
According to iolo's tests, Windows 7 starts up 42% slower than Vista - one minute, 34 seconds versus one minute, six seconds - on a brand new machine when the time trials are run to the point where the machine is usable, at least by iolo's standards.
Windows 7 does seem to start faster than Vista, said iolo, with its time-to-the-desktop measured as around 40 seconds. But iolo measured startup as the point where the computer is "fully usable", with a low load on the processor.
Microsoft has said it's dedicated significant resources to making Windows 7 boot, and resume from sleep and hibernation, faster than Vista, which has been panned since 2007 for starting slowly.
Other tests, however, have echoed iolo, and showed that in some cases Windows 7 does boot slower than Vista. PC World, a sister publication to PC Advisor, for example, benchmarked the new operating system as starting about 10% slower than Vista when 32-bit versions of the two were compared, although it was 14% faster on 64-bit.
Iolo also said its tests indicated that Windows 7's startup times, like Vista's, degrade over time. After several "commonly-used" applications have been installed on a new Windows 7 box, for instance, its boot time - again, as measured by the company - slows to two minutes, 34 seconds, an increase of 64%.
Over an even more extended span, Windows 7's boot times get more sluggish than that: By the end of a simulated two-year period, Windows 7's startup times increased more than 330%.
Boot times have become a hot topic. Last week, Chinese computer maker Lenovo said its new ThinkPad laptops and ThinkCentre desktops will boot Windows 7 56% faster than when loading XP or Vista, thanks to operating system, driver, and power management tweaks it made.
iolo said it will release more details and results of its Windows 7 boot-time benchmarks on Monday.
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Comments
Cyteck said: Frankly I will be very surprised if windows 7 does load to the desktop any faster than XP or Vista 95 of computer users completely forget just how incredibly complex amp demanding the booting up amp OS loading process is then add loading of a users personal profile followed up by loading of selected applications The way modern OSs are designed its hard to see how they can be made to load up radically faster We are becoming increasingly impatient we are talking a couple of minutes or shaving a couple of seconds off load time will it really make a big impact on your entire life Get over it
WTF said: Well thats good news for 64bit W7 but frankly I dont know anyone who would want 32bit W7 it would be like using a penny farthing these days And if you havent the power to run 64bit i wouldnt bother installing anything other than XP anyway
geeby said: win7 does summersaults over vista for me getting 20-25seconds boot up times regularly and 10-12 seconds shutdowns twice as fast as vista on the same machine