Compare windows 7 with vista

The timer was started either when the power button was pressed, or the appropriate button inside the operating system was clicked. For the power-on sequence the timer was stopped when the system was at the desktop, idle and waiting.

We expected both machines were going to be quick with their relatively clean installs and SSDs, but coming in under 30 seconds was impressive for the Windows 7 system. Shutdown time was equally impressive, with the Windows 7 configuration completely powered down in half the time over Vista. Timers in this case were stopped when the activity LEDs were off. Shutdown Time. Sleep and wake times are important for users who want to quickly power down their machine—say at the end of a class or meeting—but might not want to lose what they were working on.

In this test as well, the Windows 7 system had another clear advantage over the Vista configuration. For standard system activities, Windows 7 easily takes the lead.

Clocking in with consistently faster times over and over again, there is no question in our minds that at least some areas have been optimized compared to Vista. Battery Life Our next test is battery life, which plays a major role in day-to-day use and also gives us an indication of how stressful background activities are on a notebook. In this test we installed FireFox on both systems with the ReloadEvery plug-in set to refresh the same webpage on each system every minute.

This was to duplicate slow but steady usage which might be duplicated inside a classroom or reducing the boredom in a lengthy meeting. They're better optimised for multicore CPUs, and Windows 7 in particular includes a number of tweaks to make the best of the latest hardware. You may well find yourself somewhere between these two extremes, though, and so the 'best' OS to use will be a more difficult decision. But don't worry — help is at hand. We've taken a test PC and laptop, installed XP, Vista and Windows 7 on them and applied a number of testing real-life benchmarks to see which will come out on top.

We're aware that speed isn't everything, though, so we've also explored the new features that each OS has introduced.

To make life easy for you, we've split our findings over eight categories, with an overall verdict at the end.

It's often said that recent versions of Windows have become bloated, and it's hardly unreasonable to expect each new OS to perform better than its previous iteration. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the lightweight OS runs quickly on today's processors. Newer OSes can optimise for modern hardware and include more powerful features, but is this extra functionality really just slowing us down? To find out, we decided to test each operating system's performance on an average PC.

There is a significant difference between the two operating systems. A true Microsoft user will be able to pinpoint each and every difference the successor has available in better format than the predecessor. Windows Vista was the updated version of Windows XP, however the visuals in Vista were better designed and graphics made for a good experience for the users.

The Vista came with better security features, speedy file search, built in Web services and better multimedia features. The Vista is available in five options, business, enterprise, home basic, home premium and ultimate. Simple definition of file size : Your files are containers of information; the type of information stored inside a file determines the file's size: a plain text document in Notepad is typically small, but the exact same text inside Microsoft Word is much larger, because Word includes a lot of 'metadata', like text formatting, colors, bullets, etc.

A picture is even more tedious to describe for a computer, and it needs to write information about the position and color of every single dot, or 'pixel' that makes up the photo or image in addition to GPS coordinates, the name and model of the camera that shot the image, etc.

Simple definition of size on disk : unlike size, which is an absolute measure of the amount of information a file contains, the size on disk depends from one computer to another, and from one moment in time to another on the same computer.

Note : this is the reason why a well and regularly defragmented hard drive is important, and makes your computer run faster.