This is not a proper test. Windows does optimizations on the first few boots which makes the startup take longer. As it’s not mentioned in the video, we have to assume this was not accounted for, which completely invalidates the results.
I thought it being Toms was enough to discount any actual evidence.
Tom’s has become a disappointment. It’s been like that for years, since the buyout.
Phoenix, Ars, Tom’s… It’s all shit now
Well considering almost every time I reboot it seems to do a windows update, those optimizations are probably running every time anyway. It’s almost fair.
Windows 8.1 was great. My favourite iteration of Windows ever.
Yes officer, this comment right here.
At first: Stop posting Tomshardware! They just bulk repost ad-enriched low quality clickbait content without validating anything (cough 9700X3D). Just post the original video.
As the video creator said in it’s disclaimer, the test is probably not accurate:
- I’m having serious doubts about the test setup. The laptops are all on a carpet directly facing a wall. There is 0% that their is proper air circulation and this will likely effect heat dissipation.
- Some tests (e.g. Video editing, Battery life) are extremly hardware dependent and shouldn’t be used in a OS comparison.
It’s the same exact laptop, the tests ran sequentially but were edited so that the video shows them in parallel. Since it’s the same hardware in each test and only the OS changes, it’s a perfectly fine setup for comparison.
Okay but can’t we just post an article?
Why does everything need to be a video? I am more such of Everything needs to be a video then I am of This meeting could’ve be an email.
I think their main issue lies with Tomshardware, not the medium of an article
The computers get faster and the software gets slower. Tale as old as time.
- as old as unix time
Markdown formatted that as a bullet point. You can avoid that by putting a backslash in front of the asterisk.
Typing this:
\* Test Message
Will get this:
* Test Message
Without backslash:
- Test Message
I would argue a dot is also as old as time… ;)
- as old as time_t
- as old as time_fast32_t
- as old as 32bit time_t
Saw this video on YouTube a few days ago, it’s really interesting. Seemed like XP, 7 and (somehow 8.1) ran pretty good. Here’s the video for anyone wanting to see it :P https://youtu.be/7VZJO-hOT4c
Tho while 8 may be more performant, it’s also less usable imo. Would like to see how this stacks up with different OSs!
i still like 7 better
The UI of 7 plus the kernel of 10, and the marketing approach of XP, would make a windows that might come close to being as good as linux today and certainly wouldn’t be enabling linux to steal even a few % of market share.
7 was peak
7 was about the last time that it felt like Microsoft was trying to make a good product that was useful for its customers. They’ve always been anticompetitive sniveling greedy little shits that would buy out or otherwise kill competition, but used to be they’d try to sell new versions of Windows or Office on features they could reasonably expect customers to want. “It does spell check in real time now! We’ve included USB plug-and-play! Your PC with a modem is also a fax machine now! We made a 3D graphics library for gaming enthusiasts! We ship or OS with a media player that can play DVDs and MP3s out of the box! Here’s a free video editor!”
I…don’t remember that happening after Windows 7. Windows 8 was an attempt to cash in on the mobile craze, they’re gonna make Windows a tablet product now! Except a lot of computers didn’t have tablet controls, and a lot of desktop PC software doesn’t work with tablet controls. They made a confusing annoying buggy hell mess. Win 10…I remember people hating it when it came out, they REALLY preferred 7, I was on Linux by that time and didn’t care that much, and Win 10 was almost a rolling release; it changed a lot over its lifetime. They’d go all in on something, pack Win 10 full of features, and then the fad would fade and they’d pull it back out. 3D, AR, a couple other things. And now we’ve got the openly user hostile Windows 11. “It Harms Your Family!®”
Fascinating that the browser using so much RAM is the OS’s fault, not the browser’s. Though, it using more RAM could be considered a good thing if it sped up page loading, but apparently that’s not the case with Win11.
Yes and no. The browser is a complex virtual machine + OS in itself.
Removed by mod
I always said that 8.1 is the most optimized even compared to 7 (mostly because they launched it together with phone version which shared a lot of stuff with 8 so it includes a lot of optimizations under the hood). Most people never cared to use it apparently.
If I could just experience the high of having Windows Phone sounds and experience… I would be so happy. For all the shit it got, Windows Phone is still the most beautiful mobile OS, and the way it utilized sound is still next level.
They made so many terrible Windows 8.1 tablets which they had to support. I used one of these with an atom z3735f and 2GB of RAM as my only Windows computer for a long time, and Windows 8.1 was completely smooth on it despite the anemic hardware. Some even cheaper tablets and mini PCs released with 1GB RAM and 16GB emmc yet somehow also were also able to run Windows 8.1 okay.
Was that Windows 8.1, or Windows RT?
Full Windows 8.1 thanks to Intel’s x86 tablet push at the time.
Windows RT never made it to any other devices besides the Surface RT iirc and was pretty much an immediate failure.
I have fond memories of Windows XP working well.
Do not have fond memories of the multi-dvd game installations, but I still have my library of physical games. :)
Nothing sucked more than buying a used game only for it to ask for disc 5 to be inserted to continue, when it only came with 4!
Oh, true, but back then game companies would sell you those single disks you needed. My copy of Baldur’s Gate 2 was missing one that I was able to replace for a few bucks.
In hindsight, I kinda miss the awesome customer service that used to exist.
There’s a circle in hell for game publishers that only wrote “disc 1” on a CD or DVD (or floppy, back in the day) and not “disc 1 of 3”. I think it’s the one where they have to wade forever in shit.
Idk a tiny almost imperceptible scratch causing you to retry installing 3 or 4 times might a contender. At least the missing disk is a clear error.
Multi dvd? Those are from 2007 and later, iirc. Multiple cds were common by 2000 already, tho
Windows 98 came on 28 floppy disks… We definitely felt the pain property to 2007…
And before that, there were games that spanned multiple floppies. Plus, floppies were less reliable, so there was a higher chance one of the disks would fail to read, leading to the Retry, Fail, Abort menu.
They were only 1.44MB so a 50GB game would take like 40k floppies.
I watched a video where a dude wrote his own filesystem for floppies so he could run and play factorio from floppy disk. It was quite entertaining.
How usable did it end up being? Like would he frequently need to change disks? Or just during startup?
He mostly needed to change disks when the music changed. Apparently most of the game is loaded at the loading screen.
I remember when Doom Ultra HD 8k came on 40k floppies. Back before we even had 2k displays. It took nearly 2 days to read it all into RAM (mind you, I had a cluster of 200 computers just to have enough ram…) and ran at about 0.01 FPS on my 640x480 CRT. And you had to read about 73 more floppies every time you loaded a new map.
Ah, the good old days.
Watching Basement Brothers play some old PC88/98 games and using several actually floppy diskettes is incredibly entertaining. Those also only had like 300kb of storage
I installed Office 97 from 49 floppies on a bunch of office computers. We didn’t have CD-rom drives, so we requested the floppies from Microsoft (this was a free of charge service). Took me a week. Got into graphic novels, as I was waiting for each floppy to load.
Even the older Windows XP managed 50 tabs, and that’s because it kept crashing past that number because of its paging file failing to keep up, not because it had hit the 5GB memory ceiling.
Windows XP 32bit can’t hit 5gb memory ceiling, the 32bit memory addresses don’t allow that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
Not at release. It came later though for certain chipsets.
Wasn’t there a bug that made XP unable to hit even 4GB, I seem to recall a limit of 3,5GB ram…
Short answer, no, there were artificial limitations to ensure compatibility. Plenty of long-form answers if you care to search.
It was 3.2GB and afaik it wasn’t a bug, but 800MB was reserved for hardware IO
PSA: In the video (not the retarded posted article that has 0 proofreading) it’s stated that he used Windows XP 64 bit
Windows Vista walked away as the fastest.
My girl
I ran Vista for years, but recall people hating it.
I remember her as a sip of fresh air. No other OS was this appealing
Making me want to revisit Vista.
At the end of its life, Vista was quite competent.
But during the early years, the added animations and transparent features really tanked the performance on the hardware of that time. Combined with the issues any new OS has, it received much hate. Only after much optimization became it somewhat stable.
[Screaming in linux]
Interesting. I’ve always said that I liked 8.1 the most out of all Windows versions. With classic startup, it was basically a more stable, faster Win7 that had newer DirectX and fastboot. Too bad it died with 8.0 and so 8.1 never got any market share, but damn was it awesome.
I also liked 8.1, but I kept 7 until 8.1 was released so I never experienced 8.0. Personally I was disappointed with Windows 7 when I moved from Vista because I had heard that it would be faster but for me 7 was slower before I upgraded to a SSD. I used a debloated version of Vista and compared it with the standard 7 so not really a far comparison.
Seems like every hardware upgrade just makes software worse because they can just brute force it.
Optimization?
What’s that?
My father bought my nephews laptops for Xmas and didn’t talk to me about it before purchasing. He got them an i3 for one and a Ryzen 7 for the other with both having 8gb of ram for the memory and I just sighed. Like what sales person convinced you to go with 8gb of ram for Windows 11? So sad for their use.
