Users to Microsoft: 'Just make Windows faster'

[Ytterbium]

From an enconomic pot of view Microst will make Windows 7 work on slower computer, they'll be happier if every eePC was running Windows not Linux and they can't do that today with Vista. They have to keep the people with Quad CPU and Quad SLI happy.

That's a tough thing to do, I think they'll do better this time around.

[azz0r_wugg]

  Chicane-UK said:

Hey - i'm fortunate enough to be in a position where I can spend pretty much whatever I want on a home computer too. But the majority of people have real lives to worry about with real expenses and other such issues in their life and a computer often isn't something they're prepared to spend even $1,000 on - and understandably slow.

If you can afford the ?100+ for Vista, you can afford the ?300 hardware to run it.

With dual core and ram being so cheap right now, most computers sold can run it just fine.

[Mikee99]

I hate the whole "but XP runs faster on the same hardware than Vista does" argument. Windows 95 runs faster on the same hardware than XP does. Should we all downgrade?

[abcdefg]

  tsupersonic said:

OS have matured, just look at XP, Vista, OS X. How much more can you really improve it with today's technology and hardware?

XP matured? :x It's still duct taped bug festival.

And Vi$ta, really matured, how could they improve it. Tough.

http://www.aerotaskforce.com/

Maybe we just need better computers. :whistle:

[TruckWEB]

  The Grinch said:

Please don't bring reality into the argument. they hate that.

+1 so it seems.... You want to stick with your old PC, then stick with your old OS.

Anyway most people upgrade their OS when they change their PC. Joe user (mom, pops, granny, ....) don't usually go to the store to ask for the box of Vista to install it....

[HawkMan]

  abcdefg said:

XP matured? :x It's still duct taped bug festival.

And Vi$ta, really matured, how could they improve it. Tough.

http://www.aerotaskforce.com/

Maybe we just need better computers. :whistle:

Your coments and your gratuis usage og the $ signs instead of S (very clever) as well as your highly intelligent Avatar and sigs make it obvius you really know what you're talking about.

oh yeah, that was all sarcasm.

[ObiWanToby]

I do think Windows needs to perform better. There are some performance issues in DWM for sure.

The author of switcher thinks so as well...

Q: Switcher is too slow and jerky.

A: Unfortunately I think it's a performance issue elsewhere, such as in DWM or video drivers/hardware. This problem is especially apparent if all your windows are maximized; restoring them to smaller rectangles improves performance. Regardless, I'm still looking for workarounds to improve performance.

http://insentient.net/Switcher/FAQ.html

If Windows becomes uber quick, that'd be wonderful! It isn't too horrible now, it does still need looked at.

[BigCheese]

  brianshapiro said:

I mean its silly when people say , nothing was added to Vista, that its XP SP1, but its slower because of bloat. Do you think they added code just to make it run slower?

To be honest it seems to me like thats exactly what they did. When I first looked at Vista I thought "It took them 5/6 years to add transparent windows, a better search and popups that ask you for permsission to do anything".

[Brandon Live Veteran]

  BigCheese said:

To be honest it seems to me like thats exactly what they did. When I first looked at Vista I thought "It took them 5/6 years to add transparent windows, a better search and popups that ask you for permsission to do anything".

Please tell me this is sarcasm. You don't really think that's what Vista is like do you?

[xpgeek]

My Vista x64, on a dual core processor with 3 gigs of ram granted, is NOT slow. XP is actually just a little bit faster, boots up alot faster, but, Vista is NOT slow.

[Sethos]

  Mikee99 said:

I hate the whole "but XP runs faster on the same hardware than Vista does" argument. Windows 95 runs faster on the same hardware than XP does. Should we all downgrade?

No, but XP is the "oldest" OS where everything works and the speed is unrivalled.

And by speed I mean game FPS etc. that's why I'm using XP.

[Linkinfamous]

  Intelman said:

I do think Windows needs to perform better. There are some performance issues in DWM for sure.

The author of switcher thinks so as well...

Q: Switcher is too slow and jerky.

A: Unfortunately I think it's a performance issue elsewhere, such as in DWM or video drivers/hardware. This problem is especially apparent if all your windows are maximized; restoring them to smaller rectangles improves performance. Regardless, I'm still looking for workarounds to improve performance.

http://insentient.net/Switcher/FAQ.html

If Windows becomes uber quick, that'd be wonderful! It isn't too horrible now, it does still need looked at.

The API he's using for Switcher was never meant for what he's using it for. (Seriously, do people think that Microsoft implemented Flip3d with DwmRegisterThumbnail?)

I think they need to crack open the DWM a little more, so that people can implement things like switcher without incurring as nasty performance penalties.

Whatever happened to DWMaxx, anyway?

[7Dash8]

This reminds me of that Simpsons episode where a bunch of kids are in a room and a marketing person asks them what they want for upcoming Itchy and Scratchy episodes:

Marketing Guy: Okay, how many of you kids would like Itchy & Scratchy to deal with real-life problems, like the ones you face every day? (the kids all cheer and agree)

Marketing Guy: And who would like to see them do just the opposite - getting into far-out situations involving robots and magic powers? (more cheering)

Marketing Guy: So, you want a realistic, down-to-earth show... that's completely off-the-wall and swarming with magic robots? (The kids agree)

The man sighs. The light is turned on in the observation booth, and Meyers appears at the mirror.

Meyers: You kids don't know what you want! That's why you're still kids: 'cause you're stupid! Just tell me what's wrong with the freakin' show!

Great, so people want less features and more performance, but they also want exciting new features to make them want to upgrade as well! If steve sinofsky is listening to the idiot users we'll wind up with absolute crapware for windows 7 :(

[1759]

  Sethos said:

No, but XP is the "oldest" OS where everything works and the speed is unrivalled.

And by speed I mean game FPS etc. that's why I'm using XP.

It's all relative. Remember how fast typical PCs were when XP came out? Back in the olden days of PIII's and the early P4's were cutting edge.

XP is almost 7 years old. Min. specs were a PII 300 and 128 MB of RAM; my first XP box wasn't much better than that, and it wasn't exactly fast. Additionally games ran better in 98 at the time.

How times changed. I could still stand to see MS to make a new version of Windows that didn't make think my PC is suddenly in needs of upgrading. (current Vista desktop is an AGP, socket 939 A64 X2, with 2 GB and Vista runs fine, expect AGP is too old for new games).

[Simon Veteran]

Yes, Vista performs fine on modern hardware. But wouldn't it be nice if it ran even faster?

We're going into an era where response time needs to be immediate. A photo needs to move where your hand moves the instant it happens. Animations are becoming more and more mandatory to not only look nice, but make things easier to use and understand. If the code of an operating system, heck, even any application, isn't as optimized as the author thinks it can be, there's something wrong. Modern hardware compensates for lag a lot of the time, but we don't even need to push for better hardware. In the end, the software should run as fast as possible, and hardware should only be as powerful as it needs to be. You end up with less power consumption on desktops and better battery life on laptops and phones.

Microsoft aren't the only people optimizing their code right now. Apple is working on Snow Leopard, which is more of an optimization of Leopard than a full blown release (at least that's what Apple's letting on), and software developers are increasingly relying on well developed frameworks that essentially write efficient code for them, not only speeding up development time, but increasing performance because the frameworks are naturally light and efficient.

[7Dash8]

  simon360 said:

We're going into an era where response time needs to be immediate. A photo needs to move where your hand moves the instant it happens.

and Vista does just that. Seriously what are people running Vista on that makes them say it runs slowly?

[Brandon Live Veteran]

  simon360 said:

Yes, Vista performs fine on modern hardware. But wouldn't it be nice if it ran even faster?

Of course! When I say that Vista runs perfectly fine on my machines, that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. There's always room for improvement! Sometimes lots :)

[Simon Veteran]

  7Dash8 said:

and Vista does just that. Seriously what are people running Vista on that makes them say it runs slowly?

Clearly you didn't finish reading my post. If Microsoft think they can make it faster, then they'd be wrong not to.

Brandon Live: while I have you reading a thread, can you let Microsoft know that it seriously needs full screen zooming? That's quite possibly the main factor keeping me on OS X: out of the box, I can actually read the screen :p (I have an eye condition called Ocular Albinism, plus a few other side effects, and Magnifier simply doesn't do the job.)

[Denis W. Veteran]

  7Dash8 said:

and Vista does just that. Seriously what are people running Vista on that makes them say it runs slowly?

Vista speeds up over time, but I think most people are going by the first hour of using the OS when it does the indexing, and for subsequent boots the first minute or two when Superfetch goes and loads up files into RAM.

  simon360 said:

Brandon Live: while I have you reading a thread, can you let Microsoft know that it seriously needs full screen zooming? That's quite possibly the main factor keeping me on OS X: out of the box, I can actually read the screen :p (I have an eye condition called Ocular Albinism, plus a few other side effects, and Magnifier simply doesn't do the job.)

That's a good suggestion for the Aero Taskforce. Let's see...

edit: Here it is.

Edited August 20, 2008 by rm20010

[Sethos]

  1759 said:

It's all relative. Remember how fast typical PCs were when XP came out? Back in the olden days of PIII's and the early P4's were cutting edge.

XP is almost 7 years old. Min. specs were a PII 300 and 128 MB of RAM; my first XP box wasn't much better than that, and it wasn't exactly fast. Additionally games ran better in 98 at the time.

How times changed. I could still stand to see MS to make a new version of Windows that didn't make think my PC is suddenly in needs of upgrading. (current Vista desktop is an AGP, socket 939 A64 X2, with 2 GB and Vista runs fine, expect AGP is too old for new games).

Yes, I do know this is pretty much a mirror of what was going on back then. But what's the point in me purchasing expensive hardware and overclocking to squeeze those extra frames per second out of my games, just to have an operating system march in, do nothing but add transparency and some features I couldn't give a rats ass about, hog between 10 and 50% of the performance from games, even some older games won't work at all. Why would I as a gamer want that?

And yes, I would use Windows 98 if I got a performance boost and every game worked with it, but no such luck.

So for gamers who cares about performance, Vista is useless until game developers start excluding XP from their support list ( Won't happen for a long time though ).

As I said, this happened back in the Win98 days too, but I also stayed with Windows 98 as long as I could.

[HawkMan]

  simon360 said:

Clearly you didn't finish reading my post. If Microsoft think they can make it faster, then they'd be wrong not to.

Brandon Live: while I have you reading a thread, can you let Microsoft know that it seriously needs full screen zooming? That's quite possibly the main factor keeping me on OS X: out of the box, I can actually read the screen :p (I have an eye condition called Ocular Albinism, plus a few other side effects, and Magnifier simply doesn't do the job.)

That's what was supposed to have been Aero diamon or whatever, with everything being vectorized. I suppose there's a chance we'll get that in 7 since it was dropped in Vsta, and WPF is actually out there being used by devs now so here are apps that would natively support it.

[redfish]

I don't know about Vista, but I remember with some versions of Windows , while running slower on older hardware, they ran faster than the old versions on newer hardware. It was about changing the way the OS performed to take advantage of new systems.

[Simon Veteran]

Even vectorizing everything doesn't make up for it. Upping the DPI only wastes more screen space for me, I want the real zooming in on the screen, screen moving with the mouse and all. It sounds hard to use, but it's a lot better than magnifier.

[HawkMan]

  Sethos said:

So for gamers who cares about performance, Vista is useless until game developers start excluding XP from their support list ( Won't happen for a long time though ).

I'm a gamer, and I care about performance, and I switched to Vista permanently at RTM. and at that point I actually played more games than Conan or Canguard on the computer too.

I never had any sunstantial performance drop. At most it was barely noticeable if the game showed the FPS in numbers, visually, NONE. and some games like BF2142/2 coudl actually perform better on Vista.

But today after all the perfomance patches, there's no reason to cling to XP like a long lost baby, even on mediocre hardware as long as it can run the DWM, actual windows experience WILL be faster than running non Aero.

  simon360 said:

Even vectorizing everything doesn't make up for it. Upping the DPI only wastes more screen space for me, I want the real zooming in on the screen, screen moving with the mouse and all. It sounds hard to use, but it's a lot better than magnifier.

You'd still need vectors to do that properly without ruining the graphics, you probably wouldn't care at ay rate but.

Though I have seen the Desktop larger than the monitor res zooming on Windows. though then it's not so much of a zoom just a really large desktop :)

[Sethos]

  HawkMan said:

I'm a gamer, and I care about performance, and I switched to Vista permanently at RTM. and at that point I actually played more games than Conan or Canguard on the computer too.

I never had any sunstantial performance drop. At most it was barely noticeable if the game showed the FPS in numbers, visually, NONE. and some games like BF2142/2 coudl actually perform better on Vista.

But today after all the perfomance patches, there's no reason to cling to XP like a long lost baby, even on mediocre hardware as long as it can run the DWM, actual windows experience WILL be faster than running non Aero.

Yeah, I wish I could believe you.

I just re-installed XP just a few days ago. Vista hogs almost 15-20 FPS in Crysis under the exact same settings ( DX9 - High ), BF2142 refused to install, lost 15% FPS in CoD 4, I could set AA and AF to high under Armed Assault and still get almost 20 FPS more ( Where as I had to set both to none under Vista ). Older games like Outfront is unstable and most performance benchmarks generally suffer.

I done my own benchmarks with games, I used Vista for several months which I should believe is enough and I have seen no evidence Vista is on par or above XP's performance at this point.