Windows 7 vs Windows 10

[MacGyverSG1]

I have an old computer that's running DOS and Win95 for older games. I was going to dual boot it with WinXP, but haven't had the time or desire. I much prefer the older games from the 80's, 90's and early 2000's.

[anon]

Nothing like booting from a custom floppy to have as much free conventional memory as possible for gaming

[MacGyverSG1]

All you need to do is "LH" as many drivers as possible. I had multiple autoexec.bat and config.sys combos for different games. Depends whether you need a mouse, cdrom or even sound card (the real old games would use PC speaker).

QEMM became my best friend.

[Aronsmith]

Three years ago we were benchmarking Microsoft's then latest operating system, Windows 8. At the time we were keen to make sure Windows 8 performed as well as Windows 7, which was a huge upgrade from 2006's Windows Vista.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Boot, Sleep & Hibernate Performance

Using BootRacer measured the time it took for Windows to boot. Windows 8.1 delivered the best result taking just four seconds opposed to six seconds on Windows 10, from the Windows logo to usable desktop.

Hybrid Sleep

Windows 7 takes quite long to wake from sleep -- 17 seconds on average. Windows 8.1 is considerably faster taking just 12 seconds, though Windows 10 was able to improve on this shaving off an additional 2 seconds.

Hibernate

The wake up from hibernation results are similar to wake from sleep. Here Windows 10 took just 21 seconds, while Windows 8.1 was slightly slower taking 23 seconds and then Windows 7 at 27 seconds.

Cinebench R15

Windows 10 was 7% faster than Win 7, though it was just 2% faster than Win 8.1.

Futuremark PCMark 7

PCMark 7 with some interesting results: Windows 8.1 was consistently faster than Win 7 by a little over 100pts while Windows 10 was around 600pts faster on average. Further examination reveals that for whatever reason PCMark 7 was showing much higher "video playback and transcoding / video transcoding" performance under Windows 10 than the previous Microsoft operating systems. The result was almost twice as fast in hitting 9600kB/s.

Microsoft Excel 2016

Windows 10 delivered similar performance to Win 7 in Excel 2013, while 8.1 was consistently slower.

Mozilla

At this point Firefox is slower in Windows 10 when compared to 8.1 and 7, based on an average of 7 runs we found it was 7% slower.

Chrome

Interestingly both Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 were slower than Windows 7 when measuring Chrome performance

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 11 is very slow on all three operating systems compared to Firefox and Chrome.

Photoshop CC

The best results with Photoshop CC were seen when using Windows 8, while Windows 10 matched the performance of Windows 7

WinRAR

When testing with WinRAR, we find that Windows 10 is slower than both 8.1 and 7 in 7-Zip.

HandBrake

Windows 10 delivered similar performance to Windows 7 in HandBrake encoding test while 8.1 was noticeably faster than both.

Gaming Performance

Finally, here Windows 10 performed well, delivering strong performance at both tested resolutions.

The short version of this conclusion is that a properly set up Windows machine equipped with semi-modern hardware should be capable of running Windows 7 or above more than adequately. The same hardware that currently runs Windows 7 competently can be upgraded to Windows 10 with no issues whatsoever on the performance front.

I've determined that Windows 8 was on par with 7 and at times a fraction faster.

[MacGyverSG1]

Unfortunately most synthetic benchmarks mean nothing. They are usually optimized for certain hardware and OS, so the numbers really don't mean much. They can be useful to diagnose problem hardware, though. I don't know what the fascination is for boot times, time to wake from sleep and hibernation. I'm certainly not going to pick an OS based on those numbers. I think Windows 10 is slower than 7 and 8 when running Internet apps because of all the extra data that is being handled. Data collection clogs the pipe, plus all the background services running keeping track of everything. If Windows 10 would get rid of all the telemetry shit and get streamlined from the junk, it could be very fast.

[anon]

Windows 10 is faster than 8.1 and 7 overall, but the difference isn't big enough to make you feel like you're missing out.

Boot times are also meaningless to me, since I use standby mode and never turn off my computer Windows 8 and above "cheats" by hibernating the kernel even during a regular shutdown, so it's faster than 7, but how many times a day do you reboot for a few seconds to be meaningful anyway?

[shaina]

Windows 10 is faster than 8.1 and 7 overall, but the difference isn't big enough to make you feel like you're missing out.

So you saying that Anon i assume you are talking out of the box copies of these operating systems...

But saying you shut down some of the features in any of them that an everyday user of windows really never uses, and i would think that there would be more for Win 10?? Then can you see a difference??

I disabled and bunch in windows 7 to speed it up a bit, but i do find that even doing that depending on the Hard Drive you are using?? That actually made more of a difference, especially multi tasking...

What always puzzles me is you see the hard drive working hard and the CPU doing nothing?? Even in downloading.. The question you may be able to answer??

I think you are more a Torrent guy but as you know, you were kind of forced to use Sabnzb to actually download and have it extracted properly, but it is really slowing down my pc when i try to multi task or even switch tabs to open other sites on Firefox?? I opened up Task-manager and see there is no real stress on the CPU but the Hard drive yes is showing use but not anywhere near maximum..
When i used to use my old school Altbinz download program i never had these problems?? Do you know anything about this or how to tweak either windows or SABnzb to solve that problem??
Or actually anyone know how to fix/solve this problem

Thanks.........

[anon]

But saying you shut down some of the features in any of them that an everyday user of windows really never uses, and i would think that there would be more for Win 10?? Then can you see a difference??

Most features are not active in any way if not used, so you wouldn't obtain anything from this. Stopping unnecessary services can result in some gains if you know what should and shouldn't be touched.

What always puzzles me is you see the hard drive working hard and the CPU doing nothing?? Even in downloading.. The question you may be able to answer??

If the disk is so active then something is obviously using it. Use the Resource Monitor under System Tools and you'll see exactly what, and what for.

As for your SABnzbd question, my guess is that it's using a ton of memory and Windows has to read from the swap file like crazy whenever you switch to another program. I would start by limiting the size of the article cache in the settings, mine's set to 4M and I've never had any trouble.

Once again, the Resource Monitor will help you find the cause and confirm any theories.

[shaina]

Thank you for the suggestions and the help Anon...

Now being a bit of a dummy without a video guide or play by play instructions

How do you do this..
"I would start by limiting the size of the article cache in the settings, mine's set to 4M and I've never had any trouble."

And maybe i should have explained better, this is only happening when i am Downloading from Usenet and using NZB, and trying to multi-task.. If i am doing nothing, the computer is sitting at pretty much zero's in CPU and Hard Drive use, so trying to see something in resource monitor?? well i just don't see it...
I can say with Altbinz i do have everything shut off when it comes to extracting and stuff, meaning i use Winrar when all the files are downloaded so you can say two programs (and occasionally quick par if i need to see if files are missing but not all the time or constantly needed to run), but because of the new obfuscation, you have to let Sabnzb do it all, you can't disable the extraction part, plus Sabnzb is web based and the Altbinz is a windows program??

I am not sure if that matters or not?? But i can only think it has to do really more on how SABnzb works and the stress it is putting on the Hard drive??
If you Anon or anyone actually has or can show me/ go through there optimal settings or meaning they have fiddled with the settings to make SABnzb more efficient and not affect the performance of there PC??
And chances are it is something stupid or minor i should change in the SAB settings!! but i don't want to fuck with it and either make it worse or better yet stop working...

Edit: And really your explanation on disabling services....yes in theory some are not active automatically, but if you do something by accident or start a program, until you reboot your PC it may or may not make it inactive no?? So disabling it completely will assure it..Like i completely disable system notifications on all of my PC's just an example not just turn them off, and doing that i notice a difference in task manager on usage programs and speed just with something as small as that...

[MacGyverSG1]

If you run QuickPar and WinRAR at the same time, it will slow down your computer a lot (especially if the files are located on same HDD, not SSD so much). And if you are downloading files at the same time (same HDD), it will be even slower. Having many tabs open in web browser (especially with Chrome) will bring a computer to its knees. I've done it and I have 16GB of RAM with fast SSD for OS and 7200 RPM HDD for downloads.