Windows 7 GUI slowness...

Vimes

Vimes

Vimes

Soldato
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Hello

Has anyone moved from XP to Windows 7 and noticed that the 2D GUI is a little slower, like noted in these two videos...


and also this one...


If you watch either of the two above videos on youtube you can read the persons opinion on why they believe the GUI is slower on W7.

I still need to keep a disk with XP 32 on it to boot to for certain applications to work as I would expect them to. My phone software and flashing utilities etc work correctly under XP32 for example. I also use file explorer a lot and transfer many files and folders over different drives and this is where I note the differences in how much more responsive XP is in previewing and navigating those folders, drive contents etc. Without doing that maybe I would not be as aware of those differences.
I do find a notable difference between the 2D GUI in XP than W7 64 and whilst I appreciate that XP is as old as it is and W7 offers so many other features that I appreciate, and is now my main OS, I'm a little surprised at the differences I have mentioned.

I think that W7 is a superb OS and I'm glad that I did pre-order it, especially at the price it was, but I am a little disappointed with its sluggishness in its 2D GUI compared to XP. Running W7 in classic mode, whilst a little ugly compared to aero, is a little better but still short of XP's performance.

I am using a E8500 running at 4Ghz with 4GB of memory with a 4870 and the 9.11 drivers.
 
Yeah, I've also been used to XP's performance for so long that anything that doesn't match it, seems awful sluggish.
 
I no longer have an XP/7 dual boot so I can't test it but I haven't seen as much slowness as is shown in these videos. Maybe I've never bothered looking hard enough. Not using 2D hardware acceleration is a bit stupid tbh.

However, on this XP machine at work, resizing windows is crap anyway. Not very snappy and any icons the go behind the windowwhen making it bigger take half a second or something to reappear when you reduce the size of the window. >_>

EDIT: Hmm I also just realised that both videos have Windows XP set to Classic GUI mode, so the test isn't fair anyway. Either set XP to Luna or 7 to Classic, otherwise the test means nothing.
 
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In the grand scheme of things I really doubt you're gonna notice any difference between the two. I mean seriously, who sits there scrolling up and down as fast as you can?

It kinda sucks for Windows 7 to be a bit of slouch for simple things like resizing a column, but its hardly the end of the world. The fact Windows 7 in general runs better than XP is more than enough to make up for it.
 
What next? Lets compare boot times of Windows 7 with DOS 6.22?

Honestly who gives a damn, with readyboost on a 16Gb stick your general windows performance on Windows 7 will be far nippier than XP anyway and we're not at SP1 yet!
 
It's not really any surprise that XP running in Battleship Chrome mode renders "faster" than Vista/7 in Aero Glass mode.

XP only had bitmap icons whereas Vista/7 use vector icons - which explains why the Explorer folder scrolling test is slower.

The services.msc applet... it does that on Vista too when you resize it quickly. It's not the desktop composition which is slow or buggy like the video author suggests though. Infact if you look closely you can see that the window frame has been drawn correctly with no artifacts or tearing. But the rest of the window inside it is lagging behind (hence the black areas). That's because that part is still being rendered in legacy GDI mode.

A tear and artifacts free desktop is more important nowadays.

WDDM 1.1 in W7 has some performance optimisations around legacy GDI. Though it requires graphics driver support. I would think that as time goes on the performance will only get better.
 
The "tests" they were doing aren't a reflection on every day use anyway, making the whole thing a bit pointless.

Not many people spend much time in the Admin windows, and those of us that do don't spend much time resizing the bloody window and columns!

"Oh noez that column is too narrow"
*adjusts*
"Ahh, much better"

Those vids would make you think the average user has OCD :p
 
This is totally a none issue. Who cares that XP scrolls faster than W7 seriously I cant believe someone took the time to make a scroll comparison video lol
 
NathanE said:
XP only had bitmap icons whereas Vista/7 use vector icons - which explains why the Explorer folder scrolling test is slower.
Click to expand...

What I find odd is the CPU usage when I scroll through a folder with a ton of files, e.g the System32 folder, CPU usage goes up to 10-20% Isn't the GUI completely GPU accelerated?
 
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