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!
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 a 0% chance that this is using 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 sick 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
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?
Not sure why it would be unexpected? 8.1 was not a good OS from a UI perspective, but it was the last version before Microsoft went all in on making Windows a service and not a product you paid to use.
They still had the incentive to make the OS better and faster. I remember videos from Microsoft at the time showing how fast Windows 8 could get to the desktop compared to 7. They don’t really even try to work on stuff like that anymore.
Windows 8 also had to run on atom CPUs with dire CPU performance and even more dire memory configs. So even once it was booted it needed to be relatively slim and quick. I actually preferred it at the time because it was faster than 7.
I actually really liked 8.1, preferred it to 7 once I got used to the Start Screen. Surprisingly well designed, actually found myself preferring the menu over 7’s
10 had the best start menu in my opinion, but the quality was just an ever advancing downward spiral.
Now, I can’t even stand it, deal with it at work as much as I have to, but at home, the only Windows machine left is only still on it because simulator peripherals are a pain to get working right on Linux sometimes, so my dedicated simulator machine still uses that, but it’s used for nothing else
I miss the Intel Atom, not because I wanted to use it, but because of the positive impact it had on big tech and software bloat. I wish we could bring it back, but it seems nowadays, even Chromebooks have 16 GB of RAM and an i5.
but it seems nowadays, even Chromebooks have 16 GB of RAM and an i5.
That is extremely far from the truth. Yes, there are a handful of Chromebook with such specifications, but the vast majority has an underpowered ARM chip and 4gb of ram
The atom is only gone in name. It’s now just “intel processor”. The N100 CPUs are in a ton of neat machines. And the E cores of Intel CPUs are just Atom cores.
Current RAM shortage will bring good old days back :)
For Linux maybe, MS is part of the data center funding circle jerk and doesn’t want you to compute anywhere they can’t scrape it for training data.
Yes, but computers are still made and computers need ram
Those 2 in 1 baytrail laptops were so underpowered, but damn, they’re so cool
Windows 8 was where Microsoft went all-in on optimizing Windows to run on low-power tablets to compete with the iPad. It’s mostly remembered for the terrible tablet-first full-screen “start menu”, but also continued the work to trim away all the Vista bloat that had started with Windows 7 (where the motivation was to make it work on netbooks so they could finally stop shipping XP)
all the Vista bloat that had started with Windows 7
The fuck?? Vista predates Win7, that sentence makes no sense
Windows 7 was based on Vista, and started the job of trimming away Vista’s bloat, which 8 continued.
Aha, well it’s a very ambiguous phrasing that is used.
Ambiguous, yes; very ambiguous, though, sounds like you’re preemptively dodging any blame for misreading :P
the work (to trim all the Vista bloat) that had started with Windows 7
Could be phrased better but it makes sense to me
You’re getting downdooted, but I was stuck on rereading that nonsensical sentence, as well, and I’m glad it was clarified.
I basically jumped from XP to 8.1 and I was amazed at how much of an improvement 8.1 was on a technical level. Yes, the UI was horrendous, and any usability expert should have been able to tell you it was a terrible idea, but apparently they weren’t listened to. Luckily there was Classic Shell that restored a proper Start Menu, so I never had to use the horrible touch interface.
8.1 was the last good Windows (with caveats). When support ended I went back to Linux, because 10 and 11 are enshittified to all hell.
I agree, 8.1 with Classic Shell was good. I also liked Windows Media Center.
I hung on through 10, but last year, as I learned more about Win 11, I decided to finally bite the bullet and figure how to switch to Linux.
Windows Media center was an amazing money saver! I cancelled all my cable boxes, bought a server to run 8.1, bought some used xbox360’s for every TV in the house, and everything was paid for in 9 months compared to the cable company rental fees. So I not only got 3 xbox360s and a server for “free” but was saving money for the next 3 years until I cancelled cable completely.
Plus I had unlimited TV show storage and could transcode anything I wanted to keep permanently to mp4.
Yeah I think Windows 8 in general is just what happens when you don’t have proper user testing and go entirely based on what the shareholders think the next big thing in computing is going to be.
At the time everyone thought that touchscreens and tablets were going to take over everything, at this point though it’s become pretty clear that tablets are for media consumption and some creative work. For productivity they just aren’t as good as a full on desktop environment.
I never understood how anyone thought touch screens were going to take over for productivity. Back when they were being hyped, it seemed plainly obvious to me that even multitouch didplays couldn’t outpace a physical keyboard and mouse for input speed.
I can’t find it with a cursory search, but I remember seeing marketing back then for a laptop that was just two touch screens with no touchpad/keyboard. Color me shocked that it didn’t become the new norm…
The underlying work on Win 8 was really good… Just not the front end
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!
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.
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.
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 prior 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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… ;)
Thanks for the heads up
- as old as time_t
- as old as 32bit time_t
- as old as time_fast32_t
Windows Vista walked away as the fastest.
My girl
I ran Vista for years, but recall people hating it.
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.
I remember her as a sip of fresh air. No other OS was this appealing
Making me want to revisit Vista.
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.
PSA: In the video (not the retarded posted article that has 0 proofreading) it’s stated that he used Windows XP 64 bit
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
i still like 7 better
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!®”
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.
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.
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.
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
Personally I don’t think an Os has any business but tying my hardware together and running apps I install myself.
The amount of services/bloat on Windows now is completely ridiculous and your pc is basically 70 percent their spy device and 30 percent what you bought it for.
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.
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 dumpster dived a Nokia Lumia tablet that had RT on it. It got used as a kitchen Youtube viewer for a couple months before I gave it away.
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.
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.
