Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system boots slower than its unloved predecessor, Windows Vista, a PC tune-up developer said today.
The claims by iolo Technologies, a Los Angeles maker of PC software, contradict Microsoft's boasts that Windows 7 starts up faster than Vista.
According to iolo's tests, Windows 7 starts up 42% slower than Vista -- one minute, 34 seconds versus one minute, six seconds -- on a brand new machine when the time trials are run to the point where the machine is usable, at least by iolo's standards.
Windows 7 does seem to start faster than Vista, said iolo, with its time-to-the-desktop measured as around 40 seconds. But iolo measured startup as the point where the computer is "fully usable," with a low load on the processor.
Microsoft has said it's dedicated significant resources to making Windows 7 boot, and resume from sleep and hibernation, faster than Vista, which has been panned since 2007 for starting slowly:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/08/29/boot-performance.aspxOther tests, however, have echoed iolo, and showed that in some cases Windows 7 does boot slower than Vista. PC World, a sister publication to Computerworld , for example, benchmarked the new operating system as starting about 10% slower than Vista when 32-bit versions of the two were compared, although it was 14% faster on 64-bit.
iolo also said its tests indicated that Windows 7's startup times, like Vista's, degrade over time. After several "commonly-used" applications have been installed on a new Windows 7 box, for instance, its boot time -- again, as measured by the company -- slows to two minutes, 34 seconds, an increase of 64%.
Over an even more extended span, Windows 7's boot times get more sluggish than that: By the end of a simulated two-year period, Windows 7's startup times increased more than 330%.
Boot times have become a hot topic. Last week, Chinese computer maker Lenovo said its new ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops will boot Windows 7 56% faster than when loading XP or Vista, thanks to operating system, driver, and power management tweaks it made.
iolo said it will release more details and results of its Windows 7 boot-time benchmarks on Monday.
(PCW)