New Study Confirms That Vista 7 is Bloated

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2010-02-18 23:48:13 UTC
Modified: 2010-02-18 23:48:13 UTC

Summary: Data from Devil Mountain Software shows that Vista 7 is a memory hog, which is therefore a lot slower for most users

A NEW study (data analysis rather) confirms what we've been saying all along. On many occasions we produced and shared evidence to show that Vista 7 was just too damn bloated (slower than Vista sometimes, except for cases where the reviewers had very modern hardware or received high-end hardware as bribe from Microsoft, in which case the bloat was harder to sense).

Anyway, the study at hand was covered by Gregg Keizer, who is one of the best guys at IDG/ComputerWorld.

Most Windows 7 PCs max out their memory, resulting in performance bottlenecks, a researcher said today.

Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks.

The above from Barth says that Vista 7 is "larger and more complex", which is a gentle choice of words for "bloated".

In the following new video from Linux Magazine ("Andrew Tanenbaum on Bugs and Minix' Reincarnation Server"), the inspirer of Linux explains that many operating systems have become too bloated. Sorry about Flash alone being an option for viewing. ⬆

Comments

NotZed

2010-02-19 00:56:41

Tananbaum's comments about operating systems are pretty spot on. Although I would argue that the CPU/memory hardware in the last 5 years has actually out-stripped software's bloat at last - if only just. Hard drive speed hasn't really kept up as much though, hence the slow booting.

Hmm, interesting that he has money to turn minix 3 into something real. Although Minix 3 started as a clean simple design, over a few years of student hacking it's actually quite a big mess now (the VM system in particular). Although he claimed it was originally supposed to be a 'real' operating system, it just isn't in practice - at least not yet.

What I think is most interesting about minix 3 is it shows just how *simple* even a multi-user kernel really ought to be. The design is certainly capable of doing real work, even if the implementation isn't quite there. It is a far cry from the giganticism that Linux has become. Or the complexity of the hurd.

Roy Schestowitz

2010-02-19 01:32:45

DaemonFC has just transcribed: "The PDP-11 ran at about 1 Mhz and booted in 5 seconds, modern PCs run at about 3,000 Mhz and boot in about 5 minutes"

Nice, eh?

Robotron 2084

2010-02-19 15:29:02

Devil Mountain Software has a history of questionable results. Every once in awhile they come out with some new controversial findings just to stay relevant. Just how accurate is their Exo.performance.network software?

"Barth acknowledged that XPnet's data couldn't determine whether the memory usage was by the operating system itself, or an increased number of applications,"

Pathetic. But hey, it garners more publicity for Devil Mountain and makes for a good article at Computer World.
Yuhong Bao

2010-02-22 01:08:44

See this rebuttal by Ars: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/behind-the-windows-7-memory-usage-scaremongering.ars

Roy Schestowitz

2010-02-22 01:48:05

See this.

your_friend

2010-02-22 04:43:49

Wow, there are so many Windows advocates. Where do all these "strident" people come from? How do they cover the news sources so well with so many similar talking points in so many emails? What a mystery!

Roy Schestowitz

2010-02-22 09:17:47

Microsoft has programmes like "MVP" to "incentivise" those so-called 'advocates'.

New Study Confirms That Vista 7 is Bloated

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