October 14th, 2009
Windows 7 in the real world: 10 PCs under the microscope
When the slow-motion launch of Windows 7 finally ends and it hits store shelves next week, will it erase the memory of Windows Vista? Yes, it’s gotten good reviews in the run-up to its official release, but so did Windows Vista. Harry McCracken has put together a retrospective of those Vista reviews from late 2006 and early 2007 that’s well worth reading, and he closes his analysis with a warning about the need to postpone judgment until the product has been in the marketplace for a while: “There’s never been a new operating system that didn’t cause significant headaches for a meaningful (if, in the best cases, small) percentage of the people who installed it, and there’s never been one that wasn’t significantly improved by the first major round of post-release bug fixes.”
Absolutely right.
An operating system doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is inexorably tied to CPUs and chipsets, storage controllers, display adapters, external peripherals, drivers, and third-party programs. Give me the right hardware and well-written drivers and I can make any modern OS (even the despised Windows Vista) run with impressive performance and reliability. Throw in a flaky motherboard, a bad BIOS, or a buggy driver, and your computing experience will quickly spiral into unpleasantness. One hopes that the PC industry learned the painful lessons of Vista and that the wave of new PCs that will begin shipping next week will be properly tuned to the new operating system.
In the meantime, I’ve done the next best thing. Over the past three months, I’ve been test-driving the final version of Windows 7 in my home and office on a variety of PCs, performing a variety of roles. The 10 systems I cover in this article include six desktops and four notebooks. All of them were put into service in January 2007 or later. For each one, I’ve listed the current hardware configuration, the price I paid (including upgrades), the version of Windows 7 currently installed, and whether I did a clean install or an upgrade. The PCs I looked at represent a cross-section of the market as it exists today, minus two extremes: I didn’t include any low-powered netbooks, and I left out high-powered gaming machines and workstations.
During the research for this article, I spent a lot of time looking at two numeric measurements you can find on any Windows system. One is the Windows Experience Index (WEI), which provides a broad-brush measure of performance. (You can read some overall conclusions about these systems in last week’s preview, Measuring Windows 7 performance.) The other is the stability index, a 1-10 rating found in the Reliability Monitor section of the Windows 7 Action Center. Overall, I discovered that the WEI actually does a pretty good job of predicting how a system will perform. As the detailed discussion on the next few pages makes clear, though, the stability index can be extremely misleading because of some curiosities in the way it makes its calculations.
In this article, I don’t talk much about the features and capabilities of Windows 7. Instead, the question I wanted to answer is the one that keeps Microsoft’s product managers awake at night: Will their new OS work properly on new PCs and upgraded machines? Will it make people happy? Or will it suffer from the crashes, glitches, and slow performance that doomed Vista in the six months after its launch?
The reports I’ve put together here are anecdotal, to be sure, but I hope that the range of hardware I’ve chosen will provide some good clues as to the experience most people can expect, especially when upgrading.
Page 2: A desktop workhorse This Dell XPS 420 is nearly two years old, but it has become my preferred PC. Here’s why.
Page 3: A very small desktop PC After it failed the Blu-ray performance test, this ultra-small Dell desktop found new life as a business machine.
Page 4: Two ultralight notebooks Two review units, a Lenovo X300 and a Sony VAIO TZ2000, were built for portability, not for speed. Which one gets better battery life?
Page 5: Notebooks for everyday use How well does multi-touch work? And how well does Windows 7 work on a 13-inch notebook with fast, modern components?
Page 6: Three Media Center PCs Despite its checkered reputation, Windows Vista was extremely reliable on a trio of Media Center PCs here, from Dell and HP. Windows 7 continues that tradition.
Page 7: Windows on a Mac Last month I started using a Mac part time so I could make informed comparisons with Windows 7. With a brand-new 2009 model, Windows 7 runs surprisingly well.
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 10/14/09
