Windows 8 Is Faster At Pretty Much Everything

Microsoft promised us major performance improvements with Windows 8 and while the new OS may still be in its infancy, it appears to be living up to these claims. Over at Lifehacker they decided to put Microsoft’s claims to the test and ran a few speed tests to compare the Windows8 developer preview with Windows 7.

However they didn’t conduct those usual tests which are just a bunch of synthetic benchmarks which simply churn out numbers and don’t really make sense to the average user. Instead they performed an array of everyday tests where you could visually see the difference for yourself. All the tests were performed on a clean installation of each OS with the same programs installed.

The system used to test them on was a 3.8GHz Intel Core i7 with 6GB of RAM, a 2TB Harddrive and an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT.

So the results? Well hands down Windows 8 won overall, and beat Windows 7 in nearly every single test that was carried out. However there was one test where it absolutely blew Windows 7 away, and that was the boot time. When Windows 7 was released it did boot surprisingly quick, but Microsoft have put a lot more work into Windows 8′s boot time, as a result it thrashed Windows 7 in this test, booting in just 10 seconds compared to Windows 7′s 35 seconds.

Time Analysis:

 

	Windows 8	Windows 7
Boot Time (Windows Screen to Desktop)	0:10	0:35
Compress a ~700MB File	0:29	0:32
Decompress a ~700MB File	0:11	0:12
Duplicate a ~700MB File	0:01	0:02
Encode a Movie in Handbrake	8:06	8:15
Cold Start 9 Applications	0:46	0:46
Open 10 Tabs in Chrome	0:07	0:07
3dmark10 Score	6470 (5218 Graphics, 23098 CPU)	6455 (5199 Graphics, 23448 CPU)
Total Time	9:56	10:29

As I’m sure you can probably see some of the differences were very very slight and you probably wouldn’t notice. But bear in mind all these tests were run on a pretty powerful machine so you would probably see more improvement on an older lower spec machine.

Lifehacker also noted that sometimes Windows 8 didn’t boot in this magical 10 seconds, sometimes it would take nearly as long as Windows 7. I think we can just put that down to the fact that it’s still only a developer preview and we’ve still nearly got a year to go until Microsoft release Windows 8 to the public, and chances are these little quirks will be gone by then.

Source:

Lifehacker