Will I get a net performance benefit from upgrading XP to W7? Or is the main benefit one of features and usability?
I have a laptop running XP Pro (technically it’s XP Tablet, which is XP Pro with tablet features added). I am considering upgrading to Windows 7, but I am assuming Windows 7 will have a bigger footprint and might be more of a drag on the system than the benefits it would offer.
The machine is a Gateway C140-X with an Intel dual-core T5250 1.50GHz, with 4GB of memory installed (3.4GB recognized).
Windows 7 (unlike Vista) isn’t much more of a resource hog than Windows XP. Your machine won’t have any problem running Windows 7.
You won’t get a performance “benefit” from upgrading. Every new OS adds new things, and those new spiffy features do take system resources. Windows 7 does have a larger memory and disk footprint than XP. The performance difference is going to be pretty small though.
The only time you gain performance is upgrading from Vista to 7, and that’s only because Vista was such a horrible awful resource hog (due mostly to some rather stupid ideas Microsoft had about constantly trying to load things into memory on the off chance that you might need them).
requirements for programs or operating systems can be optimistic. if you are a bit above the published requirements then you should have no problem.
Win 7 has some stability benefits i’ve seen. a program having a problem will more likely crash itself and not the whole machine compared to earlier versions.
i turned off some new look and feel features of Win 7 because i didn’t find them useful for how i use a computer.
I tend to disagree. Windows 7 is less wasteful than Vista, but still uses far more resources than XP did. On a modern computer, it’s manageable, but I know my vintage 2003 Toshiba tablet PC wouldn’t have the memory to run Windows 7 in a pleasant fashion.
I think you should first run Microsoft’s Upgrade Advisor to get an idea of what’s possible.
Sorry, missed the edit window (boss walked into cubicle). From the specs in the OP, I’d say the laptop can probably run Windows 7 just fine, though perhaps not with Aero.
Oh, and one thing to watch out for: some tablet PCs have a screen calibration file that’s created at the factory and just sits in a directory somewhere on the hard disk. At one point we reinstalled Vista on an HP tablet, losing the calibration file in the process, and the touch screen has been barely usable since then. And no tools to re-calibrate.
Unless you need W7 for some specific reason, I would not do it. I have been using W7 for nearly a year now (not an upgrade, a new computer), and I still think the XP GUI was better and more customizable.
A Pentium 4 single core with 1 GB or more memory should run Windows 7 about as well as a Pentium III with 512 MB RAM runs XP (which I’ve done, and it works fine). Anything less than that and I wouldn’t try to run Windows 7 on it.
The OP has a dual core with 4 GB of RAM. Should be fine.
In terms of performance, cacheing has been much improved since XP. And the GUI runs on the GPU instead of the CPU and is more responsive due to changes in the way the graphics stack operates.
You’ll also need it to take full advantage of stuff like large RAM sizes, modern GPU’s, and SSD drives.
I think any computer that came preinstalled with windows xp would definitely be struggling to handle windows 7 and sure windows 7 is definiitely not as bloated as windows vista but it’s still much more demanding than windows XP I Would seriously suggest reinstalling Windows XP on a machine with XP on it at least you know it’s clean of viruses and do your best to keep it that way.
**Gateway does not list any win7 drivers for this model. **
I personally would not reccomend it, can, and should, are not the same thing. You have plenty of ram,which is helpful, but your system was built with the throughput requirements of 5-6 years ago in mind not present day stuff. You will not see a net increase in performance but it will be more secure and able to use many present day things that it will not under XP.
Possibly. But caching what exactly right after a restart? Honestly sometimes I wish Microsoft engineers would spend some time optimizing their code for least amount of resources footprint. What can Win 7 do with all that extra resource usage that Win XP didn’t do?
Well, the idea is that it predicts what programs and files you are going to use, and has them in memory waiting for when you activate them. So any program you normally use as soon as you start should be loading into memory ASAP.
That’s not saying that Windows 7 doesn’t take up more memory than Windows XP, even discounting the cache. I’d say my Dad’s Windows 7 64-bit takes up an average of 768MB more than mine doing the same thing. Plus, 32-bit programs in a 64-bit OS take up twice the space, if I remember correctly.
OS is basically looking at the vast amount of RAM available and choosing to use RAM over swap because RAM is orders of magnitude faster, and you have a metric shitload of it available.
My kids have 2 computers I built for them some years ago with what was already by then “old” components: the Shuttle XPC SS51G. Back in August 2002 this was an impressively high performing PC with a small footprint… Which means that by late 2005 I was able to pick up two of them for very little, spending most of the money on two 17" LCD monitors and two wireless networking cards (which nowadays are dirt cheap). I put Windows XP on both of them with 1GB of RAM and just used the on board video and sound.
Fast forward to December 2011 and while in theory they can run Windows 7, but as I found out last week, there are no Windows 7 certified drivers for the motherboard. So now that I have to do an OS re-install on one of them, I’ve had to resort to getting a new copy of XP on eBay because Microsoft is no longer supporting or selling produce codes for XP and I lost the product key sticker on the CD-ROM of XP that I have. Because while installing Windows 7, it halts because the DVD drive does not have a “signed driver”, which means the motherboard’s IDE driver was never updated with a driver cleared for Windows 7.
Win 7 (and Vista) has a predictive cache. It caches files based on what it predicts you’ll do… since you have a lot of RAM available, it caches a lot of files. If you normally start Outlook after booting, Windows 7 will start loading up Outlook files into its cache so if you start it, it starts much quicker. If you never start it, Windows can toss that cache at any second and use the memory for whatever else is needed.
The thing a lot of people don’t get about computer RAM, and it is admittedly hard to wrap your head around: RAM takes time to fill, but empties instantly. The implication is, any RAM in your system that’s empty is wasted… if the RAM ends up being needed, it can be emptied instantly for use. Thus, the predictive cache.
(If you’re using Task Manager to measure memory usage, make sure you look at the “Available” number and not the “Free” number. If you’re using a third-party tool, make sure it’s updated for Vista/Win7 or it might be feeding you very misleading numbers.)