Windows 7 seems to be quickly shaping up with its new taskbar and a much more polished UI than Vista.
After testing it on both my laptop and in Hyper-V I've found some interesting stuff I wanted to share.
All Tasks
In Windows 7 they have added a pretty big list of tasks (shortcuts) to help people find the settings their looking for.
This library is a list of shortcuts to dialogs in the system that users often want to use.
Let's say you want to connect to a wireless network and the only thing you'er used to is the start menu.
You click the windows button and you see the "search programs and files" textbox at the bottom of the menu.
If you type in Wireless in the textbox this is the result you should be getting.
This seems to be a pretty neat feature and I hope they include all the possible dialogs that are useful both for the average and the IT-pro's.
This build currently include 273 tasks and you can see a screenshot of some of them here.
Boot time
Both machines got 512MB ram, and no page file.
Boot time in seconds from i pressed boot to notepad was running:
Vista: 38
Windows 7: 24
Memory usage (Updated)
At PDC a netbook (Asus eee?) with 1GB of RAM was showcased running Windows 7 just fine.
1GB of RAM isn't much these days, but still I kept wondering how much RAM does Windows 7 really need?
A quick comment pointed out that in the night i forgot to take the page file into account!
As I wanted to find the "static" memory usage of Windows 7, the page file had to go.
The new tests showed that with 512MB of RAM the system used about 369MB of it.
With 400MB of RAM the system used 329MB.
And with 300MB of RAM the system got a critical error after booting.
So what is the real "static" memory footprint of Windows 7?
It seems to need about 350MB of RAM to be able to boot successfully.
PS: Just noticed Windows 7 got a new Resource Monitor, it's worth checking out :)
TheNetAvanger wrote
Ok, you do realize the footprint of superfetch is pretty small, and even on memory tight systems, will gain some benefits to applications? Just not sure why this is singled out, when it still produces a benefit.
I ended up testing this with superfetch off and on with applications running. Superfetch itself (the service) takes about 30MB of RAM, but it does't seem to use a lot more RAM than without superfetch.
The only thing I ran into was that with 300MB of RAM the superfetch service crashed after a while (a bug?).
SuperFetch has gotten a lot of bashing since it was introduced in Vista, but there are few deep reviews of the good and the bad it actually does. Since it will over time build up a index over what applications are run when, the test also has to be run over time. On a laptop or desktop computer you should never disable it, and on a netbook with 1GB of RAM i propably keep it running too. I just don't have the numbers to suggest if it should be off or on when running less than 1GB of RAM.
Hopefully this was a interesting read :)
* Vista and Windows 7 includes applications that uses free RAM on the system. If you got 2GB of RAM the task manager often shows that 1GB or more is used, if you got 4GB of RAM the task manager shows that 2GB is in use. The applications basicly use a percentage of RAM and makes sure they free up what they have used if the system suddenly needs to use it (when playing games etc).