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Microsoft Windows 7 Test Drive, Part 2

Dec 28, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

           

Last issue, I wrote about my experience installing Microsoft Windows 7 on a Windows XP 64-bit system. In this issue, I'll compare the rendering performance of Windows 7 with that of Windows Vista, and ultimately Windows XP. I say ultimately because I wasn't able to test my Windows XP system until past the deadline for shipping this article. So we shipped on time with Windows 7 versus Vista, and we'll add the XP component in a day or two.

Figure 1. The Puget Systems Genesis II workstation. By swapping the system drive, I could quickly and easily change from Vista to Windows 7.

I was fortunate to have an extraordinarily convenient test bed for comparing the operating systems. Specifically, custom computer manufacturer Puget Systems provided a 3.33GHz dual-processor, quad-core Intel Nehalem-based Xeon Genesis II system with 12GB of RAM, Asetek-based liquid cooling, and more importantly, three swappable system drives that let me change the computer's operating system by pulling out one drive and inserting another. This let me quickly and easily go back and forth between the operating systems, which I did multiple times during the tests.

Related Links

Microsoft Windows 7 Test Drive, Part 1 It's time to look at Microsoft Windows 7, which I'm doing in two phases. First, I'll upgrade an existing Windows XP installation and detail the experience and my first impression of Windows 7... Microsoft Windows 7 Test Drive, Part 3 Back again with Microsoft Windows 7 tests. I received the 64-bit Windows XP system hard drive from Puget Systems I mentioned earlier this week and ran my comparative tests. I'll include the test descriptions (again) for those who jumped directly to these results... CS4 and 64-bit Systems, Part 1 So there I was, testing Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4)’s AVCHD compatibility. I created a simple project, about 4 minutes long, two picture-in-picture overlays with simple rotation and color correction...

My original test plan was to compare Windows Vista (SP2) with Windows 7, and Puget shipped both of these system drives with the original computer. Then it struck me that many folks—myself included—were also interested in how Windows 7 compared to Windows XP. Because I asked so late, and because of holiday-related delays, I wasn't able to get the XP system drive in time to include the results with the original article, so I'll add those later.

I tested using two programs, Adobe Premiere Pro with Adobe Media Encoder and Sony Creative Software Vegas Pro, and I'll detail the tests used in the respective sections.

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