In-Depth with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview
by Andrew Cunningham, Ryan Smith, Kristian Vättö & Jarred Walton on March 9, 2012 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Microsoft
- Operating Systems
- Windows
- Windows 8
To test claims of faster booting and lower memory usage in Windows 8, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 on each of three different computers of varying vintages—a Dell Latitude E6410 with 8GB of RAM and an SSD, a Dell Latitude D620 with 2GB of RAM and an HDD, and a lowly netbook with 1GB of RAM and an HDD. More complete specs for these systems can be found on this page, in which I discuss the computers on which I’ve been running Windows 8. Each computer had the most recent drivers for all of its hardware installed.
Startup time is defined as the amount of time between when the power button is pressed and when the Windows login screen is ready for input. POST time is defined as the amount of time between when the power button is pressed and when the “Starting Windows” boot screen first appears. After measuring all times in Windows 7, I reformatted the hard drives, installed Windows 8 and any needed drivers, and measured boot times in the same way.
Microsoft claimed that Windows 8 featured improved boot times, and that claim is definitely true—boot times vs. Windows 7 are down across the board. These reductions are due to some architectural changes that Microsoft has made—a Windows 7 shutdown would completely purge the OS and all running programs and user sessions from memory and then re-load a fresh copy at next boot. Windows 8 unloads the user session and running programs from memory, but saves the core OS to disk from RAM as it would do if the OS were hibernating. The result is a much faster startup time all around, even on mechanical HDDs. If, for whatever reason, your system doesn’t support hibernation (or if you’ve turned it off), these boot time advantages will evaporate.
But what's that, you say? How is a netbook that barely meets the minimum system requirements booting more quickly than a late-model Dell Latitude? Perhaps these numbers will clear things up:
This is one of the instances where hardware designed for Windows 8 will probably have an advantage over older hardware that has been upgraded—as you can see here, a computer’s time to POST is a larger than ever percentage of total boot time. Thanks to its newer hardware and SSD, the Latitude E6410 only takes four or five seconds (!) to boot to the login screen in Windows 8, but its nearly 22 second POST time means that both the Latitude D620 and the lowly netbook are ready to use more quickly. Systems designed for Windows 8, especially those configured to use UEFI instead of legacy BIOSes, can have drastically shorter POST times, and new computers equipped with SSDs may well go from powered-off to ready-for-input in just a few seconds.
To test claims of reduced memory usage, I took the same machines and let them idle at the desktop with only the Task Manager running. Both the Windows 7 and Windows 8 installs used the same drivers, so any background processes running on one OS were also running on the other OS.
We see marginally lower base memory usage in Windows 8 compared to Windows 7 on the two Dell laptops by a noticeable but not staggering amount. The netbook, with its 1GB of RAM, sees about the same base memory usage under both operating systems—because of the extra caching and preloading that's going on under the hood, my experience has been that Windows 6.x's memory usage increases when you give it more RAM to work with. That computers with 2GB and 8GB of RAM would have a higher base memory usage than a machine with 1GB of RAM shouldn't be surprising.
These slight savings won’t keep you from needing to upgrade your RAM if you’ve been thinking about it, but it’s impressive that Microsoft has been able to hold steady or slightly decrease the amount of RAM used in spite of the additional features (and remember, since Windows 8 includes both anti-virus and anti-spyware protection built in, these numbers should look even better after an install of Microsoft Security Essentials or another anti-virus package on the Windows 7 machines).
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Impulses - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I plan to start my own riot once I'm done reading if there isn't any multi-display discussion... :pMrSpadge - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
AMD fans can be quite thin-skinned..Kristian Vättö - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
My system is not included in the table but don't worry, it's Intel based as well ;-) Z68 and i5-2500K to be exact.futurepastnow - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I installed it and have been playing with it on an AMD-based system (laptop with a Turion II P540 processor, HD4250 graphics and 8GB of DDR3). It runs fine.I mean, actually using Win8 is like sticking a fork in my hand, but there are no performance issues whatsoever on what is now a basically low-end AMD system.
george1976 - Sunday, March 11, 2012 - link
It is not a funny post. The answer I am sure you know it very well, it is all about the money, money makes the world go round etc.Andrew.a.cunningham - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
So, wait. Intel paid me money to use years-old CPUs of theirs in a review of a beta product that another company made?I like this story. Tell me more.
medi01 - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
We shouldn't be telling you fairy tales.Having 8 systems with Intel and 0 with AMD you should have better argument than "oh, I've forgotten it in my pocket".type.
Why is it that you " have no AMD test systems on hand at present" please?
Andrew.a.cunningham - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
Because this is a review of Windows 8's new features, and it doesn't matter what hardware I run it on because an x86 processor is an x86 processor. Because I'm also an OS X writer and AMD doesn't come in Macs. Because Intel offered bang/buck and battery life last time I was in the market for a laptop. Because the business-class PCs that I usually buy lean heavily toward Intel.You wanna buy me an AMD system? Please do. Otherwise, I'm sorry I don't have anything in my arsenal, but not sorry enough to spend $400-600+ on computing equipment I won't otherwise use.
medi01 - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
It doesn't matter what hardware eh?"This broad list of hardware, most of it at least a couple of years old, should be representative of most machines that people will actually be thinking about upgrading to Windows 8"
And this, coming from a hardware reviewer, is insulting humanity:
"Because Intel offered bang/buck and battery life last time I was in the market for a laptop"
You can have good AMD notebooks (with good battery life AND performance, including GPU) at price points where there is NO Intel offering.
Andrew.a.cunningham - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
"Insulting humanity?" Dude, perspective. I'm trying very hard to engage you in a rational conversation, so try to extend the same courtesy to me. They're just CPUs, and I don't understand why you're attacking me personally about them.I'm not sure what notebooks you're referring to - even a cursory glace at Newegg, Best Buy, and other retailers shows Intel offerings featuring Pentiums and Core i3s (both Nehalem and Sandy Bridge-based) competing in the sub-$500 (and sub-$400) market where AMD is offering Brazos and Llano chips - AMD's GPUs are going to be much better but Intel's CPUs are also much better, so what you buy depends on what your workload is. Some of the AMD laptops I'm seeing use single-core processors, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone in 2012 regardless of GPU.
The difference becomes more apparent once you start looking at higher-end laptops - I've had a very hard time finding a 14" or 15" AMD laptop with anything other than a 1366x768 display, for example, and an equally hard time finding an AMD notebook with dedicated graphics. I've looked not just on Newegg and other retailers, but also on the websites of major OEMs like Dell, HP, and Lenovo - their AMD offerings are pretty sparse.
This is AMD's problem right now, at least in notebooks - it's "good enough" at the low end, but get into the middle and high-end and (without even considering performance) you very rarely even have an AMD option.
Also, for the record, the last time I was in the market for a laptop was about two years ago when I bought my E6410 - this was well before Brazos and Llano.