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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phoenix_rizzen - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
God that Start Screen is ugly, disorganised, and hard to look at. Boxes are different sizes. Boxes are different colours with no apparent relationship between colours and program groups. Some have graphics, some have icons, some have multiple lines of text. There's no symmetry to anything. It's just like the default Control Panel layout in Windows 7 ... a disorganised mess.The fact that they had to add a search field, and implement "type to start searching" is a giant red flag that should have warned them they had failed. You should not need a search option for your program launcher.
Granted, the default layout of the Start Menu in every previous version of Windows wasn't much better, as there was no enforced organisation (each vendor dropped whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted), but at least it was easy-to-navigate and easy-to-scan to find things.
Kiouerti - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I have to agree. The aesthetics of the Metro are just horrible.Andrew.a.cunningham - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Aesthetic issues aside, almost all modern OSes have a search feature built into their launchers: the Windows 7 Start menu has one, OS X and iOS have Spotlight, Android has one... they're pretty much universal.phoenix_rizzen - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
They might be universal, but Metro Start Screen basically makes it required/mandatory.Search in KDE's Lancelot and whatever the default menu is called is optional. Everything is organised according to type of task and easily reachable in under 4 clicks (generally 2 clicks). But you can type-to-search if you aren't sure where to find something.
Search in the Windows 7 Start Menu is optional. Things are still (sorta) organised, although by vendor instead of by task, and still easy enough to find things.
Same with Windows Vista Start Menu.
Search is optional. Metro Start Screen basically requires type-to-search to find anything. Otherwise, you have to spent minutes trying to read everything onscreen to find anything.
p05esto - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Right, why in the world is there a search box at all on a computer? lol. If you can't organize files and put applications int he right place then you need to go back to a pen and paper. A search box is not a navigation option, it's a last resort and a cumbersome at that for the unorganized.phoenix_rizzen - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
IOW, you agree with what I'm saying. ;)dan0512 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
If I can't change the name of the executable window to Programs, then I won't buy this product. I hate the noun "Apps".alpha754293 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
bwahahahahahaa.....that's all I gotta say about that.
(Surprised that given the specs of the systems, that people couldn't have deduced that he's testing with whatever hardware he had laying around....)
bwahahahahaha...still that update is hilarious! (And the fact that he had to write the update...makes it that much the better...)
Andrew.a.cunningham - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Glad I'm not the only one seeing the humor in it. :-)Mathragh - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Just made this account to express my gratitude for the author(s) of this article.This has been the most complete, readable and (arguably) objective article about the consumer previes so far, so great job!
I also think that most of the people really underestimate the time and effort that goes into writing something like this, so even more kudo's for not letting yourself brought down by some of the comments people make!
Also, I have been using this version of windows 8 for some time now as main OS on my laptop, and it is indeed how you described it yourself aswell. The more time you spent using it, the more you start to like it. All the added functionality is really awesome. The only thing I dont really get the the fact that the desktop version of remote desktop has been hidden like this. If not for this article I wouldnt even have known it still existed.
Keep up the writing! Loving every article on this site.