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Windows 7 On Multicore — How Much Faster? 349
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Andrew Binstock tests whether Windows 7's threading advances fulfill the promise of improved performance and energy reduction. He runs Windows XP Professional, Vista Ultimate, and Windows 7 Ultimate against Viewperf and Cinebench benchmarks using a Dell Precision T3500 workstation, the price-performance winner of an earlier roundup of Nehalem-based workstations. 'What might be surprising is that Windows 7's multithreading changes did not deliver more of a performance punch,' Binstock writes of the benchmarks, adding that the principal changes to Windows 7 multithreading consist of increased processor affinity, 'a wholly new mechanism that gets rid of the global locking concept and pushes the management of lock access down to the locked resources,' permitting Windows 7 to scale up to 256 processors without performance penalty, but delivering little performance gains for systems with only a few processors. 'Windows 7 performs several tricks to keep threads running on the same execution pipelines so that the underlying Nehalem processor can turn off transistors on lesser-used or inactive pipelines,' Binstock writes. 'The primary benefit of this feature is reduced energy consumption,' with Windows 7 requiring 17 percent less power to run than Windows XP or Vista."
Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:5, Funny)
Snow Leopard is better than Windows 7 (Score:3, Funny)
Suck it, Microsoft drone.
Linux is better that Snow Leopard (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
It's slower.
Win7 is basically just a refurbished Vista under the hood.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to disagree with the Troll mod.
I ran XP x64 for a few years, and I liked it a lot. Driver support was dodgy in some cases, but it was a pretty solid OS. 64 Bit Vista was indeed slower, much larger and suffered from the well documented issues we all know...
Windows 7 is very Vista-like, but with the benefit of:
1) Two years to get application writers used to the Vista/7 model, and the headaches associated with it.
2) More driver support from vendors
3) Hardware that's two years newer
4) More customizable
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly, it's inevitable here if you discuss anything Microsoft doesn't want discussed.
It's a fact though. They couldn't afford to take any risks after the Vista failure and played it very conservative with Win 7. Of course, admitting that wouldn't generate a lot of hype, so their marketing machine is in overdrive trying to spin a very bland OS as something exciting.
At least it's showing clearly how much Microsoft has infiltrated Slashdot over the past couple of yea
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. I particularly like the feature where you rename a folder, and it shows up as renamed, but on the filesystem, it's still called "New Folder". Gotta love the strict testing that Microsoft put in.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sigh, I've seen this script so many times before.
Yes, I have used Win 7. It is widely available and has been for a long time. I have a copy of it I can boot right now if I feel it'd achieve anything. No, it is not exciting. No, it is not particularly fast, just a little quicker than the previous MS release, which was widely considered sluggish. No, it will not help me do anything better than XP. No, there is no real point in "upgrading". Yes, I know this will be mod
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:5, Funny)
I bet you even threw a Windows 7 launch party.
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I considered it to score a free Windows 7 "license" but selling my soul for free software just isn't worth it, especially for software I can buy for under $200
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Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:5, Informative)
XP X64 sucks
Do you have a source for that claim, i've only run it briefly but the only real issue I found was driver availibility.
and it is most assuredly not the same thing on any level as Win2K3 server.
The server specific functionality has of course been stripped out and the crippling adjusted but afaict the version of the major components is the same and it even uses the same hotfixes and service packs as the x64 version of server 2003.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
XP x64 shares service packs with Windows Server 2003, and is built upon the same code base.
The reason why XP x64 has gained the "it sucks" reputation is mostly due to missing consumer drivers for XP x64. Almost all decent server hardware supports WS03 x64, but there is a lot of consumer out there that was never supported on XP x64.
Since Microsoft has made x64 support mandatory for Vista upwards, this has changed greatly. Vista SP1 and WS08 are built upon the same code page, just like WS08R2 and Windows 7 ar
Re: (Score:2)
Suck what? The fact that Windows is finally catching up to Unix in this area?
What are you going to test this feature out on?
You can buy 1024 CPU Linux boxes. 100 cpu Unix boxes have been commonplace for awhile.
Microsoft is last to the party (like always).
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Suck it, nerds.
So they actually bothered to ship it with a compiler, source, and a text editor that's better than note/wordpad?
I didn't think so.
Why would anyone with half a brain bloat up a OS with those things when only about 0.5%(I'm being charitable here) of the user base would ever find a use for them? You can always download the things you mention for free(sans source) from places like http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualc/aa336402.aspx [microsoft.com]
And yes, Visual Express is much better editor than notepad/wordpad.
If you're a nerd you would know where to get them. If you're a true nerd, you can slipstream them into the OS install.
How come you don't know
Less power? (Score:5, Funny)
Nooo! I was hoping that power consumption would continue to increase! Sooner or later our PCs would require 1.21GW!
Re:Less power? (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. So much work with my lightning catcher for nothing.
Well, time to go back to the human reanimation experiment.
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Maybe you should have worked on something more useful, like a machine to turn trash into power!
I build such machine, but it was too dangerous.
You see, if it ever got in contact with a Windows they'd both disappear in a higly energetic explosion.
Re: (Score:2)
No.
Not Really (Score:5, Funny)
'What might be surprising is that Windows 7's multithreading changes did not deliver more of a performance punch,'
No, it's not surprising.
Re:Not Really (Score:5, Interesting)
What is surprising is that power consumption could be so significantly reduced. This story could have come out with an entirely different spin if the headline were simply, "Windows 7 Reduces Power Consumption by 17%."
Re:Not Really (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree - user-mode code, whether it's separated into threads or processes, still relies very heavily on kernel scheduling decisions. It may sound simple enough, but if you study the decisions the kernel has to make (such as which thread to wake first, from a set of 8 all waiting on the same semaphore), you can find lots of ways to get it wrong. We now take it for granted because thousands of man-years have been spent on solutions.
Re:Not Really (Score:5, Interesting)
While actual performance may not be faster, perceived performance almost certianly is. It "feels" snappier, seems to respond better, due to some optimizations in locking and in the graphics subsystem that allows visual feedback in one app to not be blocked or held up by work going on in another app.
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While actual performance may not be faster, perceived performance almost certianly is. It "feels" snappier, seems to respond better, due to some optimizations in locking and in the graphics subsystem that allows visual feedback in one app to not be blocked or held up by work going on in another app.
That was one of the first things I noticed when I installed Win7.
Vista always felt sluggish. Even when things were working properly and I wasn't experiencing any problems, the entire OS just felt like molasses. There were minute pauses everywhere. Not enough to actually say this is taking longer than it did on XP... But it always felt like the OS was struggling to keep up with me.
With Win7, that hesitation is gone. Everything feels far more responsive. I don't know that I'm actually getting anything d
Re:Not Really (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft's "Engineering 7" blog has several telemetrics examples from Windows 7 vs. Vista.
As a Microsoft Partner, we've been using Vista exclusively on good hardware (2.5+ Ghz Intel Dualcores, 4GB RAM, 32bit Vista Enterprise).
We've completed our Migration to Windows 7 x64 two weeks ago. That's 10 desktops and 20 laptops. Everyone that has moved to Vista to 7 is glad that their computer is now faster.
Personally, i've witnessed that it's quicker to respond, though the tasks take roughly the same time in the end.
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I thought it was funny to read that they were comparing Windows to Windows. BFD, it just sounds like marketing to me.
LoB
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There's progress but what Microsoft has co
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Re:Not Really (Score:4, Informative)
There's a multitude of possible migration paths to take, to go from Windows XP to Windows 7 - in fact there is only one migration path that's exclusive to Windows Vista - the inplace upgrade.
The inplace upgrade is a horribly bad idea, and you should never try or consider it.
So, for any reasonable person, the migration paths available from XP to 7 are exactly the same as from Vista to 7. A new, clean install, followed by a migration of application settings.
If you're a home user, use Windows Easy Transfer to save all your settings to an external drive, reinstall, then recover your settings from the external drive. Reinstall all apps.
If you're a business user, there's a wealth of options available to you - check out the documentation for MDT2010, which can provide you with all the tools you need to roll out Windows 7 in your company. USMT and Windows Easy Transfer are the same under the hood - so user settings can be migrated.
A good place to start is the Windows 7 springboard:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/default.aspx [microsoft.com]
Re:I disagree with *you* (Score:5, Informative)
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The system they performed testing on has a CPU with a single shared L2 cache so processes moving between CPU cores are not necessarily slower than processes parked on
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Is that really the best you can come up with?
Some of us have actually don't development on large Unix servers. There
really isn't any reason the OS should be getting in the way. The
bottlenecks should be all in your applications. A well built application
should be able to light up your entire server, fully exploit all of it's
hardware and scale well while doing it.
Whether or not you overwhelm your scheduler is also something that should
be an application problem rather than an OS problem.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This story could have come out with an entirely different spin if the headline were simply, "Windows 7 Reduces Power Consumption by 17%."
Welcome to Slashdot!
Re:Not Really (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. A 17% reduction in power consumption doing the same tasks is nothing to scoff at...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That was sort of my reaction.
From what I read, I got the impression that Windows 7 isn't any faster than Vista, but it will get the same speed using less energy.
This is a good thing for laptop users, is it not?
Re:Not Really (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not Really (Score:5, Informative)
not surprising because the OS really can't do that much to improve (or mess up) the performance of user-mode code that isn't making many OS calls anyways.
Others have already mentioned scheduling and cache thrashing, I'd like to add memory management. There are lots of ways memory management choices can degrade performance, sometimes drastically.
One example is page sizes and the TLB - each cpu has a hardware TLB [wikipedia.org] which is like a cache of virtual page to physical page address maps. Hardware TLB look-ups are fast, but the TLB is only of limited size and when a virtual address is not in the hardware TLB, the OS has to take a fault and walk its own software-maintained TLB that holds the complete list of virt2phys translations. That's a couple of orders magnitude slower than getting it from the hardware TLB.
One way to reduce TLB misses is to use larger pages. So an OS that is smart enough to automagically coalesce 4K pages to 4MB (or larger, depending on the hardware) pages can significantly improve TLB performance. In a pathological case, that could result in a 100x-1000x speed-up, in typical cases where it is going make an difference you'll probably see ~10% performance improvement.
Another related example is how shared memory is handled. Every page of virtual memory has a PTE [wikipedia.org] which, at the most basic level, contains the virt2phys translation. When shared memory is used, a decision must be made - are the PTEs shared, or does each process get a separate copy of the PTEs for the shared memory. Downside of sharing PTEs is that the shared memory must be mapped at exactly the same virtual address in each process that uses it, so if one of those processes already has something else at that address, it won't be able to use the shared memory. The downside of using separate copies of PTEs is that you can really suck up a lot memory for just the PTE list -- imagine 50 processes that all share on chunk of 100MB of memory, if they all get their own PTE copies for that 100MB its the equivalent of 5GB worth of PTEs. If a PTE itself takes up 32 bytes, then that's at least 40MB of PTE entries just to manage that 100MB of memory. A 40% overhead is huge and then there is the issue of hardware TLB misses which, depending on the implementation, may have to search all PTEs in the system, so the more PTEs the worse a TLB miss will hurt performance.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's not surprising.
Should have implemented Grand Central [wikipedia.org], I hear it's free and opensource. Even has the Apache license so that it allows use of the source code for the development of proprietary software.
I mean they already borrowed the TCP IP stack. [gcn.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Why would Microsoft implement GCD when they already have ConcRT [msdn.com] which appears to be a better (more scalable) implementation of the same functionality?
And while the NT 3.1 TCP stack was based on the BSD TCP stack, that TCP stack was replaced in Win95/NT4.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Why would Microsoft implement GCD when they already have ConcRT [msdn.com] which appears to be a better (more scalable) implementation of the same functionality?
So that when I write code that uses GCD I don't have to rewrite it to port it to Windows?
And while the NT 3.1 TCP stack was based on the BSD TCP stack, that TCP stack was replaced in Win95/NT4.
Yet I can still write a piece of software that uses BSD sockets calls and port it to Windows by changing little more than a couple of header includes.
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't understand the difference between copying code and implementing an API, I really hope I never use any code written by you.
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>No, it's not surprising.
Im not surprised. I think we're going to find that as people start taking Win7 apart that its not too much different from Vista because Vista itself was pretty efficient to begin with. The Vista bashing was really unjustified and after you got over issues like old drivers, old hardware, and pre-SP1 UAC, you pretty much have Win7.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Vista bashing was really unjustified and after you got over issues like old drivers, old hardware, and pre-SP1 UAC, you pretty much have Win7.
are you really that disillusioned? People bash Vista because it deserves it. I have Yet to run into one person that genuinely likes vista and has no problems. Out of 3 of my business clients 2 requested a downgrade to XP within the past 4 months. They both gave vista a shakedown on all workstations for 2 years, and finally looked at the numbers we gave th
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Im not surprised. I think we're going to find that as people start taking Win7 apart that its not too much different from Vista because Vista itself was pretty efficient to begin with. The Vista bashing was really unjustified and after you got over issues like old drivers, old hardware, and pre-SP1 UAC, you pretty much have Win7.
Vista had issues, no matter how you look at it.
The lead-up to Vista was just plain stupid. Microsoft was advertising it like the second coming. It's a freaking OS! If you do it right, people don't even notice the OS because it gets out of their way and lets them do their work. With Vista, Microsoft seemed to forget that their job wasn't to produce the single flashiest piece of software on the computer, but rather to make that computer run all the other software better.
The GUI was an improvement over XP
Is this really that surprising? (Score:3, Informative)
Power savings (Score:2, Interesting)
Seeing the performance increase and in some cases decrease from Vista to 7, I don't see that as a selling feature either.
What does intrigue me is the ability of the OS to allocate threads to the different cores. That is something I would want to learn more about.
Basically, unless you're on a workstation and running intensive app
Re:Power savings (Score:5, Informative)
The 17% power savings mentioned on page 3 of the article is primarily for the Intel Xeon 3500 and 5500 lines (the Nahalem processors), which shut off power to cores that aren't being actively used. The other linked articles go into this more in depth.
Not all code can be done in parallel (Score:5, Insightful)
What the new languages and OS's are doing, are just making it easier for developers to make code that runs on parallel processors. However most of us are not trained to write parallel code. And there are some algorithms that cannot be parallelized. What the moderns OS are doing is taking code that was designed to run multi-threaded or parallel in the first place and in essence have them run more efficient on multi-processors. As well as giving you some tools to make development easier and stop us from trying to work around all those conflicts that distracts us from software development. Much like how String classes came common for developers so we didn't need to fuss around with allocations just to do some basic string manipulation... (Alocate space, calculate the memory offset insure the last character was a 0x00...) aka making development really easy for buffer overflow errors if you missed a step.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And who wants to spend money looking at decades old code in order to make explicit implicit blocks, or dare to risk breakage by tweaking the code to be concurrency amenable?
Re:Not all code can be done in parallel (Score:5, Insightful)
Well you bloody well should be, it's basic stuff.
Parallelism has been around for over 20 years now, not to mention the related discipline of distributed computing. It's not new. It's not *that* hard. You don't need to parallelise every last goddamn algorithm if you can split the work up into jobs using thread pools, or into similar tasks.
You think the people that make apache analyse every string comparison they do to see if they could do it more efficiently across a set of vector cores? Well maybe, but most likely they use task parallelism to get multiple threads executing different but comparatively large chunks of code.
This is not a distraction from software development, it's doing it well. And if you're afraid of a little bit of memory allocation then you're doing it wrong...
Re:Not all code can be done in parallel (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Parallel Software development is normally taught as a Masters Level class for computer science. Only for the last 3 years has multi-processing architecture been available for common PCs. So sorry It is not a common Skill for good parallel software development.
2. Having to rethink your coding methods isn't hard but you need to be retained to think about problems differently. Multi-Threading isn't the only thing about real parallel processing programming.
3. Spending a week to make sure your threads are completing and starting at the right time and are Not creating a race condition where you have just been lucky does require a lot of extra coding that for most applications can be the difference between the software being a benefit or a cost.
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http://egonitron.com/2007/05/25/the-truth-about-the-firefox-pipelining-trick/ [egonitron.com]
This is false. Even if it was true, it can be mitigated with pipelining, which is very easy to enable.
Unless you are using firefox 2.0 or less, this issue doesn't exist.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I use FF 3.5.3 on Ubuntu 9.04, and it behaves exactly as the grandparent describes. In fact, loading a tab with a /. story in it sometimes takes so long that compiz grays out the whole FF window in the same way that Windows tags a window title with (Not Responding).
Whatever the cause of this behavior, it is definitely annoying.
Wadaya want, chopped liver? (Score:2)
...permitting Windows 7 to scale up to 256 processors without performance penalty, but delivering little performance gains for systems with only a few processors...
So you're disappointed Microsoft doesn't magically speed up your single or dual-core PC? Maybe you're expecting too much.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe he's a mac user. 10.1-> 10.2 -> 10.3 all sped up my 550 mhz powerbook back in the day. 10.4 was the first OS update to slow down my computer (10.3.9 was screaming fast on my laptop). 10.4.1 fixed some speed issues, and by the time 10.4.5 came out it was nearly as fast as 10.3.5 or so. So it's possible to upgrade your OS and end up with a faster feeling system. There used to be a mac benchmarking site, mac feats that documented that each release was in fact marginally faster in most every aspect.
Re:Wadaya want, chopped liver? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, it's possible for an OS to slow down your computer by improperly handling tasks, but you can't depend on finding and correcting them. (They may not even be there.) It's understandable to be annoyed if an OS update slows down your system; it's something else to expect a speed-up from out of nowhere.
Also, Windows 7 users are reporting a subjective improvement in response much like you report in OS X's progression.
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And I bet 10.6 works quite well on there, too.</sarcasm>
Re: (Score:2)
Supposedly there was a hack to allow 1ghz computers to run 10.5, but I wouldn't have much space left over on the 20GB hard drive after 10.5 would be installed. Sadly like most TiBooks of that era, one of my hinges broke and it's now collecting dust somewhere. Sadly a hinge repair costs almost as much as the entire laptop is worth these days.
Ouch (Score:5, Informative)
I should know better than to click on InfoWorld links, but I think I just lost about 10 IQ points as a result of reading that article.
In summary, Windows 7 now tries to keep threads on the same processor. It has been known for about 15 years that this gives better cache, and therefore overall, performance. Any scheduling algorithm developed in the last decade or so includes a process migration penalty, so you default to keeping a thread on a given processor and only move it when that processor is overly busy, another one is not, and the difference is greater than the migration penalty (which is different for moving between contexts in a core, between cores, and between physical processors, due to different cache layout). This also helps reduce the need for locking in the scheduler. Each CPU has its own local run queue, and you only need synchronization during process migration.
If Vista, or even Windows Server 2003, didn't already do this, then I would be very surprised. FreeBSD and Linux both have done for several years, and Solaris has for even longer. Fine-grained in-kernel locking is not new either; almost every other kernel that I know of that supports SMP has been implementing this for a long time. One of the big pushes for FreeBSD 5 (released almost a decade ago) was to support fine-grained locking, where individual resources had their own locks, and FreeBSD was a little bit behind Linux and a long way behind Solaris in implementing this support.
Most interesting part uncommented... (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows version - 7 *ULTIMATE* (Score:2, Insightful)
They tested Windows ULTIMATE, the best of the newest against the oldest patched-up version of XP. And it only saved a marginal amount of power. and may be slightly faster in some operations. What about the versions that the average Joe is going to be running? There are Starter, Home, Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate; each with an increasing price requirement (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/compare). How does the "basement" version compare to XP SP3 (or against the various f
Re:Windows version - 7 *ULTIMATE* (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on, look at the feature comparisons, and tell me which actual features of Ultimate make it any faster than Professional, or even Home Premium.
If Ultimate was actually faster than any other version of 7, wouldn't it be in tech news sites everywhere? Ultimate is about more features, not about more speed.
Re: (Score:2)
They tested Windows ULTIMATE, the best of the newest against the oldest patched-up version of XP.
What? They tested the best of the newest version of Windows 7 against the best of the newest version of XP. The oldest version of XP would have no service packs at all.
And it only saved a marginal amount of power.
17% is not marginal. What would you consider to be non-marginal? Greater than 100%?
What about the versions that the average Joe is going to be running?
Average Joe doesn't use a Xeon processor either. The choice of operating system versions seems appropriate for the level of hardware. Average Joe should just wait until someone does a comparison using games & video encoders if he wants real world tests more
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just catching up? (Score:2)
I must not be reading that chart right (Score:2)
If I'm reading the chart correctly, it appears that Vista rivals Windows 7 in all benchmarks and even beats it in a couple.
Ru-roh, Shaggy. That's not good. I thought Windows 7 was supposed to be the Vista Apology version?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Win 7 XP particularly with NUMA multi-socket (Score:2)
This test was only using a single socket system. Perf differences from XP are going to be greater on a NUMA multisocket systems like Barcelona or Nehalem. XP predates NUMA on the PC architecture, while Vista and Win 7 got a lot of tuning for it.
This can be a big help for video encoding and other highly multithreaded tasks.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Any examples?
(Score:-1, Troll)
There' s one ---^ :)
Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:5, Insightful)
If the device drivers for your motherboard have a bug - which sounds more like the cause of your issue - then that isn't a Microsoft problem at all, since they didn't write the drivers. Contact Abit for support.
Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's being a little too easy on Microsoft. Getting drivers right is a shared effort of both the hardware vendor and MS. Both parties need to do their jobs right in order for the overall system to work.
Even if it is a bad driver, one might blame MS for not making Windows 7 sufficiently compatible with Vista at the device-driver-interface level. Or for building an ecosystem in which closed-source, maintainable-only-by-the-OEM drivers are the norm, etc.
I think the best we can say here is that the MS-Abit team seems to have produced a bug.
Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:4, Insightful)
If the device drivers for your motherboard have a bug - which sounds more like the cause of your issue - then that isn't a Microsoft problem at all, since they didn't write the drivers. Contact Abit for support.
If we take this as true, it's an example of why for some people, paying a premium for a Macintosh is worth the cost and can make sense. You give up the freedom to do all sorts of things (like get a machine with specs perfectly suited to specialized needs for example), but you gain freedom from a lot of problems of this sort.
(Just trying to plant this in the heads of the countless people who argue there's literally no rational reason to buy a Mac, and only fanboys would even consider it. You won't see me argue that there's no such thing as an Apple fanboy, but I will argue that the fanboy phenomenon is not all there is to Apple's sales.)
Re: (Score:2)
Err... you DO know what first takes control of the computer when you turn it on right? The BIOS. SOMETHING has to load the MBR from disk and execute it.
After that, yeah, modern Windows tends to do it's own thing and doesn't use the BIOS for anything.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Windows 7 (as well as I think certain versions of Vista) provides support for booting from EFI rather than a BIOS. While, yes, it's still a "BIOS-like" bootstrap loader, Windows 7 is not reliant on any specific BIOS functions.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Err... you DO know what first takes control of the computer when you turn it on right?
That would be a firmware interface. BIOS is one example of a firmware interface - and is the defacto standard on a PC - but it isn't the only one. You can indeed run all recent versions of Windows without a BIOS.
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Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:5, Informative)
And work on your Google-fu.
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"Not true. The BIOS controls the fans and such even when the OS is running."
Err no, it doesn't. The BIOS isn't some seperate autonomous entity running in the background on some special CPU reserved for it - its just a bunch of routines the OS can call if it wants. And no modern OS does - they all have their own 32/64 bit drivers.
Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:5, Interesting)
The first is clearly the most desirable, as SMM is just plain wrong, and hardware protection should not rely upon the stability of the operating system.
What's happening in your case could be a problem with the EC somehow becoming confused, which is likely either a BIOS or EC firmware bug.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
In my experience it is best not to rely on the BIOS control on these boards and instead use a software solution to adjust the fan speeds.
Under Windows you can use the Abit uGuru software to automatically adjust fan speeds based on temperature thres
Re: (Score:2)
Those of use that skipped Vista would do well to pick up 7, which while flawed, seems to me to be the best of the Windows home operating systems.
Re: (Score:2)
People complained long and loud about Vista. Microsoft addressed all of the complaints, and produced an OS that is faster, easier to use, and consumes less power. Now, people are complaining that this new OS is just "refurbished Vista". Was Vista just "refurbished XP"? Was XP just "refurbished Win95"?
Re:Did we really expect different? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for Windows 7 being an improved OS, yes it is. It is a substantial improvement over XP and Vista in a variety of ways such as security, virtualization support, performance on multi-core processors, support for 64-bit processors, desktop usability etc. Perhaps none of them matter to you or don't matter enough to switch but that's besides the point.
Re:Did we really expect different? (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 7 is NOT as or Faster than XP. PERIOD, stop the lies already.
Did you even read the article? There's a simple performance table on the first page, followed by the analysis:
These results suggests that when considering Windows 7, performance should be viewed as a reasonable justification for upgrading from Windows XP, but not a driver for migration from Vista.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Do you mean the BKL [wikipedia.org]? It's hurt [lwn.net], but it's still there [google.co.uk]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What you're probably thinking of is patch for the Big Kernel Lock(BKL) in Linux which basically was the origin of SMP scaling in Linux. This article is talking about the kernel dispatcher lock in NT. Two separate things.
Re: (Score:2)
Except this isn't an article about how "the one true word processor" doesn't have a Linux version.
This is about basic OS level functionality that's very easy to quantify and is not vulnerable to rhetoric and sophistry.
Re: (Score:2)
Mac users can't use a Windows desktop too easily if they haven't been previously exposed.
Windows users have issues with OSX.
The use of Windows is learned, like anything else. Most normal people can't use Windows worth a damn either, they can click the blue E and then complain their computer got slow and they don't know how to install a printer....
Re: (Score:2)
Actually I find most windows users take to OSX far faster than a Mac person takes to windows.
I have to train new users at a clients office on OSX once a month, they catch on incredibly fast and most have never used OSX.
I'd say that Windows is a major failure in the Useability. People switching away from it to OSX learn faster than those switching to it from OSX.
Re:Not fast enough (Score:5, Funny)
I see you are using Windows 7... :)
Re: (Score:2)
Why did you even post this? You just posted that you had no reason for posting on this thread.
Re: (Score:2)
DOS attack on tntshoes.com in 3, 2, 1....
Payless Shoes posting spam for Discount Online Shoe Superstore in 3, 2, 1...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)