Evaluation of Windows 7 RC Build 7100

By

Muswera Walter

Supervisor: Mr John Ebden

Consultants: Billy Morgan and Jill Japp

Background

• Vista was not received warmly due to bugs, crashes, poor performance and software incompatibility and demand for system resources

• Microsoft has been working on a new Operating System (OS)

• Available release at time of evaluation was Windows 7 RC Build 7100 (May 2009)

Motivation

Claims have been made about improvements that have been made on Windows 7 since the XP era and the ill fated Vista era: Security

Software compatibility

Enhanced performance (graphics, disk I/O, robustness etc)

Ease and speed of installation

Fast start-up and shutdown time

User friendliness

This assessment was carried out to validate some of these claims

Importance of this Research

Every new OS should be tested/evaluated before being deployed at full scale to allow for:

Planning of transition (upgrade and training)

Avert loss of time and revenue through crashes and incompatibilities

Evaluate availability of system support

Features Evaluated

• Security

• Virtualisation

• Software compatibility

• Performance benchmarking

Specifications of Experimental Machine

• Intel Core 2 Quad processor (Q9400 - 2.66GHz, 6MB L2 cache)

• 4GB RAM

• 500GB SATA hard drive with 32MB cache

• 256MB graphics with DirectX 10 support

• DVI and VGA connector

• DVD writer with LightScribe

• G45M Digital motherboard with 1GB network port

Minimum System Requirements for Windows 7

• 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor

• 1 GB of system memory

• 16 GB of available disk space

• support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory (to enable the Aero theme)

• DVD-R/W Drive

• Internet access for updates

Same as Vista

Testing Conditions• The same computer hardware was used for all tests

• Both OS were installed fresh in a dual boot setup

• Results obtained reflect what you get when you install a plain OS without any tweaks or configuration changes (standard install)

• Install time was measured from the moment the option to boot from CD/DVD was chosen until the point where the desktop reached.

• Windows 7 Ultimate (32bit RC Build 7100)

• XP Professional (32bit SP3)

Security

• Bitlocker and Bitlocker To Go 100MB partition TPM and PCR Usability on other PCs running other Oses Bitlocker To Go Reader

• UAC Implementation of the 4 new levels Is it really secure?

Virtualisation

• Windows XP Mode

• consists of two things:

the Windows Virtual PC engine

a licensed copy of Windows XP SP3

• System requirements

2GB of memory

15GB disk space/virtual machine

Software Compatibility tests

• Successful Installations

• Compatibility issues

Drivers (TPM)

Nero 7 (program has known compatibility issues)

Daemon Tools (program blocked due to compatibility

issues)

Tests carried out on XP SP3 and Windows 7

• Performance benchmarking

• Installation time for each operating system

• Logon, boot up and shutdown time

Performance

• Passmark PerformanceTest version 7.0 was used to assess perfomance

CPU test suite is designed to measure CPU operations

Memory test suite is designed to exercise the memory sub-system of the computer.

Disk test suite is designed to measure the rate at which files are read and written from and to disk

2D Graphics test suite tests of standard two dimensional graphical functions

3D Graphics test suite measures the performance of the 3D graphics

CPU Tests

0.00

1000.00

2000.00

3000.00

4000.00

5000.00

6000.00

7000.00

516.

98

1982

.40

1095

.22

5984

.44

229.

30

2930

.10

518.

04

1979

.82

1101

.22

6062

.06

230.

52

2955

.70

Windows 7 Windows XP Units of Measurement

• Integer - Millions of operations per second

• Floating Point - Millions of operations per second

• Find Prime numbers Thousands of Primes per second

Compression - Kilobytes Processed per second

Physics - Frames per second

Random String Sorting - Thousand Strings per second

Memory Tests

0.00

500.00

1000.00

1500.00

2000.00

2500.00

3000.00

2077

.50

1907

.24

1924

.24

2547

.76

910.

48

2077

.64

1924

.14

1961

.10

2727

.20

1061

.90

Windows 7 Windows XP

Units of Measurement

• Cached - Megabytes transferred per second

• Uncached - Megabytes transferred per second

• Write - Megabytes transferred per second

• Allocate small block - Megabytes transferred per second

• Large RAM - Operations per second

Disk Tests

Sequential Read Sequential Write Random Seek + RW0

20

40

60

80

100

120

93

81.2

3.22

97.14

84.9

3.25

Windows 7 Windows XP Units of Measurement

• Disk Sequential Write - Megabytes transferred per second

• Disk Sequential Read - Megabytes transferred per second

• Disk Random Seek + RW - Megabytes transferred per second

2D Graphics Tests

0.00

50.00

100.00

150.00

200.00

250.00

300.00

350.00

400.00

450.00

1.36

1.33

91.1

6 112.

64

66.2

8

386.

12

278.

78

8.98

2.98

124.

80

109.

18 137.

86

386.

82

274.

56

Windows 7 Windows XP Units of Measurement

• Solid Vectors - Thousands of vectors drawn per second

• Transparent Vectors - Thousands of vectors drawn per second

• Complex Vectors - Complex vectors drawn per second

• Fonts and Text - Operations per second

• Windows Interface Operations per second

• Image Filters - Filters per second

• Image Rendering - Images per second

3D Graphics Tests

Simple Medium Complex0.00

50.00

100.00

150.00

200.00

250.00

300.00

350.00

400.00

450.00

394.18

82.18

14.74

376.62

80.72

15.00

Windows 7 Windows XPUnits of Measurement

•Simple - Frames per second

•Medium - Frames per second

•Complex - Frames per second.

•DirectX 11 issues on complex graphics test

Summary of Findings• BitLocker Drive Encryption and Bitlocker To Go in Windows 7

require special hardware

• XP Mode also requires special hardware

• BitLocker Drive Encryption and Bitlocker To Go are only available in the Ultimate and Enterprise Editions

• XP Mode is available only in the Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise Editions

• Windows 7 is incompatible with some software

• Windows XP dominated most of the benchmarks run

• Windows 7 performs better in the 3D graphics

Conclusions

• XP still remains a better desktop OS since:

– it has few application compatibility issues

– works on ordinary hardware and

– has a better performance.

• disadvantage of “black box” benchmarking is that it cannot conclusively explain all of the performance differences– it merely exposes the differences