Windows 7 Vs. Windows Vista: Boot Time Performance Drag Race

Although Microsoft failed to support in any way past comparisons between development milestones of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 3, arguing that pre-gold builds are not fit for any sort of OS measuring
contest, it failed to hesitate in the least when it came down to throwing the pre-beta build of Windows 7 against its precursor. On the opening day of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft delivered a boot time drag race between Windows Vista and Windows 7 pre-Beta Build 6801 Milestone 3.

The video embedded at the bottom of this article features a real-time comparison between the startups of Windows 7 and Windows Vista side-by-side. Jon DeVaan, Senior Vice President, Windows Core Operating System Division, revealed, "You're going to see that Windows 7 is going to startup several seconds faster than the Vista machine, and there are several things that we have done in Windows 7 to make sure that this comes true. A few examples are: loading device drivers in parallel, and another important one is that we created a mechanism to start services truly on demand, because by lowing the number of services that start during this scenario we can lower the memory pressure, we can lower the I/O pressure and we can deliver a superior experience".

Microsoft, through the voice of Michael Fortin, Microsoft distinguished engineer and lead of the Fundamentals feature team in the Core Operating System group, indicated in the past that it was committed to the evolution of Windows 7 past Vista in terms of the startup time. In the testing lab, the Redmond giant is looking for 15 second boot times for Windows 7, which is of course a mark that will not be achieved in real life booting scenarios.