Windows 7 slaughters Vista and XP in performance

January 3, 2009 by Paul Spoerry 1 Comment

Bill Gates wasn’t kidding when he said Windows 7 would “be more efficient.” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes from ZDNet put together 23 real-world scenarios to see which operating system would be the quickest to complete all of the tasks. He tested the 32-bit versions of Windows 7 build 6.1.7000.0.081212-1400, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3.

Adrian used two different test systems (listed below) and tested Windows7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP against one another. Windows7 came out the winner… and it’s still beta code.

Test Systems

An AMD Phenom 9700 2.4GHz system fitted with an ATI Radeon 3850 and 4GB of RAM
An Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.2GHz fitted with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS and 1GB of RAM

Kingsley gave a 1 to the operating system that finished each test first, a 2 for second place, and a 3 for third. Windows 7 scored 25 points on both systems, placing first in 21 tests, and second in two other ones. On the AMD system, XP scored 61 points and Vista scored 52, while on the Intel system, XP scored 56 points and Vista scored 57.

View the full results of his tests over at ZDNet.

DExposE2 – Windows clone of Mac Expose

December 16, 2008 by Paul Spoerry Leave a Comment

Mac users love Expose. DExposE2 is a clone of Mac OS X’s Expose feature for Windows XP and Vista. Aside from the basic Expose featuresDExpose2 features a handful of extra features like interactive previews, hot corners, multi-monitor support, and more. You can get DExposE2 as both a portable and installable application. Hit the portable install if you want to check it out without installing anything or if you’re sure you’ll use it hit up the full blown application.

DExposE2 can be downloaded at Devrexster.

You can also check out this video to see it in action:

Vista Annoyances Resolved

September 23, 2008 by Paul Spoerry Leave a Comment

“Oh lord, not another Vista article!” Like me, I’m sure many of you might be thinking something along those lines whenever you see an article with the word ‘Vista’ in the title these days. We’ve had what can only be described as a plethora of articles on Windows Vista, almost all of them repetitive, one-sided and of little practical use. Some of them have bordered on the absurd, such as Infoworld declaring Windows Vista to be the second biggest tech blunder in history, giving as its reason a one paragraph description that serves more to highlight the author’s ignorance than provide any actual logic for their decision. We’ve been suffering under the weight of these nonsensical, sensationalist and opinion-laded pro- and anti-Vista articles for far too long.

So what makes this Vista article any different? The title provides a clue: it’s as much about providing practical working solutions to resolve some of the commonly-quoted Vista annoyances as anything else. That in itself should give all Vista users a reason to read it. However it doesn’t matter whether you use Vista or not, because this article does something that most of the others don’t: it takes an objective and up-to-date look at the current state of Vista, with a range of facts, clear examples and informed opinions aimed squarely at debunking a lot of the myths and FUD we’ve been gagging on for the past year. So for those of you still considering whether to make the switch from XP, for those of you who want to abandon Vista and go back to XP, for those of you who used Vista a while ago and who are wondering whether it’s worth using again now – this article puts things in perspective with the latest facts.

What this article doesn’t do: it doesn’t try to make you believe that Vista is the greatest (or worst) thing since sliced bread. It doesn’t try to force you to think a certain way by taking liberties with the truth just to prove a point. It doesn’t try to highlight how witty and incisively sarcastic I can be. And most certainly this article doesn’t try to dazzle you with technical jargon.

Read the full article over at TweakGuides.com

Executor – Challenger to the Launchy throne

August 19, 2008 by Paul Spoerry 2 Comments

Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. It allows you to pretty much ignore your start menu and do all kinds of time saving stuff from the Executor itself.

No doubt I’ve been in love with a similar application called Launchy for quite some time. Launchy is a free windows and linux utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. It indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

Many have come, but Launchy still stands as the king. But Executor brings with it many features that Launchy doesn’t have and it might be time to make a switch.

One of the major differences between the two is Executor’s emphasis on keywords. Although it does text search for just about anything, Executor gives priority to user-assigned keywords for launching apps, documents, and folders. What’s more, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any keyword for quick launches without even invoking Executor. It’s also has a small footprint on your system clocking in at just about 10 megs.

[Read more…]

Vista tweak – Reduce System Restore disk usage

April 23, 2007 by Paul Spoerry Leave a Comment

System restore is never anything I found particularly useful… in fact I don’t know that I’ve ever even used it. However, I’ve always left it enabled just in case. In Windows XP you could configure the amount of drive space System Restore uses via a slider control. No such control exists in Windows Vista and by default the sucker is configured to use up to 15 percent of your available drive space! Ok… 15% for something I don’t think I’ve ever used… I don’t think so.

To store restore points, you need at least 300 megabytes (MB) of free space on each hard disk that has System Protection turned on. System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. As the amount of space fills up with restore points, System Restore will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.

My laptop currently has a 60g drive and it’s allocated 5.136g of space. Of course this isn’t visible via the interface but to find out you can open a command prompt. Click on the start menu (or the orb as it seems to be called nowadays) and in the searc box type ‘command’, right click on the Command Prompt icon and select Run as Administrator. You’ll then see a DOS command prompt open up… type the following to see the current settings:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

What you’ll see is something like the following:

The command to set the amount of space used follows this syntax:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]

So to configure your drive to only use 2 gigs of space on your C: drive you’d to the following:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=2GB

That’s it! You’ve recovered some space. If you find system restore useful I’d recommend not touching this setting, or at least not reducing it too much. But if you’re somebody like me who’s never used it you can easily reclaim some space.

« Previous Page