Myths and Reality at Robert Pogson

All over the web, sycophants of M$ are extolling the virtues of 7 and how it is blazing fast. That’s a myth M$ wants to spread.

Engadget published some reality. Thanks to them, because they were not afraid to get their hands dirty and actually touch three products: XP, Vista and 7. To no surprise they found 7 a bit faster than Vista but XP was faster than both in real benchmarks.

Like Vista, this new Windows chews up a lot more CPU cycles per transaction loop than XP — from 39 to 68 percent more on dual-core and from 19 to 51 percent more on quad-core (the lower figures in each case representing the workflow workload, and the higher figures the database workload). Any illusions about Windows 7 somehow being leaner or more efficient than Vista can now be thrown out the window, right along with the infamous “new kernel” myth and related rumors and misconceptions.

Further, they add that to have any hope of keeping up with XP. 7 will have to wait for 32-core CPUs. HAHAHAHA. Supposing cores follows Moore’s Law, we should get:

Year	cores
2008	4
2010	8
2012	16
2014	32

Several more years to reach parity with XP which is behind GNU/Linux
means … another Vista-like window of opportunity for GNU/Linux. Folks tired of waiting for M$ to produce a good OS will have plenty of opportunity to run GNU/Linux.

This gives some clues to the abysmal performance of M$’s latest efforts at producing an OS. Rather than doing the job the user wants done, M$ must be shadowing the user’s process with some additional processing that sucks up all that juice. DRM anyone? That is why Vista really sucks on single and dual-core processes. There must be more than two processes, a lot more. The task cannot complete until everything is done to M$’s satisfaction which is not the way IT is supposed to work: Do Everthing the Fastest and Best Way Possible.

I will sleep well tonight knowing the march of the penguins continues.

I wonder what makes the fanbois of M$ tick? Are they paid? Do they believe the myths they try to spread? Are they in denial that M$ would do this to them? How many of them were laid off this week?

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

2 Responses to “Myths and Reality”

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1 Richard Chapman Jan 25th, 2009 at 3:33 pm

Are those tests run with anti-virus software installed and running? If not, they should be.
2 Robert Pogson Jan 25th, 2009 at 4:11 pm

I do not know.

Recently, I set up a PC without real-time scanning and it ran like a rocket compared to its neighbours… This was on a single-core machine with a very slow hard drive. Quad-core with RAID might work better, but we don’t buy PCs so they can polish their bits off.