Windows 7 Struggles to Balance Performance and New Features
Tired of having to upgrade your hardware every time a new version of Windows is release? The Windows 7 development blog feels your pain, but unfortunately stops short of offering a solution.
In a quite candid post (for Microsoft anyway) the Windows 7 team discusses the various tradeoffs involved in improving system performance. As Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky writes “one person’s must-have is another person’s must-not-have.”
The question is, how will Microsoft balance your Windows 7 wishes against that guy in the next cubicle who wants the exact opposite?
While the post may be candid about acknowledging the difficulties, it isn’t forthcoming with solutions. Aside from mentioning that you’ll still be able to turn off eye candy in Windows 7, Sinofsky doesn’t offer many specifics about Windows 7 system optimizations.
The most noteworthy detail in the post is the news that Windows 7 will be getting some hard disk read/write optimizations. “This is an area receiving special attention for Windows 7 with the advent of solid state storage devices that have dramatically different ‘characteristics,’” writes Sinofsky.
That should be welcome news for Windows fans wanting to get high-capacity solid state drives (SSD) in their laptops. Given that write speeds aren’t nearly as fast on SSD as traditional spinning hard drives, reducing the amount of disk operations in Windows 7 should make for a system that runs faster on tomorrow’s SSD-based hardware.
If you’d like to give the Windows 7 team your thoughts on what they should do to improve performance, head over to the development blog. However, if you’re really interested in giving Microsoft some useful data, consider the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program, which collects anonymous stats on what your PC is really doing.
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