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https://www.patreon.com/ulillillia --- Published on Jan 28, 2014

Windows 7 - I didn't want it but I was forced to have to get it thanks to Microsoft and developers abandoning the awesome OS that XP was. When I finally got it a month ago, I ran into all sorts of problems. The worst one was my motherboard drivers disk being unreadable which meant no Internet access which meant not being able to download any necessary/updated drivers. The fact the boot up system changed caused yet another problem. You can read the full story on my main site here: http://www.ulillillia.us/myblog/gener....

Once Windows 7 was up and going, the biggest thing I've noticed is a massive performance loss, about 30% (Platform Masters had an 85-90% performance loss - more details on this in my upcoming video in a few days). The biggest clue I have to the performance loss is pulsing as I clearly demonstrate (and the video shows very well). GIMP scrolls much slower than it did on XP, about half as fast, just to suddenly speed to the original speed, about double, then slow back down, doing so very frequently. The scrolling action I was doing would have been doing about 220,000 page faults per second instead of the roughly 155,000 I was getting here, which hints to about a 30% performance loss.

It's not just GIMP that's getting this performance loss, it's pretty much everything that uses the CPU. What used to do 1.6 to 1.9 fps for video compression is now getting around 1.3 fps (I only have one test case, but it's under similar circumstances - that previous video, with the winter storm, is what was getting this). Platform Masters, my own project, is getting this pulsing too. I set up a timing system that times how long it takes process input and draw the scene (excluding the final blit) and I'm seeing the frame rate varying with the low point about 30% lower than the high point. I can't think of anything not affected by this pulsing. The pulsing does smooth out on occasion, but only on the slow side, but it eventually returns.

XP started off slow when I did the same tests, but after only a half second, it really went fast and remained fast until there was a few seconds of inactivity where, in that case, it slowed back down until nothing happened. Windows 7 seems like it's trying to but it's not.

Short of temporarily changing the clock multiplier in the BIOS from the 40x that I have (for 4 GHz) to 25x (for 2.5 GHz) and testing the results (the factory set clock is 34x for 3.4 GHz, as per what the Intel i7-2600K CPU has), I have no way to know if the overclocking I've set on my CPU is having any effect. CoreTemp used to show what the clock is in real time on XP (albeit, glitched) but it only ever shows 3.4, the original clock.

Several other annoyances are present in Windows 7 and I clearly explain them in the video: having to get a plug-in to stop the grouping of similar windows (note the Firefox window highly separated from the rest), icons not keeping the same positions, programs not starting up (or, for the Windows Task Manager case, not knowing how to have something done by default), and various others.

There are some up sides though. I like the extra details in Windows Task Manager and I like the resource monitor (I remember resource monitor best in Windows 98 - check some of my screenshots prior to Feb 6, 2006 to see it). While showing resource monitor, you can see just what exactly is going on.

I keep getting told that Aero improves performance. So far, I have yet to find Aero doing anything but reducing performance, usually about 1%, 5% at the high end with all those annoying effects disabled (like animations that I don't care for).

I have 4 GB RAM (1600 MHz), the i7-2600K CPU, and the GeForce 460 for the video card.

I also explain why I've been silent on YouTube and why I've disabled commenting. It all comes down to Google+ - I absolutely refuse to get Google+. I do have a Facebook though (I've had it since August 16, 2013). You can access it here: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?....