• Windows 7 Wallpapers
• Vista Wallpapers
• Windows Wallpapers

How can I tell that we’re close to seeing an RC build? Well, mostly it’s a gut feeling based on the fact that features-wise Windows 7 has been finished for a long time and that now Microsoft seems to be at the stage of adding new wallpapers, tweaking default account pictures, and generally polishing a few aspects of the UI. However, I don’t want to underestimate the importance of getting a look at this build, because it’s the first 32-bit build I’ve seen since the beta 1 release (which was released back in January, but had a build date going back to December 08). Only the 64-bit flavor of build 7048 emerged earlier this month. Build 7057 also the freshest build - the build date stamp, 090305-2000 translates into 5th Mar 2009, 8:00pm - so this is literally just over a week old.

Rather than give you a blow-by-blow account of everything that’s different about this build compared to every previous build that we’ve seen (I’ll leave that to others), I’m going to concentrate on the one area that interests me (and many of my readers) the most - performance.

Note: Before I go any further, I feel the need to emphasize that build 7057 is still a beta build and nothing can be taken as being final at this stage.

Important note: I have on several occasions contacted Microsoft for feedback on benchmarking Windows 7 and at this point the company is not ready to discuss performance testing.

Rather than publish a series of synthetic benchmark results for the different operating systems and builds (Microsoft frowns upon benchmarking beta builds, not to mention the fact that the final numbers only really matter for the release candidate and RTM builds), I’ve decided to put Windows 7, Vista and XP head-to-head in a series of real-world tests to find out which OS comes out top.

Conclusions

After I carried out the performance test on Widows 7 build 7048 I commented that I thought some of the results were all over the place. However, on looking at this latest build, I’ve no doubt that not only will Windows 7 will be fast. In fact it will blow away all previous Windows OSes, including the sainted Windows XP.

Note: Why haven’t I just published raw benchmark results? Simple - it’s not allowed under the terms of the EULA.

So far it seems that on the hardware platforms that I’ve used that the 32-bit flavor of Windows 7 is faster than the Beta 1 build (significantly faster in some of the tests). Will this be true of the RC and RTM builds? Initially, I expect it to be the case unless you are throwing a lot of RAM and CPU at the OS. I suspect that the cause for this is immature drivers and that once we see an RC build vendors will put more effort into optimizing the drivers for both 32-bit and 64-bit.