It's an interesting way of getting round the EULA. What I take from it is not that 7 is better in just compressing, or file operations, or installation etc. but that there have been across the board improvements, and this is a very good thing.
Couple this with the fact that no beta software has ever been as fast as the finished product and I think we'll be looking at a very fast, very stable OS indeed. Can't wait for the public beta!
What I do find extremely interesting is that on the newer equipment Vista comes second, and on the older it is pretty much the same as XP overall (again, using the scoring system to get an overall impression of the system, not necessarily individual scores of individual tests). This tends to reflect the post-SP1 shift in opinions I have observed that has occurred which is that Vista is not actually a bad/slow/buggy/insecure/incapable OS, it's just had extremely poor word of mouth (also heavily influenced by a very vocal minority I note - over the past couple of years I have seen the same things referenced between groups of sites - A says problem X exists, B reports A has said this, C blogs that B has said it, D picks up C's blog and puts out a note on its RSS feed, this gets picked up by A who says "look, someone else with the same problem!". Gotta love the one-click-to-publish ethos of the internet!
Sorry, got a bit off topic there.
@AKH: would you consider a more technical set of tests using the same scoring system (i.e. not actual benchmarks, but just an overall impression)? Disk activity when idle for instance, smallest memory footprint (I'm going to guess Vista will come bottom on that one, XP first, 7 second, but you never know, XPs memory management isn't as sophisticated is it?).
Keep up the good work, it was an interesting read!
And Happy New Year!
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