Unimportant question Win7 vs XP

Post by philo
I was recently given a Win7 machine.
Everything on it was working but it was fairly slow.
Since I wanted to set the machine up simply to play old games.
I popped in another drive and installed XP on it and amazingly found all
the drivers.
It runs *considerably* faster on XP than it did on Win7
I then decided to completely disable networking.
Funny thing was... there is no network card shown in device manager nor
is there any unknown device showing as needing a driver.
Just to be sure the network card is still there, I even booted up with
the Win7 drive again to confirm.
FWIW: The onboard video and net chipset is Nvidia.

I assume this is not a new PC. Open the properties for the Windows 7
drive. On the Properties window, select [Toos > Defragment]. On the
Defragment window, select the main drive and the "Analyze disk" button.
If the result is more than 5% fragmented for a "spinner" or more than
15% for a SSD, defragment it. Repeat for any other drives used by
Windows 7.

--
David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Demonstrators worldwide are demanding that Israel stop
fighting in Gaza. Why does it seem that no one is demanding
that Hamas stop fighting? And where are the demonstrations
against Russia fighting in the Ukraine.

Spalls Hurgenson

2024-08-25 18:49:08 UTC

On Sat, 24 Aug 2024 16:06:21 -0700, "David E. Ross"

Post by David E. Ross

No. Do not defragment an SSD, regardless of defragmentation level. It
offers little to no advantage, and puts unnecessary wear on the drive.
The cells in an SSD only have a limited number of writes, after all.

Defragging a conventional 'spinning rust' drive is necessary because
-on a defragmented drive - a file might be scattered across the disk.
Thus, in order to read the file, the head must make multiple moves
(and the platter must make multiple revolutions) for the file to be
read. If you defragment the drive, all the parts of the file are
placed consecutively one after another in a single location, so the
head only needs move once to the start location, and the platter only
needs a single rotation.

On an SSD, there's no mechanical action; the electronics just calls
the specific cells and they output the data. Arguably defragging might
in certain situations result in a miniscule speed boost, but it's not
worth the cost to the drive. Especially if you are using
consumer-level defragmentation tools (or the one built into
WindowsXP).

If you have an older drive on XP, you may need a tool to ensure freed
up sectors (TRIM) are cleared and made accessible to the OS again..
Windows7 and up support the TRIM command; XP does not (at least not
natively). Some defrag tools could force an SSD to do garbage
collection, but you just want to trigger a TRIM and not do a full
defrag. And -again- default XP defrag doesn't do it.

Newyana2

2024-08-25 00:19:59 UTC

Was there a question there? I think it's not surprising that
XP would be faster on the same hardware. Win7 requires a
lot more juice. But it can be debloated to some extent. For
instance, disabling Aero.

Paul

2024-08-25 00:43:11 UTC

Post by philo
I was recently given a Win7 machine.
Everything on it was working but it was fairly slow.
Since I wanted to set the machine up simply to play old games.
I popped in another drive and installed XP on it and amazingly found all the drivers.
It runs *considerably* faster on XP than it did on Win7
I then decided to completely disable networking.
Funny thing was... there is no network card shown in device manager nor is there any unknown device showing as needing a driver.
Just to be sure the network card is still there, I even booted up with the Win7 drive again to confirm.
FWIW: The onboard video and net chipset is Nvidia.

I benched the various OSes at one time, and
there isn't much difference when testing with
things such as SuperPI.

The onboard NIC can be switched off in the BIOS. At least
one NVidia NIC had a bug, and corrupted data words every
once in a while. This required the user to install a
separate NIC (presumably a different brand).

You can make a summary for yourself, using CPUZ. CPUZ is a
portable application and does not require installation. The
"English ZIP" version (purple buttons) will suffice.
Unzip and use the EXE in there.

https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

The tool can prepare a text report in the last pane, for saving
to your folder. This helps if you need to copy and paste some
sort of detail in the report. Otherwise, the graphics are suitable
for capturing the essence of your trusty steed.

[Picture]

Loading Image...

NVidia had a lot of trouble making a good DDR2 interface.
Or for that matter, making a DDR400 interface (Nforce2). One of the first
things you do with an NVidia product, is memtest it. Turning
down the RAM speed can reduce the error rate, but that's
a pretty painful way to do a fix. I had a VIA chipset board,
where using DDR2-533 was flawless on memory... but slow as
molasses in spring.

NVidia made some higher end chipsets, and one of their tricks
was to slightly overclock one of the PCIe x16 interfaces.
They also made a motherboard, where the PCie x16 was
excessively sensitive to static, and some of the motherboards
arrived with one of two x16 slots, blown.

This means that NVidia hardware, requires research when you get
one, to see what the syndrome is with the thing. But your CPUZ
summary, will give us some hints as to what to expect.

Windows 7 is pretty slow on my single core AMD laptop, and
if you could install WinXP on there, it would feel better.
Another thing you will notice, is you install just a couple
support packages, like a printer driver, and it slows down some more.
You really need some horsepower (moar cores), to fight the feeling.
My dual core board was much kinder to me, up to and including Win10.
But it croaked (Southbridge) and is no more.

Windows today, doesn't need more than six cores or so.
If you give it more cores, it doesn't do maintenance with
the excess. For small numbers of cores, you have Search Indexer
and Windows Defender, wasting cycles. That's part of why
you need around six cores, to have some cores for yourself.

You can have more than six cores, but they only get used when
gaming perhaps, or doing 7ZIP compression.

But in the WinXP era, the OS didn't come with Windows Defender,
and two cores, you got most of the two cores for yourself. If you
installed a third party AV, that could chew into your joy with the
two cores.

Paul

philo

2024-08-25 00:54:03 UTC

I knew XP would run faster than Win7.

My question was why it did not see the net card. There was not even an
unknown device.

It was there in Win7.

That said...I was not going to out the machine on line...so that's fine.

philo

2024-08-25 12:06:30 UTC

The funny thing is, the 2 ghz is really too fast for some of the games
so I have to use moslo or Dos Box.

Still, the machine is going to get some use rather then end up in the
recycle bin

Steve Hayes

2024-08-25 03:00:38 UTC

My Win 7 laptop (with a hard drive) was stolen, and I replaced it with
a 2nd-hand laptop (with an SSD drive) on which Win 10 was installed.
While it boots up faster than XP or Win 7, some programs seem to run a
lot slower.

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

Paul

2024-08-25 04:36:17 UTC

Please name the program types.

Browsers are like stale bread, in terms of behavior.
You might discover for example, that browsers run better on Linux.

Other programs should not behave exactly as badly as a browser would.

Windows 10 has had some changes to NTFS. You may find that
deleting files is slower than normal.

Clean out your cache2. Could be 10,000 files in that area.

On Seamonkey, I remove webappsstore.sqlite and cookies.sqlite
when exited from the browser. Once webappsstore.sqlite reaches
8MB, it has an impact on browser speed. Scrolling begins to wobble a bit.
Additional files with similar names, are journal files, and all three
files with the same first name can be removed. For some reason,
some browsers "shut down dirty" every time, and this leaves
the journal files sitting there. A clean shutdown, there is just
the webappsstore.sqlite file and no matching journal file pair.

With virtualization, Task Manager no longer gives a true accounting
of computer activity. The Memory Compressor is missing in Task Manager.
However, if you use a copy of Process Explorer, it will show you
that the Memory Compressor has some blank fields, and this is why
Task Manager has "chosen" not to show it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

In Device Manager (devmgmt.msc), check the driver loaded for the
graphics card, and see if it is the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter.
That one (a "VESA driver") is not accelerated. You may have to hunt
down the correct driver and install it. For example, my GMA950 or so,
the driver for that is an XDDM and is not Win10 compatible. I had to
use a junk room video card, one which had a WDDM driver, to get
accelerated video and the ability to modify the resolution setting.
The MBDA driver is limited to 1024x768, and many times the user
notices "the screen is blurry".

Paul

Steve Hayes

2024-08-26 05:21:11 UTC

Please name the program types.

MS-DOS programs, mainly.

Browsers are OK (I've only used Firefox so far).

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

Paul

2024-08-26 08:33:42 UTC

Please name the program types.

MS-DOS programs, mainly.
Browsers are OK (I've only used Firefox so far).

When you look in Task Manager, is the MS-DOS program railing
NTVDM on one core ?

I don't know what I'd use in my collection here, as a test case.

My only need of real MS-DOS (on a floppy) was BIOS flashing tools.

MS-DOS should really "scream" on a modern processor, because the
clock rate is that much higher.

*******

It occurs to me, while staring at the menu on this page, that
MS-DOS storage is likely to use a BIOS routine for disk read/write.
Maybe at one time, this was a polled transfer, rather than a DMA transfer.
Maybe you'd want to do a storage benchmark and measure that.
Even without doing that, you could do a "dd" transfer to >NUL
and time that with a watch, and work out the megabytes per second
when an MS-DOS read is done.

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-benchmark-pack.html

I don't really see a reason for the compute portion to be slow,
as there's not much to get in the way. Nothing comes to mind.
The caches should be turned on by then, ready for MS-DOS to use
without configuring anything.

Paul

Steve Hayes

2024-08-26 09:43:20 UTC

Please name the program types.

MS-DOS programs, mainly.
Browsers are OK (I've only used Firefox so far).

When you look in Task Manager, is the MS-DOS program railing
NTVDM on one core ?

I'll have to get out my laptop to see what it does with that.

Post by Paul
I don't know what I'd use in my collection here, as a test case.
My only need of real MS-DOS (on a floppy) was BIOS flashing tools.
MS-DOS should really "scream" on a modern processor, because the
clock rate is that much higher.

That's what I would have expected. I have an old game called Rogue
which chugged along nicely on an 8088 processor and screams on the XT,
so perhaps I should try that.

The mystery is that most of the slowness seems to be in loading. The
Win 10 machine has an SSD, while the XT machine has a spinning disk,
but it still takes longer on the former.

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

Paul

2024-08-26 11:52:48 UTC

Please name the program types.

MS-DOS programs, mainly.
Browsers are OK (I've only used Firefox so far).

When you look in Task Manager, is the MS-DOS program railing
NTVDM on one core ?

I'll have to get out my laptop to see what it does with that.

That's what I would have expected. I have an old game called Rogue
which chugged along nicely on an 8088 processor and screams on the XT,
so perhaps I should try that.
The mystery is that most of the slowness seems to be in loading. The
Win 10 machine has an SSD, while the XT machine has a spinning disk,
but it still takes longer on the former.

To support MS-DOS, the BIOS does the disk reading for you.
And it could be using polled mode. In years past, that might have
been 4MB/sec. And it's not really affected by drive speed issues,
it's the fact it is polled mode. The CPU speed can make it run a bit
faster (higher clock means >4MB/sec). Just don't expect 200MB/sec
because that's not going to happen.

If you can find a way of using MS-DOS to benchmark the disk
speed, that would tell you what you need to know.

Paul

Steve Hayes

2024-09-03 02:34:22 UTC

Please name the program types.

MS-DOS programs, mainly.
Browsers are OK (I've only used Firefox so far).

When you look in Task Manager, is the MS-DOS program railing
NTVDM on one core ?

I'll have to get out my laptop to see what it does with that.

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

2024-08-25 10:15:21 UTC

Post by Steve Hayes
My Win 7 laptop (with a hard drive) was stolen, and I replaced it with
a 2nd-hand laptop (with an SSD drive) on which Win 10 was installed.
While it boots up faster than XP or Win 7, some programs seem to run a
lot slower.

Newer Windows versions take advantage of newer hardware features. It's why
they feel "faster". Older hardwares don't yet have those newer features. The
faster performance doesn't come solely from Windows.

If some programs runs noticable slower instead, the main suspect is
antivirus. The remaining suspects are uncesessary background applications.
Most users couldn't care less about background applications, since they
think their computer is already fast and/or have big RAM. Not knowing that,
even if each of them is small, if they are many, it'll bog down the system
sooner or later - as more and more background applications are added.
Performance impact will vary across different programs, depending on what
type/part of resources they use.

Java Jive

2024-08-25 13:36:22 UTC

As I've posted before, the faster boot is explained by Windows versions
since 8 having a 'Fast startup' feature enabled by default, whose sole
purpose is to reduce boot time, but I have it disabled, because
otherwise backing up your system disk using imaging software may not
work properly, as I discovered when using Ghost for this. The shut down
state using this is akin to hibernation, and IME it is not safe to image
a hibernated OS partition, as on restore this may corrupt other
partitions such as data partitions, which logically you'd think should
be unaffected.

The following page explains some of this quite well, but I don't think
mentions the imaging problem among the reasons to turn it off, whereas
for me it's the most important one:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-disable-windows-10-fast-startup

To disable it you need to use the legacy Vista+ Power Control Panel:
Settings
System
Power and sleep
Additional power settings (takes you to the legacy Power CP)
Choose what the power buttons do
Change settings that are currently unavailable
Disable 'Turn on fast start-up'
Save changes

Also as I've posted before, the slowness of programs running might be
because Windows 10 has an absurd amount of processes running just to
display the Desktop - though Paul has pointed out that most of them
are inert most of the time, they still consume some resources,
particularly memory:

Trimmed down XP: 26
Trimmed down W7: 39 (inc 6 NVidia services for the Gfx card)
As installed W10: 150-160

--
Fake news kills!

I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website:
www.macfh.co.uk

philo

2024-08-25 15:13:12 UTC

What has really helped me to optimize slightly older machines are SSD's
I have most of my machines using them now.

The one still using a mechanical drive is slow to boot up...but once it
does so...performs well enough that I'm going to leave it.

Mark Lloyd

2024-08-25 19:41:32 UTC

IIRC, Vista would be slower than either.

Post by philo
I then decided to completely disable networking.
Funny thing was... there is no network card shown in device manager nor
is there any unknown device showing as needing a driver.

Strange that it wouldn't find anything. Do you have an XP driver? It might
help to install it anyway.

Post by philo
Just to be sure the network card is still there, I even booted up with
the Win7 drive again to confirm.
FWIW: The onboard video and net chipset is Nvidia.

Video AND net?

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?" [Art Hoppe]

Paul

2024-08-25 23:37:40 UTC