Windows 7 Improves Performance and Energy Efficiency

Even as early as Windows 7 Build 6801, a great number of reports show that Microsoft's new operating system has made major improvements in terms of performance and energy efficiency that put it well ahead of Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Microsoft explains where and how these improvements were made.

While Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista is known to have increased the performance and stability of the operating system, reports show that the pre-beta Build 6801 of Windows 7 delivers a superior level of performance to that of Windows Vista.

Through reduced background activity by minimizing the number of services running at startup, the number of disk operations, the reading and writing to and from the the registry, and the indexing of files, Windows 7 promises to increase the performance of the operating system but also to consume much less energy.

The Windows services will now be capable of starting depending on triggers, making it unnecessary for the services to run continuously simply to monitor an action, like they would now. Developers would be able to configure these triggers and develop their services accordingly. Windows 7 also comes with a set of preconfigured services that are accessible to developers via the Service Control Manager.

The processor will stay idle longer and get into that state more often in order to decrease power consumption. Devices that are not being used at the time will be shut down more often; this includes storage drives, network adapters and graphic cards.

However, Microsoft pointed out that its up to the developers that write software for the Windows platform to continue this practice of being energy efficient and generally resource conservative. According to Microsoft, the developers now have sufficient tools to control the power consumption of their applications to a great extent.