Randall C. Kennedy, InfoWorld
Everyone loves a killer feature: that must-have capability or technology that prompts you to plunk down your hard-earned cash in an effort to upgrade your computing experience. Windows 7 is a killer version — but not for the reasons you think. It’s not because it fixes Vista’s many faults — it doesn’t. Rather, it glosses them over with fresh paint and behavioral tricks.
The real killer feature of Windows 7 is scalability. Simply put, Windows 7 does a better job of taking advantage of the available hardware resources than its predecessors. This scalability edge manifests itself in the form of better performance under complex, multiprocess, multithreaded workloads.
Given the same number of CPU cores, Windows 7 runs circles around both Windows Vista and Windows XP. In fact, the results aren’t even close: In one multiprocess workflow test, Windows 7 outpaced Windows XP by 250 percent — this on an eight-core (dual quad-core Xeon) HP Z800 workstation.
