The foundational work was actually done in Windows 8-when you start Windows 7, it needs to load the entire OS and the user session from disk every time. Where Windows 7 users will notice the biggest boost is in boot times, something we’ve talked about before. And Windows 10’s version of Windows Defender includes antivirus protection instead of the simpler anti-malware-only protection Windows 7 included. Still, sitting idle at the desktop with all updates installed, it looks like Windows 10 uses a few MB less than Windows 7 did. It’s difficult to really measure RAM usage, since everyone’s system is going to act differently, and the apps you install and run will have a bigger impact on your system RAM than anything Microsoft can change in Windows. Not a big deal in the days of cheap 500GB hard drives, but harder to give up if you’ve got a 128GB or 256GB SSD. Even if you blow away all Windows Update files, system restore points, and cache files, a patched Windows 7 install uses around 10GB more disk space than an unpatched install. We looked at Windows 7’s disk space usage before and after updates were installed (our “fresh install” baseline is a 64-bit Windows 7 ISO from MSDN). Intel Core i5-5200U, Intel HD Graphics 5500, 256GB SATA SSD, 8GB RAM Intel Celeron 2957U, Intel HD Graphics, 256GB SATA SSD, 8GB RAM Intel Celeron N2840, Intel HD Graphics, 32GB eMMC SSD, 2GB RAM Intel Core i5-540M, Nvidia Quadro NVS 3100M, 500GB HDD, 8GB RAM Windows 7 can’t be installed on the Stream 11 since the OS doesn’t support installation on eMMC storage, but it was the operating system the E6410 originally shipped with, and you can put it on the Stream Mini easily if you disable Secure Boot. The full specs (including hardware upgrades) are below. For comparisons to vanilla Windows 8.1, we used the 2015 Dell XPS 13, one of the best high-end Windows laptops you can buy right now. A Dell Latitude E6410 from 2010 represents a mid-cycle Windows 7 system, while the HP Stream Mini and Stream 11 represent modern budget systems running the low-cost Windows 8.1 with Bing SKU. We used four systems for all of our comparisons here, mostly older and slower ones. Current users of both Windows 7 and Windows 8 should expect to recover a few gigabytes of drive space, a few megabytes of system RAM, and a few precious seconds of boot time. We installed Windows 10 on a few of these kinds of systems to see what you can expect, at least if you’re comparing a clean install to a clean install. Or maybe you bought something during the post-Chromebook era, where Windows PCs dipped back into netbook territory in their quest for a low price tag. But when you offer free Windows via a nag message delivered to over 80 percent of the user base, you’re going to attract people who wouldn’t have driven to MicroCenter to buy an upgrade DVD.Įspecially if you bought an eligible PC in Windows 7’s heyday, you will probably be installing the new OS on five- or six-year-old hardware that has long since been forgotten about by the company that sold it to you. A whole bunch of people are going to upgrade to Windows 10.
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