Comparing Windows 10 With Windows 7 and 8.1: The Hits and the Misses

Microsoft announced the release of Windows 10, the most awaited operating system, and most of the people have upgraded or are planning to upgrade their systems with the latest OS. This OS comes with several new changes with the promise of improved performance, so we planned to test its performance against the previous versions, Windows 7 and 8.1.

We installed all the three OS on the test-bed and tested the performance in real time as well as used some of the benchmarks. The system configuration was:

CPU: 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7

RAM: 8 GB

HDD: 320 GB Hitachi SATA HDD

GPU: 2 GB AMD Fiorepro W5000

We have been using Windows 7 or 8.1 since last couple of years, but in this testing we used the same testbed to run all the three OS against real time usage. We installed some of the applications including MS-Office, Photoshop, etc.

Memory Usage

In our test PC, we added 8 GB of RAM and installed Windows 7, 8.1 and 10. We checked the memory usage at the time of installation completion. We didn’t install any driver or additional application in any OS while testing the memory usage, in which Win 7 wins the race with only 11% of RAM usage while Win 10 was on second place with 13% (used only single 4 GB RAM out of two 4GB RAMs) and Win 8.1 last with 14 % of memory usage.

PCMark Benchmark

We also ran some of the benchmarks on the PC to test overall performance. We used PCMark 8, which automatically runs web browsing, writing, video chat, photo editing and casual gaming to test the performance of the PC. Here Win 7 achieved 4365 ranking while Win 8.1 and Win 10 got 4440 and 4174 scores respectively. In this testing, Win 8.1 was the clear winner. The benchmark took about 41 minutes to complete the test and while running the benchmark, Win 10 consumed 18% of the total memory while Win 7 and Win 8.1 consumed 15% and 13% of memory respectively.

Gaming Benchmarks

We also tested gaming performance using benchmarks STALKER: Call of Pripyat Benchmark and Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Running STALKER: Call of Pripyat Benchmark, Windows 7 won the gaming score with Max 304.8 Min 32.0 FPS; while Windows 8.1 achieved Max 293.7 FPS and Min 30.2 FPS; and Windows 10 Max 303.8 FPS and Min 36.8 FPS.

In our second gaming benchmark, Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0, Windows 10 scored 1495 with FPS 59.4 (Max 111.0 FPS and Min 8.6 FPS), Windows 8.1 scored 1511 with FPS 60.0 (Max 111.9 FPS and Min 8.6 FPS) and Windows 7 scored the highest - 1512 with FPS 60.0 (Max 109.6 FPS and Min 29.4 FPS).

Boot-up time and Multi Window

First we tested the boot-up time of each OS on our test bed. Windows 7 took about 10.6 and Win 8.1 took 9.8 seconds, and Win 10 was a little fast with 8.3 seconds of boot-up time. Windows 10 doesn’t only load faster than the rest of the two, it also resumes a little faster than Win 7 and 8.1. It comes with ‘Task View’ that lets you add more desktops in one PC. It means that you can run multiple applications simultaneously on different windows and while working on one Window, it keeps the rest as idol, saves memory and CPU usage.

The Winner

While comparing these three OS, Windows 7, 8.1 and 10, Windows 7 wins two matches, Gaming benchmark score and Memory usage and Windows 8.1 and 10 win only one game. Though, Windows 7 wins two games and becomes the overall winner, but we were pleased while using Windows 10. As it not only boots-up quickly, the operating speed is also better than the other two. Though, there were no major differences in the performance, yet Windows 10 gives you a better experience and upgraded features than the previous versions.