Windows 7: W7 64-bit as slow as Vista 32-bit? Your experience?

I was a die hard XP fan, then in anticipation of Windows 7, bought a laptop last summer with Vista 32bit Home Premium and a free Windows 7 upgrade. Lots of eye candy with aero, which I like, BUT the thing that drives me crazy is when I move a 2MB file (for instance) from the desktop to the recycle bin, the progress bar pops up, and it takes 4 or 5 seconds to move the file!! A 2MB file!! That should be instantaneous, as it is in XP! And it's not aero... many people say to turn it off, (the only GOOD thing about the OS!) but if the OS were not so lumbering, aero might flash the progress bar, but as soon as it appeared, it would disappear.

I thought Windows 7 64-bit would make the OS run like XP 32bit. Maybe with a bajillion GBs of RAM and a bank of quad core processors it does, but on my Acer Aspire 4530 with 3GB RAM and a typical dual core CPU, it runs as slow as Vista! When I go to delete something off the desktop, that's when I notice it. This is extremely irritating, and I'm wondering if Windows 7 32-bit would be faster, or if this entire Vista engine just won't be as fast as XP unless you use 64-bit with 8GB RAM or more... (FTR this laptop only supports 4GB.)



I wanted to build a new system that would be future proof for awhile, so I did not want to choose XP... but if we have to wait until W8 to get a proper OS that runs as fast as XP, AND we won't be able to migrate from Windows 7 to W8, but will have to start a new build, then it's hardly worth it to suffer with Windows 7 in the meantime... I just can't believe they didn't improve this aspect of the Vista engine in 7!

FTR, I have bg defragmenting disabled, and only allow very few programs to do auto-updating, (such as NOD32 and BitDefender). I am a miser when it comes to allowing anything to run in the bg, and I don't open multiple windows and programs at once. CPU usage is normal in Task Mgr (nothing is sucking it up) and processes are all normal (nothing hogging resources). I also installed the 64-bit drivers from Acer for Windows 7 when I installed the OS. To further guard against it being slow, I made its partition 75GB, of which 55% is free (41GB). (Am using the built-in firewall b/c I want to see how it performs with as little drag on it as possible.)

I reaaaally like the aero look of Windows 7 and Vista too.. if it was responsive like XP 32bit, I would be TOTALLY IN LOVE. But I can't live with the CRAWLING when I am doing something that should literally take a millisecond. I spend 12-14 hrs a day on my machine, and need it to be responsive.

What have the rest of you done about this? I am very curious!

No, can't say it has been as slow as Vista for me. That is one thing I like so much about 7. Faster.

BTW, how did you turn off background defragging?

Hello Welcome to SF,

I don't have such a good spec for my PC it works fine. Something might be wrong that can cause this. May first thing you can try is tweak your OS a little bit. Here a great Tutorial this should get you started

Optimize Windows 7

Post us back how it goes !!

Good Luck,
Captain

This has NOT been my experience. I had 6 machines at home all with Windows XP Professional 32bit. I upgraded them to Windows 7 Ultimate starting in December 2009 and finishing in January 2010. While converting them and I had many concerns about how fast Windows 7 would be since I had tweaked the Windows XP machines to be clean and super fast. So instead of just updating them and never knowing if I was better or worse I preformed some tests. Very Short List: Boot times, Copying files, drive to drive, drive to USB, drive to Network. Running 10 Internet Explorer Sessions all with 5 tabs each. Running 10 FireFox Sessions with 5 tabs each, and some other software. Then some disk access tests. Etc. etc. etc. You get the idea. All my machines are different the slowest P4 Pentium D, 2 gigs of Ram, and the fastest P4 Dual Core, 8 gigs of RAM. I chose to go 64bit on all machines. In my test I found that Windows 7 booted about 35% faster than Windows XP. That time is calculated by booting and having access to the desktop launching something without a delay. I tested file copy disk to disk there was no difference worth mentioning. I assume this is because the Disk speed is the Disk speed and the bottleneck is not the OS. I did see a small maybe 2% gain in speed coping to USB drives. I found a 10% gain copying files on the network from machine to machine or to the server.

Tonight: I did some tests on deleting stuff to the Recycle Bin. I have my original Windows XP drive and just put it back in the machine the swapped back to the Windows 7 drive. I found NO difference in deleting files. I used the same files from my USB drive and tested copying to the desktop and then back to the USB drive and they deleting them off the desktop to the recycle bin. I timed them and tested several times. I found no difference in the speed at which they were deleted.

As I did all this testing I did notice my Anti-Virus taking up some CPU cycles and I began to think. Is it possible that your Anti-virus is scanning your files before you put them in the Recycle Bin? I know that I have seen special settings for the way files are moved/copied or deleted in Anti-Virus software.

This gives me hope!

Control Panel -> Performance Information and Tools -> click on Advanced Tools on the left side of the page -> Open Disk Defragmenter and click the Scheduling button at the top for a menu where you can turn off bg defragging.

Just a hop, skip, jump and a train ride away...

Thanks very much for this. Will get on it and report back...!

Thanks for your detailed reply... I really WANT to use Windows 7 because I like the look so much and it has some nice features over XP, (which feels old now despite it being fast and efficient...which still counts!). I am going to look into NOD32s settings first, then try uninstalling it to see if that makes a diff. And will also work the Tweaks link in the previous post.

Thanks again to everyone for the input. And I will def come back and report!

I have the same Acer 4530 with 4 GB ram 64 bit & it runs great for me did you upgrade to 7 or a clean install

Hey Bongo,

Good to know. I really like the Acer a lot and plan to add another GB RAM too.

A clean install for this very reason. Did not want to have garbage left from an upgrade. I left Vista 32-bit as is, restoring its image to D:\, and installed W7U64 in a newly formatted C:\.

But now here is something interesting... I left here and opened NOD32 to disable the AMON module (scanner for local files), and tried dragging a 3MB file to the recycle bin. Worked great! Instantly deleted, no progress bar. Dragged it back out. Again, great.

So I thought that was it... went back and enabled AMON to re-test... guess what? Still worked great! So it isn't NOD32, but there is something going on, once I have been working awhile, that ends up slowing the machine... I probably thought it was constant b/c I don't notice when things work right... so when I first boot and all is fine, I have no reason to take notice. Then later, when it begins going south on me, I notice! And once it starts that behavior, it is constant. It happens every time... so I assumed it was happening from boot up. But apparently it's not.

So you'd think maybe all it needs is a reboot, but I rebooted several times last night, as I am trying to troubleshoot a separate problem (I can't get DriveImage XML to backup my system because it says the Shadow Service isn't running... even though it is...)

So this morning after enabling NOD32 again, I opened FF and TBird and tried deleting the file again, and still fine... but I know it's going to repeat what it did before. When it does, that's when I'll go hunting... And again, will report back FTR.

Meanwhile I read the Tweak page but already did most of those things as a matter of course, (except I won't turn off aero or transparency). I don't mind a small performance hit for the eye candy, as measured in milliseconds. The visuals are nice so long as everything else is streamlined and running as expected.

Now that the machine is behaving properly this morning... the problem likely lies in a program or background service... though I suspect the former since I don't think I have bg services running that I am unaware of... unless BitDefender is doing something... I have never used it before but it came installed in Windows 7 and got decent reviews, so I left it thinking that b/c it is an MS program, it might create less of a performance hit since MS has the benefit of access to Windows 7 code. I normally uses SAS or the like. Anyway... we shall see!

Oh, the scheduled one. Since Vista, Windows is supposed to have a defrag that works in the background when you're not working on your PC. I thought you found a way to turn that off.