Aloha fellow humans (and bots)!

Recently, as in this past Sunday, I updated my laptop which is a HP dv4t from Windows Vista to Windows 7 and boy am I glad or what! I wiped the machine clean and did a fresh install. After restoring all my data and reinstalling majority of the programs I use, I found that this whole exercise had freed up almost 30 GB of space on my machine, which I think is pretty ridiculous. Either I had way more bloatware on this machine earlier than I realized or Vista hogs up hard disk space much like it hogs memory.

Now I say Vista is a memory hog because that is exactly what it used to do, at least on my machine. This laptop has 3 GB of memory and the memory usage used to be around 50-55% when Vista would start up. On the other hand, I'm noticing that the memory usage is only 25-28% when Windows 7 starts up. Again all that factory installed HP bloatware was probably causing higher memory usage but still it seems like Microsoft has done a much better job with optimizing resource usage in Windows 7. Oh, also the boot up period itself for Windows 7 is much shorter than Vista (woohoo!!).

Another thing I'd noticed was that this laptop used to get very hot with continuous usage when I was running Vista which would cause the fan to run all the time. The sound of that fan running continuously annoyed me (a LOT) and I was almost at the verge of buying a new laptop last week. Installing Windows 7 seems to have totally fixed that problem! The laptop has not been getting that hot since Win 7 was installed and I've hardly heard the fan running at all. So apparently Vista is a processor hog as well! Microsoft, I'd be mad at you but at least it looks like you are possibly starting to learn from your mistakes. Anyway it looks like Windows 7 has saved me a decent chunk of cash, for now :)

Feel free to chime in about your Windows 7/Vista experiences folks.

Stay warm!

Anant

Disclaimer: Windows 7 marketing team did not pay me to write this blog post, although I wish they did!