XP, Vista and Windows 7

in 512MB of memory For the sake of work, ZDNet's Ed Bott recently installed the Windows 7 Ultimate x64 system in the virtual machine.

Although it only allocated 512MB of memory, but did not feel a significant delay during the installation and operation, and the memory footprint is somewhat surprising:


After the system is installed, it only takes up less than 9GB of hard disk space.

Considering Windows Vista memory and hard disk space "hungry", Ed Bott decided to do a comparison test, were installed in the virtual machine XP, Vista and Windows 7, both the amount of memory allocated 512MB.

1, install Windows XP SP3, marked with all available patches and updates, including IE7, WMP11 and Windows Search 4.0, the only non-system comes with the program is Firefox. As a result, the hard disk takes up 5.7 GB and the memory takes up 150 MB.

2, install Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 x86, and recommended to upgrade all critical patches, do not install third-party software. As a result, the hard disk takes up 14.3 GB and the memory takes up 299 MB.

3, install Windows 7 Ulimate x86 Beta, upgrade all critical and recommended patches, do not install third-party software. As a result, the hard disk takes up 8.6 GB and the memory takes up 216 MB.

to the hard disk and memory footprint XP as a reference (100), relative to the chart below:


fact, numbers and graphs can not explain everything. On a 512MB memory system, Windows 7 starts and shuts down significantly faster than Vista. Some daily operations can make Vista slow to respond, but it runs smoothly on Windows 7. Finally, Ed Bott increased the memory allocation to 1GB. As a result, Vista's speed increased significantly, and the gap between Windows and Windows 7 also narrowed, but the latter still occupies less.