It’s PDC (Professional Developers Conference) week in Los Angeles for Microsoft and there’s not been, fairly obviously, that much talk about Windows 7. BetaNews have reported an interesting story however. Mark Russinovich, the Windows NT Kernel Guru, has been explaining how the Windows 7 kernel, the core of the operating system, turned out the way it did.
"One of the things we had decided to do with Windows 7 was, we got a message loud and clear, especially with the trend of netbooks, on top of [other] things," Russinovich said, "People wanted small, efficient, fast, battery-efficient operating systems. So we made a tremendous effort from the start to the finish, from the design to the implementation, measurements, tuning, all the way through the process to make sure that Windows 7 was fast and nimble, even though it provided more features. So this is actually the first release of Windows that has a smaller memory footprint than a previous release of Windows, and that’s despite adding all [these] features."
One of the things that Windows 7 has received so much praise for is its speed compared to Vista and even the much smaller and lighter XP. Russinovich went on to talk about core features, called ‘locks’ that were removed completely. This made significant changes to the kernel, however Microsoft discovered they could do this without breaking software compatibility.
The end result is a system that uses the processor(s) much more efficiently than has been possible in the past.
One of the other things he and other Microsoft employees talked about was how memory is used differently in Windows 7. Many people have noted that the amount of ‘free’ memory in Windows 7 is significantly less than in previous versions of the OS.
This isn’t because the OS is unwieldy or badly written. This time around the OS is using memory much more efficiently, loading things that you’ll actually need and holding them there, rather than on the hard disk. It’s also being very clever about how it does this.
The end result is a version of Windows that’s much, I don’t want to say faster because really it’s not, but it’s certainly snappier and more responsive than previous versions. BetaNews have the full article.
