Thread: Windows 7 Final version

Windows 7's features probably won't change in the final version, but it bears repeating that we were testing a release candidate of the OS; Microsoft's engineers may find ways to tweak the code to improve performance.

If future tests of the final version of Windows 7 confirm these preliminary results, many Windows users are likely to be disappointed. A major complaint about Windows Vista has been that it is consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 doesn't markedly improve on Vista's performance, it may fail to convince people to leave Windows XP.

That said, there could be other areas we didn't cover in our testing-such as startup times-in which Windows 7 might outperform Vista by a wider margin. The best way to get a feel for Windows 7's performance is to download the release candidate and testdrive it on your system.