Does Windows 10 Use More Resources Than Windows 7

Tech —

Faster booting, smaller footprint make Windows 10 an like shooting fish in a barrel upgrade for old PCs

Comparing Windows 10 to 7, 8.1, and 8.one with Bing yields impressive results.

A whole bunch of people are going to upgrade to Windows 10. Not everyone. But when you offer free Windows via a nag bulletin delivered to over 80 percentage of the user base, you're going to attract people who wouldn't accept driven to MicroCenter to buy an upgrade DVD.

Especially if you bought an eligible PC in Windows 7'due south heyday, you volition probably exist installing the new OS on five- or six-twelvemonth-onetime hardware that has long since been forgotten well-nigh past the company that sold it to yous. Or perchance you bought something during the post-Chromebook era, where Windows PCs dipped back into netbook territory in their quest for a low price tag.

We installed Windows ten on a few of these kinds of systems to see what you lot can expect, at to the lowest degree if you lot're comparing a clean install to a clean install. Current users of both Windows 7 and Windows 8 should await to recover a few gigabytes of drive infinite, a few megabytes of organisation RAM, and a few precious seconds of kicking time.

Vs. Windows vii

Nosotros used 4 systems for all of our comparisons here, more often than not older and slower ones. A Dell Latitude E6410 from 2010 represents a mid-cycle Windows 7 system, while the HP Stream Mini and Stream 11 represent modern budget systems running the low-cost Windows 8.one with Bing SKU. For comparisons to vanilla Windows 8.1, nosotros used the 2015 Dell XPS thirteen, one of the best loftier-end Windows laptops you can buy right now. The full specs (including hardware upgrades) are below.

Windows 7 tin't be installed on the Stream 11 since the OS doesn't support installation on eMMC storage, only information technology was the operating organization the E6410 originally shipped with, and you can put information technology on the Stream Mini easily if you lot disable Secure Boot.

Arrangement	Key specs
Dell Breadth E6410	Intel Core i5-540M, Nvidia Quadro NVS 3100M, 500GB HDD, 8GB RAM
HP Stream 11	Intel Celeron N2840, Intel Hd Graphics, 32GB eMMC SSD, 2GB RAM
HP Stream Mini	Intel Celeron 2957U, Intel HD Graphics, 256GB SATA SSD, 8GB RAM
Dell XPS 13 (2015)	Intel Core i5-5200U, Intel HD Graphics 5500, 256GB SATA SSD, 8GB RAM

We looked at Windows seven'southward disk space usage before and after updates were installed (our "fresh install" baseline is a 64-bit Windows seven ISO from MSDN). Even if you blow abroad all Windows Update files, organization restore points, and cache files, a patched Windows vii install uses around 10GB more disk space than an unpatched install. Not a large deal in the days of cheap 500GB hard drives, only harder to give up if you've got a 128GB or 256GB SSD.

Windows 10 saved both systems 5 or 6GB compared to a base of operations install and xv or 16GB compared to a fully patched install. While it'southward possible that a Windows 10 install with multiple years of security and feature updates under its belt could expand to consume a similar corporeality of disk infinite, hopefully the aforementioned deejay compression tricks that reduce Windows 10's installed footprint in the get-go place will continue that from happening.

It'due south difficult to really measure RAM usage, since everyone's system is going to act differently, and the apps you install and run volition have a bigger impact on your system RAM than anything Microsoft can change in Windows. Still, sitting idle at the desktop with all updates installed, information technology looks similar Windows 10 uses a few MB less than Windows 7 did. And Windows ten's version of Windows Defender includes antivirus protection instead of the simpler anti-malware-simply protection Windows 7 included.

Where Windows 7 users will notice the biggest heave is in kicking times, something we've talked about earlier. The foundational work was actually washed in Windows eight—when you starting time Windows 7, information technology needs to load the unabridged OS and the user session from disk every time. Windows viii's shut down is more like system hibernation. The cadre Bone is dumped from RAM to disk and and then restored to RAM from disk when you start up.

The result is a very existent, measurable improvement in boot time. The SSD-equipped Stream Mini's boot time is cutting nearly in half. The E6410 boots effectually 14 seconds faster. Its quaint fifteen-to-twenty-second-long Post takes longer than loading Windows 10 does.

Vs. Windows 8.1 with Bing

Cheap recent systems similar the Stream 11 and Stream Mini oftentimes send with a version of Windows called "Windows 8.ane with Bing." It's functionally identical to the standard Home edition of Windows eight.one, merely it costs less for the PC OEMs to purchase, and all they need to do to get the discount is leave Bing as Internet Explorer's default search engine (cease users can still change it).

In that location's a carve up merely related feature these systems apply to squeeze Windows into a smaller amount of disk space, and it's called WIMBoot. WIMBoot is a proto-version of the file compression Windows 10 uses to save space—your system boots from a compressed Windows image file (WIM), normally kept on a separate division at the end of the driver. This partition can also be used for system recovery.

A typical WIMBoot partition map. — Enlarge / A typical WIMBoot segmentation map.

Microsoft

One downside to WIMBoot is that files within this compressed image tin't be updated by the operating system. If system files are updated, you lot end up storing two copies: the compressed copy within the prototype, and the new updated and uncompressed copy. This is why Windows Update volition simply offering disquisitional updates and security updates to WIMBoot systems. Windows 10 doesn't use epitome-based compression for these organisation files anymore, then this duplication of files shouldn't be a problem.

Once you've cleared HP's preinstalled junk off the Stream Mini, a base Windows 8.1 with Bing installation uses 8.8GB on the main arrangement partition plus half dozen.72GB for the WIMBoot partition, a total of 15.52GB. With all the updates installed, there was 22.1GB of information on the system partition, plus the same 6.72GB for the WIMBoot sectionalization.

When you upgrade a Windows 8.1 with Bing system that uses WIMBoot to Windows 10, two things happen. First, you just go a regular Windows 10 Domicile license with the Bing branding removed (whether a "Windows x with Bing" SKU volition persist on new OEM systems is anyone's guess). Second, the WIMBoot partition however exists, but all the data on it is deleted since it isn't needed anymore. You can get alee and reclaim it using Disk Management.

A clean install of Windows 10 Home on the Stream 11 uses well-nigh 15.5GB of infinite, nearly the aforementioned amount as the combined system and recovery partitions nether Windows 8.1 with Bing. Again, this number might become up every bit more updates are released for Windows 10, simply the file compression should keep it from getting as well out of manus.

Windows viii.1 already uses the hibernation fob to improve startup times, so the increase here isn't as drastic. Withal, Windows ten consistently fires upwardly a couple of seconds faster than Windows 8.1 with Bing did on the same hardware.

Vs. Windows 8.1

If you're just talking about a regular installation of Windows 8.i rather than a WIMBoot install, things are more straightforward. You'll save a bunch of disk infinite, but RAM usage and boot time are like (the XPS 13 actually regresses a bit in kick time, strangely). The Stream 11's roughly 200MB RAM savings suggests that Microsoft is trying especially hard to reduce retention usage on these depression-end, low-RAM devices.

From a speed and resource usage standpoint, Windows x is a articulate improvement no matter what version of Windows you're upgrading from. Current Windows seven users stand to benefit the most, but Windows 8.1 users save quite a bit of disk space, and 8.1 with Bing users get a simplified segmentation scheme.