AV-Test GmbH did a thorough test of Microsoft Security Essentials, with almost 3200 viruses, Trojans and worms. All files were detected by the AV, even those ones that aren’t yet detected and cleaned by other paid AV software. They also tested it for false positives, where an AV points out legitimate software as a virus, and even then MSE passed the test with flying colors. None of the clean files were marked as malicious by it.
Benchmarks
Windows 7 build 7057 vs. Vista, XP and older 7 builds
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes from ZDNet Hardware 2.0 has done a series of benchmarks, not raw ones with exact numbers, but with ratings as results. He took Windows XP SP3, Vista SP1, 7 Beta 1 build 7000 (32 bit and 64 bit), 7 build 7048 (64 bit) and 7 build 7057 32 bit which is the most recent leaked build. He tested the builds on 2 separate systems with these configurations and took 31 tests in total.
- An AMD Phenom 9700 2.4GHz system fitted with an ATI Radeon 3850 and 4GB of RAM
- An Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.2GHz fitted with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS and 1GB of RAM
Keep in mind that raw benchmark results aren’t allowed under the Windows 7 EULA. Here are the test results from both systems:
Windows XP vs Windows Vista vs Windows 7 using 512 MB
Ed Bott has a good benchmarking review of how Windows 7 handle 512 MB of memory when compared to Windows XP and Windows Vista. I had recently posted about a touchscreen 6000 MHz UMPC with 512 MB running Windows 7 nicely, so it shows that Windows 7 is indeed a step forward in terms of performance on low end systems. Good news for all you netbook advocates out there ( I’m not one of you, sorry ! ), and bad news for all the Linux zealots as they’ve got competition now. Interesting thing about Ed’s benchmarking is that he used the x64 edition of Windows 7 Beta, x86 version of Windows Vista and don’t know which version of Windows XP. To keep it fair, he updated all the operating systems with any critical and recommended updates available for them. No third party software was installed apart from Firefox on Windows XP. All these operating systems were testing in a virtual machine. Here are the memory and disk usage results: