The latest edition of the "Seven Behind Windows 7" series featuring Microsoft employees focuses on Aaron Dietrich's job on the Windows Client Performance team. Focused purely on performance, the Windows Client Performance team works in conjunction with other teams to help analyze and resolve issues.
The Windows 7 start up performance is one area that the Windows Client Performance team focused on and has been heavily promoted by Microsoft marketing. Based on my personal experience the start up performance of Windows 7 is significantly better. But what exactly did Microsoft do achieve the faster start up? According to Dietrich, his team focused in two areas.
The first was what he calls the "fast boot feature" that allows parts of the start up process to run in parallel when Windows is discovering and initializing devices. The result is a performance increase of up to 25 percent over Windows Vista.
The second main area of focus was simply reducing the amount of disk reads during start up. Following the simple concept of less work equals less time required. Windows Vista read up to 240 megabytes of data during start up compared to 180 MB for Windows 7.
While these optimizations seem rather simple, there is no doubt they had a significant impact on improving performance in Windows 7.