Things That Make Windows 7 Tick

Microsoft Windows 7 is said to have taken a different approach compared to that of Windows Vista. This changes should help boost the sales and usage of Windows Vista.

In an excerpt:

In response to this, Microsoft made fundamental changes to the way Windows Vista was linked together; shifting more towards modular designs rather than the monolithic processes used in previous versions of Windows. This increased amount of componentization, while satisfying the DoJ and EU, also led to performance issues due to the increased number of libraries which comprise the operating system. On traditional hard drives, the more separate files which the operating system has to load, the more seeking across the hard drive is required, and therefore overall performance takes a hit.

Another reason for Windows Vista’s performance issues is the way in which Microsoft approached backwards compatibility in Vista. The operating system stores multiple copies of core system libraries, as each revision of a library typically adds/removes functions, and applications compiled with dynamic links to a specific version of a DLL file may call on functions not present in the currently installed library. Vista aims to solve this issue through the WinSxS collection; essentially a massive store of every differing version of libraries present on the system. That way, when an application makes a call for a dynamically linked library, Vista queries the WinSxS cache for the correct version, which is then loaded into memory. On the average system, this directory can be several gigabytes in size, with much of the code duplicated between the separate versions many times.

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