My wifes school district just moved everyone to Windows 7. It takes 20 minutes for her computer to start in the morning and about five minutes to shut down in the evening. The computer just barely meets the minimum specifications of Windows 7 and so the district isn't going to upgrade the hardware due to budget constraints. Given tight budgets in schools I would be surprised if Windows 7 upgrades are actually feasible for some of them when Windows XP does everything they need on the hardware they already have.
How much of that 20 minutes consists of booting Windows, and how much of it consists of running the myriad policies, scripts, and startup software that "enterprise" environments push out to all their systems and run on every boot? Not exactly a fan of Windows, and newer versions often do boot slower due to added bloat, but you can't chalk 20 minutes up to Windows alone.
It shouldn't be that bad. I've seen university machines running windows 7 with less than current hardware and a whole bunch of scripts, antivirus, etc, and they still boot and shutdown in a very reasonable amount of times. Definitely sounds like the hardware rather than the myriad of scripts to me. Shrug.
But conversely, there's nothing wrong with a computer of that spec, if you're doing web browsing, word processing and the like. It's just not being used efficiently.
And it was just yesterday when I stopped being a hardcore gamer and knowing about computer specs, and that spec wasn't half bad. Am I locked forever thinking that would be a decent computer?
I'm having the hardest time believing you said that with a straight face.
Something is very, very wrong with their environment, then. I've seen Win7 come up faster on HD netbooks with worse system specs than what you posted downthread.
I've not seen Windows 7 perform well on anything with less than about 2GB of RAM. I certainly don't doubt that district configuration has compounded what are mostly hardware issues. The point was more about what type of hardware some organizations are still using. In this case the machine handled Windows XP combined with the district configuration, slowly, but tolerably and after the upgrade has lost a significant amount of its utility.
Windows 7 makes most hardware run better then XP unless it's really old. Really old means older then 2003. For example I have a horrible 2006 Compaq laptop that runs better with Windows 7 then it did with XP. I would have someone look at her setup because it could just be a faulty disk causing the problems.
The school I worked at also upgraded to Windows 7, and it was completely fine. Things are quick and great. Remember that a school is meant to be teaching kids things that have at least some hope of relevance, so teaching children how to use XP is not exactly useful.
