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So I dropped 8 and went to windows 7.
So about two years ago I got a new laptop and it had windows 8 64. The laptop was extremely slow and I couldn't open more then one internet browser at once without lagging the thing down and messing everything up. So a year later I got another new computer with 8 64 and this one ran very well. The only problem I had was when closing games it would take a really long time to close them.
Recently I got windows 7 32 and put it on the slow machine hoping it would solve something. Now that computer runs flawlessly on windows 7 32. I was really mad that I put up with that crappy computer for 2 years and it was all because of windows 8 64. So then I took the good laptop and installed windows 7 64 and guess what. It runs better then windows 8. I can close any game and it will close immediately and I can also press ctrl-alt-del and it works right away instead of 40 seconds later.
Conclusion... there is a difference between the two systems and yes windows 7 will give you a better gaming experience.
Comments
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
Your first laptop clearly had not been built for 64 bit or it had some corrupted files or viruses if you saw a big leap from 64 to 32 bits.
As for the difference between windows 8 and 7, the difference is negligible. If there was really a huge difference for you, maybe you had some faulty drivers or something as I see no real difference from the two operating systems.
The specifications of your laptop trully matters. Depending on what the laptop has inside 7 or 8 will run better. So probably when you bought your laptop it was shipped with windows 8 but was designed for windows 7 ence the machine runs better that operative system.
Very scientific indeed. All i can say is that your first laptop must have been shit. You coudnl't open more than one browser? ARe you using pentium 4 and 1gb RAM? There was fundamentally wrong with the laptop but apparently you couldn't troubleshoot it. Windows 8 was not the reason. I am not sure why your second laptop experienced the slowdown upon closing games.
Do you also realise that a 32 bit windows doesn't let you use more than 3 GB of RAM? If I downgraded to a 32 bit system, I would lose 13 GB of RAM.
My laptop flies with Windows 8 64 bit. CLosing down games is instant, no delay whatsoever. If anything Windows 8 should give you better performance as it is lighter than Windows 7 which has all that aero stuff which consumes extra resources.
Post your system specs and will let you know.
Post your system specs. You should never see a performance increase from downgrading to a 32 bit system. Do you have 1 ram? Your first laptop was probably was designed for Windows 7 probably. My laptop doesn't even have drivers for Windows 7.
Also don't use Chrome. It's a freaking RAM hog.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Windows 8/8.1 is now a thing of the past, it was a failed Operating System, and probably one of the main reasons why Windows 7 continued to grow in usage despite its age, now, Microsoft appears to be going back to some of what worked in Win 7 for Win 10, as well as incorporating some of the functions that were in Win 8, without, hopefully the drawbacks of the metro interface, which was without doubt, complicit in the OS's unmitigated disaster.
Whichever way it goes though, Windows 8 is done, and Win10 is Microsofts only real hope of getting people to stop using 7, and XP for that matter, and move onto a newer OS. That it will be releasing very soon is no coincidence. The only hope for users of Win 8/8.1 is that they get either a free copy, or are heavily discounted on their purchase of Win 10, though Microsoft might well be wise to offer a discount for those upgrading from Win 7, its a good OS that works well, in fact that was its selling point in the first place
I wouldn't recommend that as universal advice, but I'm glad you found something that worked for you.
My hunch is the laptop had a bunch of pre-installed crapware, and doing a fresh install of any OS would have cleared it up. It's also possible, as one other person commented, that you didn't have enough RAM - 64-bit will allow you to access more RAM, but it also requires a bit more RAM to run (since all memory addresses are double the size) - so it would make a lack-of-memory problem worse; not that going down to 32-bit would save enough memory to solve a lack of memory problem, but it may be enough to be noticeable on some fringe cases.
But I won't disparage the notion of liking Win7 more than Win8 - that's a personal preference. By and large, there isn't a whole lot of difference with respect to gaming performance between the two OSes, and if your machine exhibited one, it probably wasn't due to the OS, it was because of something else.
I'm a simple man and follow a simple rule: Skip every 2nd Windows
I won't argue that Windows 8 was better than 7 - apart from Metro and the revamped touch screen support, there really isn't a lot of differences under the hood between the two systems, and it's hard to distinguish between the two apart from Metro floating on top.
The "best' part about Windows 8 was that it was supposed to unify across your devices - OS 8 on your computer, OS 8 on your tablet, OS 8 on your phone, and there was even a rumor at a point in time about the same OS 8 on your console. The same OS 8 across everything, such that it all worked together as a semi-seamless ecosystem. That's something Apple has been moving towards for a long time, and a lot of people thought Microsoft may have gotten the jump on them (Apple still isn't quite there, but is iterating towards it).
But Windows 8 didn't do that. WinRT and WinPhone had similar interfaces, but that was about the limit of any real "integration". WinRT tablets, and Windows tablets in general, were a joke (arguably, until the Surface 3 Pro). Nothing really integrated well together.
Maybe Windows 10 will go back and fix that. Under the hood I think Windows has been around long enough, and it's mature enough, there aren't a lot of changes you could do to make it that much better. A new filesystem would be nice (WinFS was supposed to arrive with Server08/Vista and be a marked improvement over NTFS - you can see we still don't have it), and there are probably some more security/QOL refinements that can be made, but the major moving pieces under the hood haven't changed much for a really long time now, the NT kernel is pretty stable and robust.
I don't know if you can call Windows 8.1 dead until Windows 10 actually ships - it's possible that Windows 10 is even worse. It wouldn't be the first time that a company knee-jerked and pushed a rush-job bandaid out the door that made the problem worse, rather than better. I would be surprised if Microsoft did that, they have a long history of iterating and making their products better, but you never know, they do have a lot of new people in top spots now, and we haven't seen what they do out from underneath the previous executives shadows yet.
RIght now people buy Windows because they need Windows. They don't necessarily need Windows 8.1, and it stands they may not need Windows 10 either -- people are still running Windows XP all over the place, after all. But I think Phry is right, if Windows 10 doesn't dazzle, people will realize they don't really ~need~ Windows. If Win10 isn't a true gem, it will be 3 out of the last 4 Windows versions that have, by popular opinion, sucked. No pressure, Microsoft.
Maybe this is why Satya Nadella is emphasizing Mobile First/Cloud First, rather than Windows First. After all, if your running on the cloud, it doesn't matter what your OS is.
Maybe the concept of an OS is a dated thing - sure, we need something to bootstrap all our devices and give them order and an interface, but past that, does it matter so much after all? If Windows 10 does suck, does that mean people will go out in droves to Linux and OS X? Hardly. It just means they will keep using whatever happens to be on their computer - and if some computer manufacturer gets the ideal that they can just install Anything-Besides-Microsoft and save Millions on licensing fees, and their consumers don't care - they will (and there are plenty of pilot programs for that from major PC Vendors, the least of which are Linux and ChromeOS).
I'm glad things worked out (seemingly?) well for the OP.
Unlike the OP I'm gonna stick to to Windows 8.1. It took quite some time to configure the system and identify and install all requirements to be able to play all my favourite games (old and new).
Actually I like it so far.
Yea I wouldn't dare go from 8 to 7 unless I was experiencing some issues. More then likely it was a driver issue but the only thing I changed was the operating system so all these "system specs" people are asking for is irrelevant to my situation. More then likely the first laptop wasn't built to handle a 64 bit os so it just bogged down the system instead of improving it. As for the second laptop IDK why the programs would be slow closing and ctrl-alt-del always took forever to open but It did. I don't have these issues with windows 7 so I'm happy and not moving. If you aren't having any issues with windows 8 then there is no reason to try windows 7 as a solution. but if you are having problems like I was then it doesn't hurt to downgrade to see what happens.
Unless you are some super programmer then you aren't gonna fix anything with your drivers. You either have the current ones or you do not.
Since when? More and more people are getting Windows 8. There is nothing wrong with Windows 8. It's the exact same windows. I would love to hear what's wrong with Windows 8. Windows 8 is far from done.
Who the hell uses XP? People who only use notepad or something? XP is a terrible, terrible Windows to use today. Only reason why people might still use it because of extreme change aversion. I think this is why so many people actively refuse to use Windows 8.
But yeah enlighten me what makes Windows 7 so much better than Windows 8? Have you even tried it?
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
This is the obvious explanation. Your laptop probably came with a bunch of bloatware hogging resources and generally making everything slow. A clean install of Windows 7 or 8.1 or whatever would get rid of the bloatware and then make everything run at the proper speed. 7 gives no advantage over 8.1 there; anything that gets rid of the bloatware would work. Except Vista, because Vista finds creative ways to be slow.
/agree
I work with computers everyday and nearly all of them have Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 . Sure we get a few Windows 7 every now and then but people thinking that people are not using Windows 8 or that its some kind of failure shows that a person has no idea whats really going on. Either evolve or get left behind because the world waits for no one. Microsoft needs to get people off of Windows 7? Now that's funny.
That's been may rule since windows xp. I added a second one a little later on, don't upgrade unless the program or game won't run without it. Running 7 64 on my gaming pc and gaming laptop.
My job still had computers running xp because the software was made to run on it and it would cost a lot of money to upgrade it and that was a large city.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
[mod edit]. Windows 8.1 Is one of the best Software from Microsoft atm.. and now Win 10 is coming. most likely u bought a bad laptop with a dual core or atom processor.. or 2gb ram and so.. u really need to tell us the specs. u bought it with.
[mod edit]
oh and Windows xp and Win7 are no longer supported.. by Microsoft so ye have fun
I never looked into support for Win 7* but XP does still get industry support til 2019. There's also a simple hack floating around which allows home xp users to get industry support.
*Just looked it up and win 7 has extended support until January 14, 2020.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
So you are saying that once you used windows 7 64 then upgraded to windows 8.1 on the same exact system without changing any hardware? Because that is the only reason you're statement could be correct for your system.
Yes, I went from Windows 7 x64 to win 8.1 x64, clean install not upgrade.
Most XP users are businesses that have programs that won't run on 7/8 and the companies are too thrifty to upgrade their software or users in the third world.
@op I have been running win7 a while now and it really runs better than win8 imho. Win8 and maybe 10 (havent checked that one yet) might screw with your system even when it should run without a hitch. There is a reason why gov agencies warn about win8.
The least I can personally say about win8 is that it causes more problems than it should. The secure boot leaves a mixed feeling to say the least. If your box runs fine with win7 then use it and it will be supported for quite a while. MS just stopped the support for xp but win7 will have support (read updates) for quite a while.
Also if you are looking for an OS that runs smooth for any setting try linux (mint, ubuntu... whatever you fell like). Whatever system I threw at it, it ran without a problem. Make a 2nd partition to run win 7/8...whatever ... for your gaming needs and you are fine imho.