Member Avatar for jaycustom21

Ok,so I've been messing with Win 7,Vista Home Premium and Ultimate.
First off...Windows 7 flies! My question is...does vista Ultimate eat more performance than Home Premium? Because I had HP for 3 days with a patch for dream scenes...now I have Ultimate and its definately slower,especially when I can barely run the same dreamscenes from HP.Just altogether seems slower....any comments?

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Short summary tied to the thread: reported Home Premium felt snappier and that DreamScene made Ultimate sluggish. and pointed to extra features and DreamScene as likely suspects. The fastest way to solve this is to isolate the variable (DreamScene, drivers, background services or a rogue patch) and test each in turn.

Quick diagnostic checklist to follow:

  1. Reproduce the baseline. Boot with your animated wallpaper off and run the same tasks you felt were slow. Note CPU, memory and disk behavior in Task Manager.
  2. Check the compositor. Animated wallpapers rely on the Desktop Window Manager. Watch dwm.exe and Explorer for CPU spikes while DreamScene runs. Read the Windows compositor notes here: Desktop Window Manager overview.
  3. Driver and codec check. Update the GPU driver from the vendor site and test with a different (lower-resolution) DreamScene file to see if hardware acceleration is failing.
  4. Clean boot. Use msconfig to disable non‑Microsoft services and startup items, then re-enable groups to find the culprit.
  5. Remove unofficial patches. If a third‑party DreamScene hack was used on Home Premium, it can leave hooks that misbehave after an edition change. Uninstall the patch and run sfc /scannow to check system files.
  6. Capture the problem. If needed, run a short Performance Monitor trace or use Process Explorer to log which process and subsystem (CPU vs disk vs network) is taxed.

If DreamScene is the confirmed cause, either stick with a static wallpaper or use a GPU‑friendly video and updated drivers. If Ultimate still feels slower after these checks, a clean install (or fresh user profile) is the only reliable way to compare editions without leftover configuration. For more on DreamScene behavior see: DreamScene (Wikipedia).

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Member Avatar for OlyComputers

I don't think it's necessarily slower, but anytime you add new features there's the potential. You can run Ultimate with all the same things active as HP; or you can turn the extra features on, use the added programs, and whatever other things make it twice as much. With every extra component running I'm sure it would be slower.

Member Avatar for jaycustom21

Thanks Oly...but I have installed both. Premium ran awesome,and I applied the patch for dreamscenes thats floating around and it made no difference in performance. Then I installed Ultimate and it all together seemed sluggish. Then I used the already installed dreamscenes and it made using the pc totally impractical...hmm. Guess I'll just stick to Premium.

Member Avatar for jbennet

Its all the same OS under the hood. Probably just a bug in dreamscene.

Member Avatar for airbourne

jbennet is probably closer to the mark than anything. Aside from minor differences, the Premium vs. Ultimate is the same beast in terms of motor. Now, 32bit vs. 64bit can make all the difference depending on what the application was coded for.

Member Avatar for jbennet

Shouldnt make much difference any more. They are the 99% the same codebase, mainly just compiled differently. Vista uses vista for the core of both the 32 and 64 bit editions unlike "xp pro 64" which was riddled with compatibility issues as it was based on Server 2003.

32 bit programs generally run the same on 64 bit systems, because of WoW (windows on windows)

Member Avatar for airbourne

Oh, I did not know that. I always understood that even if an application worked in Vista 64, it might have problems depending on how it was coded if it was not specifically designed for a 64bit OS.

Hey, I learn something new everyday. :)

Member Avatar for jbennet

Nah theres a compatibility layer called WoW (windows on windows) to run 32 bit programs.

Same thing existed on XP for running 16 bit dos programs, and NT4 has a layer for running OS2 apps.

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