Microsoft had a lot riding on their Windows 7 operating system, after all people weren’t exactly flocking to Windows Vista and XP has been getting long in the tooth as far as features were concerned. Their efforts seem to have done good but does all of the added newfangled-ness cause performance issues to pop up?

AnandTech does their usual thorough testing and pits Windows 7 against XP and Vista in a veritable feast of software performance evaluations and benchmarks showing you how 7 handles the most common application tasks undertaken by PC users. There’s a lot of info to digest here:

For Windows 7, Windows has been put on a diet in order to perform better on those machines. The most noticeable changes here are that Windows 7 eats less RAM and hard drive space out of the box than a comparable version of Vista did. There have also been some underlying tweaks to SuperFetch (it’s less aggressive on startup) and the kernel to improve responsiveness.

The tweaks are certainly there as can bee seen by the OS’ ability to eek out more performance from the same hardware.

There’s nothing quite as scary as a new operating system roll out for businesses especially when they’ve invested quite a bit of time and money in acquiring licenses for Windows XP applications. Fortunately for them, and us, Windows 7’s XP Mode will smooth things over.

The Windows Blog brings word that XP Mode has hit RTM status and will be available to download for Windows 7 Professional, an higher, users meaning your XP applications will run in a nice virtualized environment that should make things go smoothly.

You’ll be able to grab your own copy of the software when Windows 7 launches October 22nd.

Source: Windows 7 Team Blog