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Final Post

Final Post and Reflection Summary and Conclusions: Over the course of this semester, I have installed fresh copies of various versions of Windows onto an extra hard drive I had in order to test if using different versions of Windows had any impact on performance for gamers. The process for the tests I did for each version looked as similar as I could make it. First, I had to install the Windows version. For every version except for Windows 10, there were some kind of driver issues or other issues during the installation process. Windows 7 and 8 needed network drivers, and Windows 7 required me to download a tool to fix the bootable USB I was using as the Windows 7 installation was meant to be run from a CD. However I do not have an optical drive so I had to fix the USB so that it would install. After the installation, I would install all of the necessary software. All of the games I needed were installed on a different hard drive. This allowed me to just create another Library location
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Week 3: Windows 7 Professional

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  Windows 7 Professional Installation and Use: The installation process for Windows 7 Professional was overall smooth. The only issue I encountered when installing was that the installer said it needed a CD/DVD driver. This issue occurred because I was using an installer meant to be on a CD but I was using it on a USB, because I do not have an optical drive. This was a simple fix that required downloading the Windows USB Bootable tool from Gigabyte and having it add the drivers to the installer on the USB drive. After this, the installation process went smoothly. After completing the Windows 7 installation, I encountered the same issue of missing network drivers as I did with Windows 8.1. I simply installed the correct drivers and that solved the issue.  I mentioned in my Windows 8.1 post that despite the fact that Nvidia did not have driver support for the RTX 30 series on Win 8.1, they did have driver support on Windows 7. I was able to successfully install the appropriate graphics d
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Week 2: Windows 8.1 Professional

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  Windows 8.1 Professional Installation and Use: The installation process for Windows 8.1 was similar to that of Windows 10 and overall went smooth. Once the installation was complete however is when the problems started. The first issue I encountered was that the default network drivers did not work. In order to resolve this issue, I had to boot up Windows 10 on my main SSD, download the drivers from my motherboard's website, and then reboot back onto Windows 8.1 and install them there. That resolved the network connection issue.  The next issue I encountered actually ended up affecting my benchmarking. Windows by default only was detecting one of my two monitors. I knew this was because of the fact that there were 130 Windows updates that needed to be installed and because I was still using the default Windows graphics driver and not the latest one from Nvidia.  After installing all 130 Windows updates, I tried installing Nvidia GeForce Experience which automatically detects and
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Week 1: Windows 10 Professional

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 Windows 10 Professional Installation and Use: The installation process for Windows 10 is simple and very straight forward. I experienced no problems during the installation and setup of 10, as to be expected given that it is the most recent version of Windows (as of the time I came up with the plan for this blog, Windows 11 just launched I believe but that will stay outside of the scope of this blog since my hardware is not compatible anyway). Installing all of the software and games that I needed was simple and required no extra steps in order for the software to be compatible. There were some issues with a couple of the games but those issues are because of the games being outdated or blocking the benchmarking software I was using. I will elaborate more on those when I go over each game. The software I used to benchmark all of these games is MSI Afterburner with RivaTuner, which comes with MSI Afterburner. This software allowed me to display overlays on the games with various statis
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Welcome Post

  Windows Versions and Gaming Performance The Plan for this Blog: The purpose of this technical blog is to compare gaming performance in a select set of games and other benchmarks on different versions of Microsoft Windows, ranging from Windows XP to Windows 10 to see if there is any impact on performance from the operating system. In order to keep the experiment consistent, all of the operating systems will be installed on identical hardware, including an identical hard drive. Each week, I will be installing, using, and benchmarking one version of Windows starting with Windows 10 and going back with every major version of Windows all the way back to XP. I will be writing about my experience installing, using, and benchmarking each OS at the end of the week. After all the versions of Windows have been tested, I will be doing one final blog post to compare each version, including graphs and other data comparisons to see if there is any impact on gaming performance.  PC Specifications: T
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