Application Performance

Windows 10 delivered similar performance to Win 7 in Excel 2013, while 8.1 was consistently slower.

At this point Firefox is slower in Windows 10 when compared to 8.1 and 7, based on an average of 7 runs we found it was 7% slower.

Please note again that lower is better here despite the ordering of the graph suggesting otherwise. Rather than sort the data from fastest to slowest for this review we have locked each operating system in order. This should help make reading the data faster since each operating system will assume the same location on each graph, the randomness of the results shouldn't be too bad given there are just three configurations.

Interestingly both Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 were slower than Windows 7 when measuring Chrome performance in the Mozilla Kraken browser benchmark, quite a bit slower in fact.

As you can see Internet Explorer 11 is very slow on all three operating systems compared to Firefox and Chrome. However, Microsoft's new Edge browser, which is exclusive to Windows 10, performs much better with comparable results to Firefox and Chrome.

The Windows 10 performance when testing with WinRAR wasn't great as it was consistently slower than 8.1 and 7 when measuring single and multi-threaded performance.

The best results with Photoshop CC were seen when using Windows 8, while Windows 10 matched the performance of Windows 7.

There's not a lot to say here as all three operating systems delivered the same performance in Illustrator CC.

Like what we saw when testing with WinRAR, we find that Windows 10 is slower than both 8.1 and 7 in 7-Zip.