Microsoft has been heavily making claims that Windows 7 is a faster operating system than its predecessor, and until now the objections have been few and far between. Iolo technologies, however, has stepped up to the plate with a stopwatch and challenged Redmond's pride and joy. Iolo are the developers of world famous tune-up software System Mechanic, and they claim that Windows 7 is in fact slower than Windows Vista, with a boot up taking 1:34 on Windows 7 and 1:06 on Windows Vista.

How did they reach this conclusion? Well, they say that the boot shouldn't be to where the desktop appears, but rather to where the machine becomes usable, and the stop watches are only tripped when the PC sits "with CPU cycles no longer significantly high and a true idle state achieved".

Interesting, but is it not possible that the distributed load of a boot means that you can get to the information/applications you want faster, regardless of how long it takes the Operating System to settle? What Iolo also fail to recognise is the number of machines that were before incapable of running Vista that have successfully been upgraded to Windows 7 - with the compatibility and stability of the new system software being far from anything that Vista can touch.

They do admit that Windows 7 did outperform Vista at the three-month and six-month old machines. But it "trailed the older version significantly" in its earlier boot-up tests. Iolo plans to release more details on its findings and methodology next week.