Windows 7 to reach down to Netbooks
Microsoft has been growing its share of the Netbook segment in recent months, but it's largely on the back of the company's older Windows XP product, rather than Windows Vista.
The trend toward the small, cheap notebooks has not been lost on the software maker, however. When the topic turns to Windows 7 at the Professional Developers Conference next week, I would expect the software maker to talk about an operating system that can run well on all manner of laptops, including the ultra-low-end.
It's just one of many topics expected to come up at the conference, which takes place in downtown Los Angeles next week. CNET News will be there in force with live blogs, analysis, and some really high-level executive interviews. You can find all our PDC coverage both now and during the show from our PDC special coverage page.
Most of the Windows talk at next week's show will come Tuesday, on day two of the event, while the first day's keynote speech is expected to focus on "Windows Cloud," or "Windows Strata," or whatever the company has decided to call its cloud-based operating system. Steve Ballmer mentioned Microsoft might have a trademark by the time of PDC, but my search Friday didn't turn up anything for Windows Cloud or Windows Strata.
Day two will also feature talk of Office 14, the next version of Office, with sources saying that the company will show off some features, including its ability to run inside a Web browser.
As for the Netbooks, it's a critical segment for Microsoft to be competitive in, growing far faster than the market as a whole. It's also the first slice of the desktop market where Microsoft has seen a significant level of competition from Linux.
After many of the initial models were Linux only, Microsoft has hustled back with versions of XP that can run on flash-based memory. As some of the Netbooks have started to come with traditional hard drives, some Vista models, such as HP's 2133, have also cropped up.
Microsoft has declined to comment on Windows 7 ahead of the conference. The company has said that it will outline the product in detail and give attendees a pre-beta version of the operating system.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
Actually, now that Intel has support for virtual machines in the silicon, I'd love to see Microsoft just completely re-write Windows to be a far more modern and logical OS, with legacy support via XP or Vista virtual machines until the various and sundry apps are rewritten for the new OS. And no, I wasn't high when I thought that up, just irrationally hopeful!
Microsoft and its developers are just going to have to nip it in the bud like Apple did with their OS 9 to OS X transition. They need to do a re-write, stripping out all of the backwards compatibility APIs and create a rosetta like compatibility engine that can be installed to run older drivers and applications if the user desires. Ideally they'd base it on a UNIX O/S like Apple did as well to get some reasonable security back. None of this crap "Click allow or cancel" BS. It would also create some interoperability that has been needed for a long time, and allow them to scale the O/S for any device they want to target.
Oh, but that's right, they don't invent anything, they just buy new features and integrate them into their O/S. Well maybe they can buy SCO. I hear their real cheap these days. Maybe Novell, so they can end that lingering anti-trust battle that's been going on for the better part of the last two decades.
We are already running Ubuntu Linux, which performs light speeds past Windows Vista on this modern PC (Intel quad core w/ 8 gig ram) and I have all my Windows apps running seamlessly using virtualization through an XP Virtual Machine (which I had already owned a license for). The windows apps run better than they did when we tested Windows Vista64 as the installed OS. The fact of the mater is - eventually all Windows apps (or any application for that fact) will just be running as nothing more than virtual machines ontop of PC's or in the cloud as hosted or web applications.. This makes more sense to developers who can control their application's environments and distribute that application to any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, even eventually successors to the XBox/PS3). It has come to the point now, and the technology is there, that there is NO reason to go out and buy a new version of Windows. Install a FREE Linux distribution like Ubuntu and then you only have to load Windows virtually for any software you can't find a really good alternative for free through the software package manager. Between Multiple-Core CPU's with built in hardware virtualization, Linux, Software Virtualization, and hosted / cloud web applications, Microsoft is actually going to have to start making products people WANT to buy, not products people HAVE to buy to stay compatible. To start, Microsoft is going to have to do something they really haven't done for a long time - and that is INNOVATE to gain new customers solely on the fact they make good and efficient software. Vista was a complete failure to do this and I have big doubts that Microsoft can rethink their entire strategy to stop on a dime and go a different direction ( I think there is too much arrogance from the upper management down right now). Microsoft not only has to battle to come up with a new efficient software model, but also fix their public image, which is probably the harder of the two problems to solve. The only hope they have with the desktop OS will be to just give away Windows 7. I'm not a diehard linux, mac, or windows supporter - I'm an independent consultant - and its my job to look at the project and find the solution that best fits the clients needs and in this economy saves them money. The days of small to mid-sized businesses investing in and needing servers, service, and support contracts for their locations has in our book - come to an end. Eliminate the need for those servers, antivirus, spam tools, at those locations and the cost savings is HUGE. Unify and lock down the desktop using thin-clients and virtualization technologies and you eliminate the need to troubleshoot individual PC's and most of the time onsite technician visits. But of course most IT outfits wont tell you any of this because they make their money on service contracts, hardware, and software sales.
/P
Woops!
In spite of the hopped-up specs (for a netbook), it had a (Vista) rating of 2.7... meaning it runs like crap compared to its competition (including XP), as predicted.
Article here: http://www.slashgear.com/eee-1000h-unboxed-vista-ultimate-installed-performance-surprisingly-good-1612060/
/P
You appear to have missed this bit:
"Important note ? After we installed all drivers and latest Windows updates, we re-ran the performance index and got a new score of 2.7 compared to 1.0. The graphics component score is now 4.0 with the gaming graphics component now scoring 2.7 ? the other component scores are the same as the fresh install.
The actual real-world experience of Vista on the 1000H is surprisingly good ? I expected it would be sluggish and slow but it?s actually quite smooth and that?s with ReadyBoost enabled we noted a slight improvement again. Keep in mind this is the Eee 80GB HDD version, the Eee PC 1000 with 40GB SSD should run even smoother."
If you knew about the Windows Experience Score you'd know it takes the lowest value, not the average value and, given that a low end integrated GPU isn't going to get much above 2 to 3, that's where it's derived from.
You may also want to do a search of the Eee forums which deal with this matter fairly extensively.
As for netbooks, you'll also note that virtually all new models offer the 1.6GHz Atom ZF30 as standard. This is the same processor as the Eee 1000 runs. The following article demonstrates this:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/MSI-Wind-Is-Also-Good-with-Vista-94492.shtml
I know you hate MS but you really shouldn't let that hatred cloud reality.
Must suck having to ride the edge of Moore's Law just to be considered as running adequately.
It runs Windows 2000 just fine. It chocks on XP due to extensive access to virtual memory.
So, Microsoft can re-label Windows 2000 as Windows 7 and they instantly get a slim-and-mean OS for the netbooks.
Note to Microsoft. We don't care about transparent menus or animated dancing fonts. We want every little scrap of performance we can get (That's real performance, not throwing away half of our memory and clock cycles preloading software so you can make things look faster).
Microsoft and Apple tend to work on similar OS feature in their new OSes. One would believe that they have the same R&D center.
Anyhow, Windows 7 sounds to be a slimmed down, optimized, and flexible OS from what has been leaked out about it. I may give that OS a chance unlike Vista.
Break the Wedge!
www.breakthewedge.com
As for netbooks, well I think that you should be looking at Windows Mobile 7 as opposed to Windows 7. Remember that WM7 is going to be a major leap forward. So what you should have with WM7 is a highly capable, light weight OS. Imagine the simplicity of the iPhone (OSX mobile) on a netbook. That should be fine for regular users.
- by DonBurnett November 14, 2008 5:13 PM PST
- I own an Acer Aspire One and I am thrilled with it, the atom processor is a low heat hyperthreaded processor that shows up on windows device manager as two 1.6 ghz processors and it is extremely fast. My machine has 1 Gigabyte of RAM and a 120 Gig hard drive. I bought a 1.6 ghz HP DV92335NR 17" laptop at Windows Vista launch and I can honestly say under Windows it's just as fast as that..
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(23 Comments)The atom processor has a core 2 instruction set even though it's technically not a core 2 processor by any stretch of the imagination. I can say without any remorse that this is the best laptop value I have ever purchased. for $350 it's amazingly fast and I have Expression Studio 2, Photoshop, Visual Studio 2008 installed on it and Office 2007 ultimate and everything runs as fast as the other laptops I own.. Plus the size really makes it a winner.. I get 2-2.5 hours of battery life on a 3 cell battery and around 6 hours on a 6 cell battery..
As far as the Vista controversy with netbooks, let me just tell you on the atom processor Vista Home Basic runs just fine, as it would on any other 945 intel chipset.. It fits fine on my 120 gig drive and runs fine on the reported 2 cores of the the Atom processor. It was easily installed with a USB dvd drive and all of this hoopla about Vista not liking netbooks is just a bunch of HOOEY!
In fact HP sells a Mini-Note 1.2 Ghz C7 processor based unit with similar specs to the atom just slower and it comes with Vista completely installed and it runs perfectly. It's slower than my unit with it's ATOM processor, but all of this buzz about Windows 7 and netbooks just is that.. Yes XP doesn't have the same memory footprint and may have some advantages, but if you are running Vista Home Basic which is the Vista equivalent of XP Home it runs fine and has nearly the same memory foot print. I can't tell a difference between the two OSes in my unofficial testing on the same atom hardware.
I have one of these and love it and use it and don't have any concerns about it running ANY operating system..
I think this is just all idle speculation from people who are unfamiliar with the Atom platform and probably don't have a machine themselves and are talking out of their realm of expertise..
Take my advice if you get one of these with at least 1 gig of ram and a 120Gig hard drive you can do anything with it that you could do with any laptop under $1000..
I am glad Win 7 is modular, but this Vista doesn't fit thing is just bad journalism and really furthering Vista bad press and misconceptions. If you don't own a netbook and haven't installed the OSes you are talking about on it yourself you shouldn't be writing about it because you are out of your realm of expertise.
There are many problems with this article..