Windows 7 vs. Windows XP On a Netbook 397
Justin writes "Many in the industry are counting on Windows 7 to bring the netbook market to the next level. Having netbook manufacturers ship netbooks with 7+ year old Windows XP pre-installed surely deterred some from joining the ranks of households with the small, light and portable netbooks. It seems Microsoft has addressed most of the pitfalls of Windows Vista on a netbook by increasing battery life and performance to be very close to that of the lighter-weight Windows XP. Legit Reviews has the full scoop of battery life and performance tests pitting Windows 7 against Windows XP on the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA Netbook." I'd like to see a follow-up with a few different Netbook-friendly Linux distros, too.
Lighter weight XP??? (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:Lighter weight XP??? (Score:4, Insightful)
From experience I can tell you that Windows 7 (64-bit version) can be installed on a 10 GB partition. Barely, but it does work.
If you want light, Minix still can't be beat but I don't see anyone using it as a desktop OS. I wonder why.
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Good point, if there was only some way we could balance things, rather than going to the extremes. Unfortunately, we all know the law, forcing us to adopt either the biggest or smallest OS footprint.
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Just use nLite, which is probably what TinyXP was made with (to begin with). Getting rid of everything you don't use and disabling unnecessary services can save a lot of disk space and reduce memory usage significantly. It works with Windows 2000 too.
There are even analogs of nLite for Windows 98 if you want to go even slimmer.
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Your comment is some retarded shit. RTFA
Re:Who cares about these tests? (Score:5, Interesting)
The tests confirm what many of us have been saying all along. Using XP as a baseline, Vista sucks gangrenous donkey balls through a garden hose. Win7, on the other hand, runs about as well as XP. Depending on configuration, of course. It wouldn't be terribly inaccurate to say that Win7 is XP with a better security model, and missing some of the bogus legacy shit that should have been dropped almost a decade ago.
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My uncle did his masters thesis on the difference an operating system makes in doing calculations and how long batteries last on the same hardware (power consumption).
It does make a difference -- one larger than he had anticipated.
Re:Lighter weight XP??? (Score:5, Informative)
I've tried a stripped-down pirate version (called XP JACKed Edition, IIRC) that would boot and run in a virtual machine limited to 20 MB RAM. It worked fairly well, I even used it to play games like Oblivion for a while (not in a VM, though). XP can be remarkably lightweight.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of installing Windows 7 is to keep Linux OFF a netbook!
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
If your whole point in installing Windows 7 is to not run something else, then just think of the money you could save by just not buying a netbook. Or a PC. Or a broadband or dialup Internet connection.
I choose my O/S based upon what it does run.
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Anonymous coward would like to point out that you've missed the point entirely
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
/facepalm -- Keeping Linux off the Netbook IS about making MS money.. are you new here?
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
DirectX 10, silly!
Seriously, though, Vista changed quite a few things under the hood. The only reason you don't see more Vista-only software yet is because it was, well, a flop.
If Windows 7 catches on, it won't be long before you run across software that refuses to run on XP.
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Which is necessary to Microsoft's survival, being their own biggest competitor and all.
It could be necessary for progress in general. Although, maybe I'm mistaken and you'd prefer to retro fit your gasoline engine powered vehicle with a pair of oxen? I'm just sayin, at some point the past "version" becomes so obsolete you may no longer wish to support it. It may also be that the costs of maintaining support for said obsolescence is simply higher than abandoning it.
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Well XP isn't going to be sold forever, and as it is now you need to pay a premium to get the Vista Business edition with the XP downgrade, so this article is actually quite good in promoting the confidence of consumers to buy Windows 7 for their netbook instead of looking for some hacked method to get XP on their shiny new netbook in the upcoming year.
TL;DR: When XP is no longer available to buy, I won't worry about putting Windows 7 on the netbook.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
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It will. Because I will not support it at all. I started with Vista, which I personally never touched. I told them that I can't help them on that. If they actually *bought* Vista, I entirely stopped talking to them. Now it's nice and quiet, and the only questions I ever get, can be solved by ssh access to a bash shell.
I won't ever give that up. ^^
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux doesn't default to granting root privileges, I know. And you don't need root privileges to delete files out of your own home directory. Hence the tilde before the slash: ~/* not /*
Linux does have executable files.
Now, I am not entirely certain it could have the +x flag set on the file after being an e-mailed attachment, though, actually. I could be mistaken there.
On the other hand, you could just bundle it up into an RPM, make it look "real" and people will "install" the "video." If you switch the average Windows user to Linux, they'll know even less about Linux than they do about Windows. They'll install RPMs (or whatever) as quickly as they will install Smilie Packs on Windows. If that means typing in their password - which they'd be used to, by now, if they've been installing updates - then they will type it in.
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Yes, not everyone follows them, but maybe after a few security problems, they'll learn.
I wish I could mod you "naive".
Besides, there are still drive-by vulnerabilities to worry about. Vista+IE actually does a lot to mitigate and prevent vulnerabilities in the browser (Vista+Chrome also does a pretty good job.)
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Or, you could just not run as an administrator and get most of the same security.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, no.
ASLR, Internet Explorer's Protected stuff (which not one of the competitors has), Bitlocker, the new Firewall (which finally has a nice group policy settings), service hardening using restricted accounts, NAP inclusion, kernel patch protection, etc. etc.
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Are we back to the 1990s belief that IE somehow runs "in the kernel?" Can you Microsoft bashers at least get up to date on this stuff please? IE is no more "integrated into the OS" than any other application that uses a system library.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
Fixed that for you.
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Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of netbooks is to use them for whatever the fuck you want. Just because they are called "netbooks" doesn't mean I'm only allowed to access the internet with them.
On my netbook I can browse the internet, write an essay in OpenOffice, watch 720p movies, run an FTP client, play CS:S. Upgrading to Windows 7 makes all of these things faster.
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Nope. See the numbers in the article, everything is really quite the same performance-wise. So '7 it is a huge improvement since vista, but not that much since XP (In fact in many places XP is still faster, slightly faster, but there we go, speed is not a good reason...)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought the point of netbooks was to have a computer for accessing the internet and that's about it. Last I checked, XP could access the internet. I don't see the point in putting Windows 7 on your netbook at all.
7's ~0.5 second sleep and awake times are a nice boost over XP, and on my Mini with 2 gigs of ram Firefox opens under 7 in 1/2 the time it took to open in XP. Also, when I boot up I can start opening programs as soon as the desktop loads, where in XP the whole system would freeze for seconds at a time during the 60 seconds after a boot, possibly because of the JMicron controller in my SSD. I'm not sure how I generally feel about the new taskbar in 7 at its default settings (i.e., OSX Docklike), but on the tiny screen of a netbook the reduced taskbar clutter is great. Windows management features like mouseover-full size Window previews make me feel a lot less claustrophobic in the tiny netbook world, as well.
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You need to do a clean, minimal, from scratch XP install on your Mini. I did that with mine and don't see any of the things you say you are. Turning off all the pointless XP eye-candy crap really makes it feel snappy.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Funny)
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Faster than XP? I've seen benchmarks, but a clean install of Windows 7 was slower than my old install of XP x64. 7 may be faster than Vista, but not XP.
It should be noted though that the Windows 7 MS is hyping for netbooks has MANY services disabled, where as they are comparing it to an XP that hasn't be similarly optimized.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, I just went through the article and XP was faster in basically every bench mark.
What feature does 7 provide you that is a huge benefit over XP, especially on a netbook?
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It's faster in the sense that it does more things than XP *and* manages to go at the same speed (the microbenchmarks were very slightly favorable towards XP as you've said, but nowhere significant).
However, by going for Windows 7, you get a better sound solution (Mixer, for instance), increased security via UAC, a non-IE dependant Windows Update, virtual store, etc., then on top of that you get a lot less reboots
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Win 7 has better battery life then XP pro or OSx on the SSD based mini 9 that I have. For regular hard drive based netbooks, XP pro should still rule. XP pro is slower then win 7 on the SSD based netbook that I have. The SSD in this mini looks more like RAM then a hard drive. The slot looks more like a mini PCI/E slot then a RAM or SATA connection. Which may have a lot to do with why XP pro on this netbook. XP loaded slower and ran sluggish on this netbook. It worked but for me it was not running correctly.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought the point of netbooks was to have a computer for accessing the internet and that's about it. Last I checked, XP could access the internet. I don't see the point in putting Windows 7 on your netbook at all.
Well, let me play devil's advocate and throw out some ideas for you...
1) Security, there truly is a major level of security between XP and Win7. This goes from the built in malware tools, to even IE running in protected mode so it is technically more secure than running Firefox or Chrome, as the browser doesn't even user level rights. (This is why the Flash and recent IE exploits you have read about (that can even affect OS X and Linux are IMMUNE on Vista or Win7 when running IE.) - I know, this is hard to hear and I hate saying it myself, but is true.
2) Network features. Running through the airport and having the new Win7/Vista networking stack features is freaking awesome, as it not only does really good at just hooking into the WiFi, but also remembers. So that if go back through Denver it knows not only how to connect (which all OSes should do), but it also knows how to classify the network and flips on the Firewall on the fly and correctly sets all sharing settings based on the profile of the network there.
3) 3G features - Networking Again - 3G if you have the latest drivers from most manufacturers, and you have a 3G netbook, or even a 3G phone that you are tethering, the Network connection is treated more like a WiFi connection, and gives you instant information from the same interface, with Bars, Speed, etc, and again automatically just hooks you into the network and again applies the level of firewall security and sharing crackdown that you have specified.
4) Resume from Standby or Hibernate - Set your Power Button to hibernate and you can flip the netbook on and off as fast as you can open your phone. The speed differences in resume from standby are good, but the hibernate resume features are fast, and when you are trying to rebook flights running through an airport, you appreciate these little things.
5) Then add in 1000 other new features over XP, from better application boot times via Superfetch, to pulling up tons of information from a simple search. There are also the nice corporate features that work better and are handy from newer ways it deals with Offline files and access remote servers, to even NTFS features that do a bit extra to keep previous versions of your documents with you at all times, without even having to back them up every hour.
And this could go on and on and on, as the full list of several thousand features were contrasted between Win7 and XP that really do make things easier and work better than an 8 year old OS. (From bluetooth to even having the right printers appear based on what network I'm roaming on at the moment, just little things that are nice.)
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Finally, netbooks are NOT ONLY for just browsing the internet. They are low power computers, and you seem to discount that there are users running Office, and Photoshop, and Corel, and Illustrator, and even playing games on these computers. There is a difference between getting a crap Web inteface to my documents when at the airport, and actually opening the application they were created in and just editing them.
You can also find 'geeks' like myself playing an MMO on netbooks, and sure it isn't 60fps, but 20-30fps on a device isn't bad, and ironically, most of the games that the Netbooks can actually run, hold their own and often run faster under Win7, as it does a better job of silencing background processes.
There are also the times, I just want to read an eBook, watch a movie, listen to a book, or listen to music, and then the Netbook becomes the ultimate PMP, and you will find me with headphones on and my Netbook is shoved in my briefcase. (Oh and on flights where space is tight, again, they work quire well for movie viewing, you are getting a 8-10" screen for you and anyone you travel with and about the same battery life as a gen
GPU rendering and compositing saves CPU power (Score:4, Interesting)
A Netbook is a system with a very low powered single-core CPU. Everything you can do to move things off the CPU makes everything else faster. Windows 7 can offload GDI, window compositing, and many other effects to the GPU (even one as relatively weak as in Netbooks), saving a ton of CPU performance. And thus making everything else faster, even if it's just looking at a web page that's running some Javascript or Flash.
I just upgraded my kids' Dell Mini 9 (1 GB RAM) to Win 7 RTM from its OEM XP config, and it's remarkably snappier even just doing web browsing, even with a GMA 945.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7#Desktop_Window_Manager [wikipedia.org]
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This sound a little like (Score:2, Insightful)
Doom 2 versus Quake 2 on a 386.
Er? (Score:2)
"Having netbook manufacturers ship netbooks with 7+ year old Windows XP pre-installed surely deterred some from joining the ranks of households with the small, light and portable netbooks."
Who, exactly? Anyone who doesn't know what they're doing will blindly buy anything. Anyone who DOES know what they're doing will install any OS they like.
Or was the submitted actually suggesting that netbook buyers were actually LOOKING for Vista?
What, you think people *WANT* vista? (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista jokes aside, the fact that people are willing TO PAY EXTRA to get their computer with windows XP is a very good indicator.
Most people/companies are not interested in the new features offered by Vista. They just aren't that compelling.
Then add the fact that Vista is new, slower, compatible with less hardware, some of your current software won't work on Vista, and many people find UAC annoying.
Not a lot of upside, and a big downside for many. The value proposition just isn't there.
Microsoft pulled XP from the retail market to avoid Vista looking like a flop.
Re:What, you think people *WANT* vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people/companies are not interested in the new features offered by Vista. They just aren't that compelling
Most people anyway, have never sat down in front of a Vista machine for long enough to get used to it.
Compatibility, seriously? That hasn't been a problem for literally years. Any computer you buy off the shelf today is going to have compatible hardware and I bet you'd be hard pressed to find individual pieces that are worth buying that aren't compatible.
UAC? Can be turned off in about 5 mouse clicks.
I can't say much about performance except that my $600 laptop has enough power to handle it easily, I know that doesn't capture the netbook market at all, but if you're buying an off the shelf desktop or laptop I highly doubt you'll see any issues. It's true that there isn't a whole lot of big changes to make the transition worthwhile, certainly there's nothing that would make me upgrade an XP machine to Vista.
OTOH, if I were buying a new machine and had the choice, I would, in all honesty, take Vista for the little things if nothing else. Being able to control the volume on a program by program basis is very nice. Being able to search the start bar and individual folders, including things like the control panel is also nice, just to name a couple. The single largest problem with Vista was it's launch, for what it's worth running Vista is actually quite enjoyable for me.
(Please don't blow this post off just because it's not anti-Vista, I run XP at work, Vista on my laptop, and Ubuntu on my Desktop. All have the pluses and minuses, I'm just trying to dispel a bit of the bad reputation that Vista (unfairly IMO) has.)
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I don't have to cook and eat a pork chop to figure out that it's rotten. The smell is enough of a clue.
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People are willing to pay for somethin
Netbook vs. Notebook (Score:2)
One of the biggest strenghts of Open Source is to give opportunity to tailor systems for a specific needs. That's why Moblin or Plasma mid and couple of other products aimed to play media only and not bother creating any will succeed in n
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Intel describes a netbook as a platform for playing media and a notebook as a platfrom for creating media. So what Windows 7 is aimed for? Play or create media? If you put both for a netbook, you just waste lots of cpu power for bloat you add in order to create new media.
It's marketing drivel. Don't give it anymore consideration than that. I use my Acer Aspire One to do video encoding, and I don't give a damn what the marketing people say.
Windows $NEXT_VERSION to rule them all (Score:5, Funny)
Windows 7 betas have been greeted with remarkable positive press. "Of course," said Steve Ballmer, "the betas preview the 'champagne and hookers' edition, which would be way too much for netbooks and explode users' brains. Imagine thinking those little things are computers! So we're releasing what we call Windows 7 Dumbass Edition(tm). It lets you log in and look at the shiny. Even Spider Solitaire has the ribbon toolbar! And you can buy an upgrade to the version that runs programs! It lets you do that!"
Dumbass Edition(tm) comes with pre-installed viruses to make the computer part of the Storm, Conficker and FBI botnets. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
"Some manufacturers were going to release netbooks with ARM processors, which would run Linux or Chrome OS at twice the speed, half the heat and ten-hour battery life, but wouldn't run Windows 7. Microsoft assures us this is a crushing blow for ARM," said Michael Silver of Gartner. "ARM didn't have anything to say to that, just a guffawing sound down the phone. Obviously they're upset and hysterical."
In future news, Microsoft Corporation has announced a limited one-off extension of availability of its Windows XP operating system to April 2101 after criticism from large customers and analysts. This is the fifty-sixth extension of XPâ(TM)s availability since 2008. "Windows XP is currently in the extremely very prolonged super-extended support phase and Microsoft encourages customers to migrate to Windows for Neurons 2097 as soon as feasible," said William Gates V, CEO and great-grandson of the company founder. "Spare change?"
Illustration: Steve Ballmer's joyous expression [today.com] when announcing seeing the latest Microsoft quarterly figures.
Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, the article isn't off the scale in terms of inaccuracy, but when you see comments like this, how can you trust anything they do or say?
Aero is automatically disabled when unplugged in battery saver mode which makes sense
Aero is NOT disabled when unplugged; instead, translucency is turned off. (The Blur/Glass effect)
Aero itself remains enabled. I know people confuse 'Glass' and 'Aero' and 'DWM' and what the OS, but come on this is a technical review right, shouldn't they get the basic facts that you find on Wikipedia correct or at least maybe, just maybe have a clue themselves?
There are other more subtle errors in the article, and even though it basically says Win7 is doing fine. However, do you notice it forgets to mention that Win7 is performing as well as XP while having search, defender and many other 'heavy' features working properly and still performing as well as XP on a very modest CPU and GPU platform.
Going to leave it here...
I see the Netbook in that review... (Score:2)
... is probably the same one running their web-server. Holy Slashdotting, batman!
My Anecdotal Evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
Having run Windows XP, Ubuntu and Windows 7 on my MSI Wind U100 I can say Windows Seven has by far been the best OS. XP ran fine, but it wasn't particularly pleasing to the eye and had some issues running multiple programs at once. Ubuntu looked marginally better but performance wise it was terrible, I couldn't watch a flash video without it seizing up. Windows Seven looks pretty, runs faster than XP and is just better overall.
Re:My Anecdotal Evidence (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My Anecdotal Evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My Anecdotal Evidence (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, many open-source drivers do not have hardware support for playing video on the graphics chip.
Regardless of the reason for this (and it may be impossible to fix if they are closed up), Ubuntu is very poor at playing Flash video depending on the chip. On one machine at home, they emulate hardware speedup in the driver using software, but Flash actually does better with it turned off.
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That's Adobe's problem, not Ubuntu's. Videos in every player other than Flash will work fine.
And that is what is wrong with Linux.
Last time I checked, if you want to surf the web and watch videos, most of those videos are going to be in Flash format (Youtube, etc.).
So why would I want to run Ubuntu on a netbook when you can't watch videos on arguably the most popular website for online videos?
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But to the users, its not Adobe's problem. Adobe works fine on their windows machine, so it must be Linux's fault that they can't watch their favorite video's on Hulu.
Its a nasty double edged sword, since Adobe won't care till it hits a critical mass of users, and it won't hit a critical mass, if its crap. The only decent solution is an Open Source project http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ [gnu.org] , so that others, who do care, can fix it, but while its coming along nicely, last I checked, wasn't quite as good a
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But it is a valid reason to say that Ubuntu didn't run as well during normal operations.
I have the Flash issue even on a dual core laptop running Ubuntu 9.04. It's annoying. Every time I mention it, though, the same answer comes up: it's a problem with flash, not Ubuntu. That may be true, but it's still making it much more annoying and difficult to watch Flash videos, no matter whose fault it is. Average User (tm) is not going to say "Oh well. I can live without being able to watch youtube videos easily
Strange conclusions? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, in my interpretation, the Windows 7 netbook had slightly shorter battery life, and performed slightly worse in all but two benchmarks. One of those two was dealing with "next generation gaming performance" that really isn't point of netbooks, and the other was essentially identical to the XP performance.
And the conclusion the reviewers take from this is that Windows 7 is good? Just because it isn't as bad as Vista, and isn't too much worse than XP?
With these sorts of results, XP is going to be with us for a long time. Why is it so hard for Microsoft to make something comparable?
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You would have a hard time convincing me that security can be implemented at no CPU cost and running IE in a sandbox has huge advantages.
So what's not to like?
Re:Strange conclusions? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that's good, isn't it? A 7 year old OS vs. a not-yet-released OS running on current hardware... and the not-yet-released OS performs almost just as well as the 7 year old OS?
I'd say that's pretty good. Typical idea is that older OS's will run faster since they were smaller and HAD to run on .. less hardware. Hardware is better, so OS's can plan on using more of it. An OS that is able to run almost as well as a 7 year old OS on CURRENT hardware is doing pretty well.
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Bare in mind that netbook hardware is most certainly anything but current. Performance is roughly equivalent to a 5 year old Pentium M. The only difference is that it has been shrunk and power consumption reduced to the point where 5 year old mid class laptop has been reduced significantly in size.
Running Win 7 on a modern mobile (Core 2 Duo) CPU would give a much better comparison, and really show the true benefits it has.
why use old RC (Score:2, Insightful)
Chrome OS announcement timing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now Microsoft is facing the same game from the other end. Very carefully timed announcement by Google that all the OS you would need to run a netbook is coming soon. Vendors do not commit wholeheartedly to Microsoft. Device driver writers do not just hack something that will work in Windows alone and be done with it. Consumers also do not rush out to buy the latest and greatest. Corporations add another action to their evaluation. "What about Chrome OS?". That buys some time. Most vendors cite Chrome OS and demand hefty discount for Win7 in netbook market. Microsoft is forced to sell its OS at bargain basement prices in the fastest growing segment of PC market.
Footprint? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's see... a bunch of hardware benchmarks, which would be expected to result in negligible difference between different versions of Windows. Does Vista REALLY come out significantly worse than XP on these kinds of benchmarks?
How about something relevant to netbooks? What's the memory footprint? Disk footprint?
What a Joke! (Score:5, Insightful)
What a fracking joke! That the new product is almost as good as the 7 year old one that it replaces.
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Because they essentially have no competition.
MS isn't improving the performance or security of their operating system.
Instead, they are simply cramming more products in and calling the monstrosity an "operating system" - in an effort to expand into more markets.
Huh? MS just fixed and tweaked what was wrong with Vista without promising or adding a bajillion new features. Security is a lot better, with many exploits for XP that are coming out not working on Vista or 7.
Intel and AMD have been making dual-core CPUs for more than FOUR YEARS.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20050418comp.htm [intel.com]
Intel has announced 8-core CPUs.
And yet the "new" (its basically a rebranded Vista) Windows 7 will barely take advantage of any of them other than the first..
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1612 [zdnet.com]
Why link to outdated speculation? Check these real tests and benchmarks out instead. http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/generation-gap-windows-multicore-273 [infoworld.com]
Even Slashdot linked to it. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F22%2F1554224&from=rss [slashdot.org]
This is what happens when you don't have a
Whistling past the graveyard (Score:3, Interesting)
All this astroturfed media about how great Win7 is and how it is going to kick butt on netbooks. Funny.
They always forget the one critical problem. Price. The only way XP clawed market share away from the penguin was by Microsoft basically giving it away. They aren't planning on giving 7 away so there is going to be a five tiered price structure on netbooks and that is about three too many.
1. ARM Netbooks/smartbooks will be the hot new low cost item this Xmas. They will be at or below where ASUS introduced the EEE PC 700. And just maybe they hit the $200 price point ASUS originally aimed for and missed. Does anyone think WinCE will be the big winner in this market? Ok, maybe they can horn their way in by Xmas '11 but the rumormill hasn't been talking WinCE it has been Android and a little Ubuntu with most trying to roll their own.
2. x86 based machines running Linux. Go look at the HP Mini Mi 110 if you want to see how low x86 hardware can get without the Microsoft tax. I have seen em as low as $249 but they have crept up a bit lately.
3. x86 hardware with an XP preload. Seem to run at least $30 more than a penguin and usually $40-50 more.
4. x86 hardware with Windows 7 starter edition. Hasn't shipped yet but we can assume it will cost at least as much as XP. Odds are it will be mostly useful as a platform to harvest the customer's credit card to upgrade to a more complete edition.
5. x86 hardware preloaded with Windows 7 Home. Either Microsoft gives up on the idea of profits or this puppy boosts the sticker a full $100 over a penguin preload. x86 netbooks have already crept up a hundred or so in average selling price and now Microsoft expects customers to pony up another portrait of Franklin? In this economy? Hello? Anyone remember why the netbook revolution got started in the first place? Wasn't price as big a factor as the form factor?
Ok, so how will the marketplace solve the 'too many SKU problem'? Starter will probably get ditched as a customer relations nightmare. Linux on x86 will probably finish its vanishing act from retail although a few online sellers might continue if the sales are there. That gets from five to three. So it will depend on how many customers think Win7 is worth a premium likely to exceed $50 over XP. If most pay XP dies, if not....
I kmnow this is off-topic but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I kmnow this is off-topic but...can anyone confirm if the following has been fixed in Windows 7?
Vista's copy progress dialog doesn't even tell you the name of the file you're copying any more. It only tells you part of the path it comes from. XP gives you the filename and full path.
If you move a folder containing files to a different place that already has a folder with the same name, XP merges them properly. Even with UAC turned off, Vista comes up with a supremely annoying dialog to confirm each file in turn, and even after a succesful move, the source folder is left behind.
If there's even one file in a folder that Vista thinks might be a media file, it presents the file list of the whole folder with media attributes instead of 'all files' attributes by default. It does this every time you create a new foler and you can't turn off or even force it to use a particular profile.
Vista's DRM means it can't play some of my media that XP can play without problem.
Vista still forgets window settings even if you set "remember each windows settings". This is a problem way back to Windows95 I think.
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I just tried for kicks... if I move a folder to another that contains a folder with the same name, it pops the message asking me what I want to do, and then at the bottom there's a tick box "Do this for the following X conflicts". Click that, popup doesnt happen again.
Thats with a folder with a very complex directory tree and thousands of files (I tried with a backup, basically)
The source folder does stay behind (though empty), however.
You're right about the file copy progress though. It gives you the entir
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Well not quite. There are 64-bit Atom processors. However, they're currently not being used in the mini-notebooks. Those are currently use the N series of chips which are 32-bit only.
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Re:Windows 7 should be 64 Bit (Score:4, Interesting)
May have been me.
32-bit should have died with XP.
Vista should have been 64-bit only.
No existing applications / devices that were 32-bit only had to worry, there was still 32-bit XP dammit.
But ok, whatever, fuck it, Intel was still flogging 32-bit CPUs for some reason, and people are morons. Fine.
But Windows 7? WHY THE FUCK do we need 32-bit versions of Windows 7? FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKK
Re:Windows 7 should be 64 Bit (Score:4, Interesting)
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Because having 2 versions makes shit harder for those who make hardware, for consumers who are confused, and for software developers, who will take the lazy route and support 32-bit primarily, while shafting the 64-bit users with shoddy, half-assed implementations and support.
64-bit is fucking awesome when done right. In many cases you can get more than double the performance vs 32-bit (anything to do with photos, audio, video, etc. decoding, editing, encoding, etc, or sciency shit, or porn simulators.).
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Because most people get whatever their OEM will sell them and stick with it 'til they buy something newer, and those of us who build our own jumped ship to 64-bits *years* ago.
The market of "people not ready to upgrade their 32-bit hardware looking for a new OS" is statistically insignificant.
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No existing applications / devices that were 32-bit only had to worry, there was still 32-bit XP dammit.
Anyone know if the XP-mode of Windows 7 is available in the 64-bit version? (I haven't tried it)
But ok, whatever, fuck it, Intel was still flogging 32-bit CPUs for some reason, and people are morons. Fine.
PAE, which allows up to 36GB on 32-bit. Intel has another 64-bit architecture, dontchaknow....it's called Itanium. They didn't license the amd64 instruction until Microsoft decided to embrace "X64."
In
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XP mode runs a copy of XP in Virtual PC, so I would imagine so.
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But Windows 7? WHY THE FUCK do we need 32-bit versions of Windows 7? FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKK
Why? Intel Atom - N and Z series cannot execute the x86-64 instruction set. Aren't netbooks (in which those Atom processors are used) major part of Windows 7 implementation? Isn't it what this article is about? Where is the securty? Is this the right hotel?
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Atom is the justification
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Because you can just go out and grab a $300 netbook with 6GB of RAM, right? Even if you could, not all of the Atom processors support EMT64, though the most-popular ones do.
32-bit is still faster for a lot of things, too. The i486 has been around for 20 years now, amd64 not so long. The compilers haven't quite caught up.
To Microsoft's credit, they are requiring 64-bit for a lot of their enterprise products now. IIRC, Exchange 2007 and SQL 2008 both require either 2k3 or 2k8 64-bit.
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Because you can just go out and grab a $300 netbook with 6GB of RAM, right? Even if you could, not all of the Atom processors support EMT64, though the most-popular ones do.
You probably meant the most popular ones don't. Only the desktop versions of Atom (230 and 330) support 64bits and those are very rare. The most popular are the N and Z series which you find in most if not all netbooks and UMPCs and those are 32bits only.
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Because you can just go out and grab a $300 netbook with 6GB of RAM, right? Even if you could, not all of the Atom processors support EMT64, though the most-popular ones do.
32-bit is still faster for a lot of things, too. The i486 has been around for 20 years now, amd64 not so long. The compilers haven't quite caught up.
To Microsoft's credit, they are requiring 64-bit for a lot of their enterprise products now. IIRC, Exchange 2007 and SQL 2008 both require either 2k3 or 2k8 64-bit.
I disagree. At least on x86-64 there's almost a doubling of the number of registers (twice the number of general purpose and SIMD FP registers). This greatly reduces the register pressure for compilers, which have been keeping up with processors thus far. For example, I use Povray [povray.org] a lot. I can guarantee you that a custom compiled 64-bit binary will definitely render faster than a custom compiled 32-bit binary on the same system.
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And also a doubling of the size of every pointer, meaning an inflation in the size of every instruction, causing an increase in the number of cache misses and an increase in the size of application binaries which means greater memory usage.
64-bit is *not* a panacea. It's better in some cases, worse in others, and which is better, 32-or 64-bit, depends entirely on workload.
While true, on x86-64, the the positives tend to outweigh the negatives [pcstats.com]. However, on architectures where 64-bit was not an afterthought, the negatives seem to outweigh the positives [osnews.com].
Re:Windows 7 should be 64 Bit (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, Windows has been kind of lagging on the 64-bit front. By treating it as sort of a bastard child (like they treated all their non-i386 NT versions), Microsoft managed to ensure that hardware manufacturers wouldn't make an effort to support 64-bit windows in a non-server environment. Which is frustrating as I've started bumping up against that once-awesome 4GB barrier.
Please, stop spewing bullshit. Just stop. For almost 2 years now, it has been a requirement to provide both 64 and 32 bit Vista drivers if a manufacturer wanted to get the WHQL stamp of approval. And these same Vista drivers install and work just fine on 64bit Windows 2008 Server as well, I know, because I actually run 64bit Win2008 on a rather obscure combination of hardware and haven't had any issues. I am sure some old hardware does exist that still doesn't have 64bit drivers for Vista/2008, but you really really need to try to actually find such hardware.
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If you want decent graphics, you need to run it on a Mac for OK graphics performance, or run it natively. None of the other platforms offer anything like as good graphics performance, mainly because their target market isn't interested in it.
VirtualBox (Score:4, Informative)
VirtualBox is very easy to use and it's GPL. If you use the free-as-in-beer desktop integration tools, then it's quite slick as well. I run a 64-bit Gentoo desktop with 32-bit Windows XP as a guest OS. This gives me all the power of Unix with MS compatibility when I need it. In full screen mode, I might as well be running XP for all you can tell.
I haven't tried 3D accelerated graphics. I understand that VirtualBox has been making strides in bringing OpenGL to the guest host, but they don't have any expectation of getting DirectX working any time soon if ever.
I hope Oracle decides to keep VirtualBox alive. As it is, VirtualBox is great for desktops, but the server side tools aren't in the same league as VMware. With Oracle backing, VirtualBox could become a serious contender.
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XP x64 was awful, unstable, etc. Vista x64 wasn't too bad. I'm using Win 7 RC x64 and it is working very well, actually, and I haven't run into anything (casual gamer, programmer, use Sibelius and East West sound libraries extensively) that I haven't been able to do... except for one piece of hardware that lacked 64 bit drivers (a rather old 1x1 midiman box).
I initially upgraded to Vista x64 for the RAM issue. I love using Linux, but it wasn't an option since I mostly use my desktop for music (Sibelius i
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Re:would be nice if they fixed RAID in windows 7 (Score:4, Informative)
We're running several RAID configurations, even on many of our notebooks with dual-HD configurations. RAID 0, RAID 1, etc...
Not sure what issue you are seeing, but maybe you should complain to the HD Controller MFR as this would be the first place to yell, as they not only make the driver, but once the OS passes off HD read/write commands to the driver and then the HD Controller for the RAID, the OS has little to do with what happens then.
I personally know that some RAID MFRs are crap sadly, but even running Linux, the drivers are and HD controllers are still crap.
Haven't seen the ATI Black screen, unless it sets your video mode to a native resolution and you havea 1990s monitor, but even then it should pop back or you could reboot and adjust this in safe mode.
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Do you honestly think that a stock install of Ubuntu 9.04 uses fewer CPU cycles than, say, Debian Woody? Hell, grab some floppies and fire up that old 286; with all the improvements to Linux over the years, new distros must run circles around the old ones we had back then!
Software becomes more complicated with each new version. Features get added. The UI gets improved. Security gets heightened. The fact the Microsoft managed to include all the new features of the past seven years without significantly