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Did the Netbook Improve Windows 7's Performance?
Arnie87 writes "One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: 'If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista's successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'"
Up to this point, people just wanted something flashy that justified expensive, penis-length-contest-winning hardware. And so Microsoft gave people a more and more integrated experience.
As the public finally realized that they mostly just wanted glorified net appliances, demands changed. Microsoft, being relatively nimble as gigantic international companies go, is shipping what people are demanding.
Whether people would have realized this without alternative OSs pulling them along is debatable, of course. But Microsoft is simply tailoring their product to demand.
There is nothing seriously wrong with Vista
Bwaaaaaa hahahahaha
I use it every day. It takes 15 minutes from boot to usable desktop. This is on NO slouch of a computer.
It is a pig with the disk. It is a pig with the memory. I have no problem with it using these things. But it does it in such a bad way it is amazingly bad. Close an application that was using a good chuck of memory and watch it chug on the disk filing that memory with stuff 'that might be used'. I have sat there and watched it fill the memory with mp3s that I haven't listened to in a couple of years. It uses 800 meg of memory just to start up to a desktop. What the hell... An OS with NO apps running uses 800meg? Im sorry that is just stupid.
When you have to disable all the new features to make it usable that says alot. When you have to disable the sysindexer, readyboost, superfetch, and windows defender to make it usable. I say all the crap they added in is just that crap.
My hopes for 7 are fairly low. It is getting good press as it is better than Vista. But not by much. XP is still beating it in many tasks. That is sad. Vista should be smoking it and so should 7. Instead we only get 'sorta better than vista'.
The one thing that made it better was the release of sysindexer 4.0. It was AMAZING bad at thrashing the disk, cpu, and memory. Now it is just tolerable.
The "netbook" is simply the tech media's latest obsession. Name anything, and the netbook is touted as the reason behind it. Cure to polio? Netbook. Waning Windows adoption? Netbook.
Name any problem, and the netbook is the answer to it. Financial crisis? Netbook. Inexplicable popularity of reality TV? Netbook. Global warming? Netbook.
Get the fuck off my lawn, assholes. Netbook.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Portable apps _designed_ to behave this way. That's not a bug.
They can be copied on (and started from) a USB stick.
You *must* know from your XP experience that the desktop appears faster than on W2K, but is simply useless for the first 10 minutes until it's finished hammering the hard disk (and I keep startup services to a minimum, to the point of manually nuking GoogleUpdate every time it gets silently installed). Also, they were the ones to come up with a progress bar that RESTARTED (so, what's the "progress" there) which meant you no longer had an idea whether to just go for coffee or have a full 4 course meal..
I don't want them to come up with more cosmetic scams like that. Your observation about a system needing to be snappy is 100% right, I just wonder where the hell all my computing power goes. Sure, I don't have the fastest box in the world but it's still 3..5x faster than when I was using W2K, yet I have to wait. On a laptop with Vista the system "disappears" for seconds on end (cursor goes away), to then later come back and catch up with my typing, in a boring word processor. That is ridiculous, and that^s why I (a) stuck with XP and (b) use Linux and OSX more and more.
The whole netbooks concept is good: do more with less. After that housecleaning we may want to use what we have then on a box with more power and see it fly at last.
After I learn touch typing. :-)
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How much does microsoft pay its astroturfers?
I really want to know.
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