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.'"

Comments

Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Face it, the real reason that Windows 7 is leaner than Vista is that Vista was a market flop because it tried to do all sorts of things that Windows users were simply not ready for.

There is nothing seriously wrong with Vista, and Windows 7 is mostly an optimized version 2 of Vista. So it's no surprise that with the codebase stabilized in Vista SP1 that Windows 7 will be able to build successfully upon that.

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Face it, the real reason that Windows 7 is leaner than Vista is that Vista was a market flop because it tried to do all sorts of things that Windows users were simply not ready for.

Such as force users to give up applications that ran perfectly fine under previous versions of Windows.

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[koro666]

Such as force users to give up applications that ran perfectly fine under previous versions of Windows.

They ran perfectly fine because Windows let them get away with whatever dirty tricks they were doing — which wasn't the case with Vista anymore.

Give me an application that is coded correctly and that does not try to be "more clever" than the operating system by using undocumented structures, functions, registry keys or whatever else, and I'll show you an application that runs fine on Vista.

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[Cyberax]

There are lot of problems with portable applications which try to write into the directory where .exe file is installed.

Vista 'helpfully' virtualizes file access and this breaks a lot of such apps.

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[Anonymous Coward]

There are lot of problems with portable applications which try to write into the directory where .exe file is installed.

Do portable progs on your fav linux distro do the same? That is, they write their configuration files to /bin or /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin or whatever.

What happens when an app with no root priviledge tries to write its configuration files in /bin? It fails spectacularly of course.

I don't like vista but isn't this double standard?

 

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[Minupla]

Speaking as an IT manager, I'll be dancing in the street the day that the last app stops this.

If I had a penny for every time a user lost data because some app decided to be clever in the manner mentioned above and not save it in the users profile directory...

Truly, if you were writing a linux app would you expect this to work? It's the same thing. Your app needs to expect that it can write to the user's home directory and temp locations. Fini. Done. Need to write somewhere else, make sure you set up the proper permissions during install time, when you'll be running with privs to access those directories.

Then I know where the user's data will be and can plan backups accordingly, without playing scavenger hunt with however many hundreds of apps my users are using.

Min

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[MrNaz]

I fully agree.

For years we (the FOSS community) have been bemoaning Windows' poor, totally broken security model. Now, when MS attempts to fix that and inevitably breaks applications that rely on the previous totally broken security model, we want to whine and moan about backwards compatibility?

Are we going to whine the same way if IE8 standardizes but breaks web pages that rely on IE7/IE6?

Seriously, there are some among us that simply will not be satisfied, and they are making the whole FOSS community look like a bunch of children.

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[Anpheus]

And that'll work fine in Vista, because that's not Program Files. Like in Linux, there are a few privileged, protected folders, and pretty much everything else, including mountable r/w media like flash drives, is essentially an extension of one's home directory. (Unless you do something fancy with the permissions, of course.)

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[hairyfeet]

I have to agree. i gave my copy of Vista away that I got for beta testing, and last I heard it is still being passed around like an Xmas fruitcake nobody wants. I tried it again when SP1 came out, hoping it didn't suck. Nope, still sucked. While my computer isn't some elite gamer rig it is a hell of a lot closer to what is still out there by the millions in the real world: A 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 2GB of DDR400 RAM, 750GB IDE, and a Geforce 7600GS OC.

Vista ran like a lame elephant with TB. It thrashed my 200GB OS drive to death, crap I hadn't seen since Win9X like network connectivity just dying and needing a reboot(in this day and age? WTF?) hard drive thrashing for no reason, crappy boot times, hell I could go on all day. And yes I tried all the "tweaks", although it is freaking sad that some think you should actually want an OS you have to work like hell on out of the box, but nope, still sucked. The problem with Vista is if you read Gate's interviews before it came out it was supposed to be "a new OS for next gen hardware" which was MSFT speak for needing 4GHz quad cores with 4GB of RAM just to run half as good as XP. After SP2 XP became a really decent OS, not as good IMHO as Win2K Pro SP4, but a decent OS none the less.

The problem was MSFT bet on Moore's law always being there to save their ass. If you think back and remember that Intel was talking about being able to get Netburst up to 10GHz you can understand why they may have thought that. But they didn't see green computing, or the Netbook/Nettop, or the fact that for most homes/SMBs computers passed the "good enough" level a little over 2GHz. From my experience in PC repair I can tell you the current "sweet spot" seems to be a single core between 2.2GHz and 3.6GHz with 1-2GB of RAM and usually Intel or Nvidia integrated graphics. Vista runs like total crap on a machine with that specs.

They also forgot the Joe and Jane Public often buy a PC based solely on price, and both Intel and AMD were happy to sell Celeron/Sempron based single core machines to the Best Buy/Walmart crowd. It has only been in the past few months that I have seen the low end being taken by dual core, and even then they really aren't anything to write home about. Vista was simply designed for a market that they expected to go nowhere but faster in GHz, but instead went green and multicore. while I hope that Win7 is better, from the articles I have been reading it looks like by the time Win7 reaches RTM it may suck just as bad as Vista.

Maybe they will finally fire Mr Steve "We can be as cool as Apple! Really we can! Stop laughing at me!" Ballmer if Vista7 bombs and get someone in there that remembers MSFT is a BUSINESS OS manufacturer, and Windows is not supposed to be OSX. I don't know what it is with his Apple/Google penis envy, but the man needs help. Seriously. But of course I'm not the only one that thinks MSFT would do better if he wasn't there.

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[cibyr]

/usr/local/* is for you stuff you've installed manually. /usr/bin is a perfectly sensible place for a package manager to put executables it installs. The package manager shouldn't fuck with anything in /usr/local.

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[the_womble]

What makes you think that the people complaining about backwards compatibility are the same people who complained about the Windows security model?

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[westlake]

By optimized you mean they have DRM turned off. Expect DRM to be in place for the final release candidate.

Let's put an end to this nonsense, shall we.

The Windows netbook has an Atom CPU, 1 GB of Ram and a 160 GB HDD. These specs are good and they going to get better. Much better.
The performance "hit" in managing DRM - the trusted path - whatever you chose to call it - isn't worth worrying about.

But if you want shelf space at WalMart, your product must deliver licensed media play out of the box.

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[xous]

Hi,

1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?

This is simply not possible to realistically do on a linux distribution because there are usually multiple options. I admit a description field below the application would be nice.

2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?

There are quite a few applications that allow you to do this. Use google.

3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal.

Learn how a linux file system works and learn how bash processes commands. The space character is a special character in the linux command line for good reason.

To me your argument is the same thing if you were at the command prompt in Windows command prompt sitting at:

C:\Documents and Settings\UserName>

and typed
> cd Windows.

Expecting it to magically figure out you want C:\Windows.
It should know what I want right? WRONG. It doesn't and for this feature to even work it would have to index the entire file system.

Solution: Learn how file paths really work.

These are all valid
cd /etc/X11

cd /etc/X11/

cd /etc
cd X11

Simple solution for a beginner: Always use absolute paths until you understand relative paths.

Alternative: Use a different shell, there are plenty of options.

4) Create an alias if you find yourself using the command often.

alias editxorg="sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf"

(See Bash Aliases for further details)

5) Tab completion plus using all lower case for file names make this trivial. I find it much faster to find things than navigating my media in explorer.

6) A shortcut on linux isn't exactly the same thing as a shortcut on windows. It probably created a symlink which makes the folder appear to be actually on your desktop to most programs. This is by design.

Create a launcher that runs your file-manager with that particular path if you want to mimic windows shortcuts

7) This is linux and not windows. Bash is much more powerful than the pitiful shell windows provides. Learn to escape spaces, avoid spaces in file names, use tab completion, or enclose spaces in quotes.

8) Traditionally extensions have no meaning in the unix world... this is by design.

9) Not understanding permissions is why you are running into these problems. Probably because you tend to resort to running things with root privileges instead of figuring out why the permissions are incorrect.

It takes a while to understand but once you've got it you'll wonder why you thought it was hard.

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[cowbutt]

I've been using Ubuntu for about a month now. There's a few things that just don't make sense, but most do. Now that I'm thinking about them, I may as well list them.

1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?

File that as a bug with Ubuntu. RH/Fedora are starting to do what you describe, at least for typical desktop user apps, like the file browser, web browser, email, text editor and so on.

2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?

It's not safe to run GUI applications as root. If you insist, and your distro vendor agrees, then they may configure it (using PAM) to use consolehelper (part of the usermode package) to ask for the root password when you run it.

3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal. These fail: cd etc/X11/ cd etc/X11

To be expected, unless your Current Working Directory (CWD) is the root of the filesystem, known as /, or you have a duplication etc/X11 hierarchy under your CWD. The trailing / on the first example is redundant, BTW.

cd /etc/X11/ cd /etc/X11

Both those should be fine. Did you test before posting?

cd etc cd /X11 cd etc cd X11

First pair will try to change to etc in the CWD (and fail), then try to go to X11 in the root (and fail). Second will try to go to etc in the CWD (and fail), then go to X11 in the CWD (and fail).

This doesn't: cd /etc cd X11 Would it hurt to be a little intuitive about where I wanted to go? Apparently so...

It's impossible to be intuitive when they mean entirely different things. Would you expect 'CD D:\SYSTEM32' to Do The Right Thing on Windows when Windows is installed on C: and SYSTEM32 is inside the WINDOWS directory? Same deal. If it helps, think of C:\ being roughly equivalent the root of the filesystem (i.e. /). It kinda breaks down because UNIX doesn't have drive letters, and actually Windows uses the backslash in the same way as UNIX uses the slash; note how you can use 'CD \' to go to the root of the current drive.

4) More #2. It would be much easier to have a way to kick gedit up to root so I can save xorg.conf. That'd save me having to navigate to that folder, which took 10 minutes the first time.

In addition to the earlier explanations, it's really not safe to let just any old user have write access to system config files by default. At best, they might mess them up, at worst, they may make them do bad things (install spyware, delete their home directory) to other users. If you wish, if you're the owner of the file (i.e. root in the case of xorg.conf), you can loosen the permissions on specific files using chmod.

5) Argh. More #3. My Windows partitions often have folders about 8-20 deep. Navigating with the terminal is... horrible. I may have to resize my linux partition and just stick everything on it, because accessing stuff on a shared partition with good organization is such a huge PITA.

You know about tab completion in the shell, right? Hit tab on a partial file or directory name, and it'll complete as best it can. If there are multiple matches, it'll beep. Hit tab again, and it'll show them.

6) Oh dear god. I made a shortcut to a file on an NTFS partition and put it on the desktop. The thing is, when I open it, I can't go "up" to the folder's parent folders - it takes me "up" (back) to the desktop. Great. I guess I'll get into the habbit of opening the terminal, typing "gksudo nautilus" in, then navigating manually to the folder I need on my NTFS partition, so that I can go "up" properly and cop

Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass

[MMInterface]

What makes you think that the people complaining about backwards compatibility are the same people who complained about the Windows security model?

The fact that many people have complained about both in the same post.

Win7 development started just after Vista shipped

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because 3 years ago when Microsoft started the work that went into Windows 7 (remember MinWin?) they were smart enough to anticipate netbooks and so they did the performance work up front that would be necessary to make netbooks work well.

Or maybe, just maybe, they realized that Vista's performance sucked rocks and they decided to fix it and Netbooks were a happy beneficiary.

Bloat

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

I dunno...Microsoft isn't the only faction that's suffered from some serious code bloat. Computers have gotten so much faster at such a rapid pace. Linux + Gnome and OSX have gotten rather porky as well....

I'd be happy to forego all the eye candy if it would speed up the work that I actually care about.

Best,

Re:Bloat

[Kreigaffe]

Does that include a red paint job? Everyone knows the red ones are faster.

Re:Win7 development started just after Vista shipp

[haruchai]

I give credit to the OLPC and the push it gave to the computing world to come up with something lightweight but functional. And that was long before Vista shipped. The Netbooks were a result of the global awareness the OLPC gave to a need for cheap, portable, functional computing.

Why is this bad news?

[FranTaylor]

Nothing is going to get me to stop using Linux, and if all of this competition means that Windows is getting better, well bully. I seriously would not mind if everyone stopped asking me to fix their computer for them.

Re:Why is this bad news?

[Celc]

The others asking you for help problem lies with people not getting better.

... that and you obviously aren't unplesant enough for them to be scared of asking you, work on that it helps.

Maybe, Maybe not.

[Reed Solomon]

While they claim (and reports indicate) Windows 7 will be faster than Vista, I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to shoot themselves in the foot as soon as it's released.

And I don't think its the success of Netbooks that is making Microsoft focus on speed on netbooks. It's the fear of Linux/Android taking over where Windows Vista cannot work that is making them focus on speed for Windows 7. Amusingly enough, if Arm based netbooks take off, Not only is Microsoft screwed, but intel too.

Then again, Via Nano based netbooks are also starting to be rolled out, and they are comparable to the atom chipset. We'll see.

Nobody has made a netbook where when the lid is closed you have an e-ink screen for dual use as an ebook reader. This is totally pissing me off. I'm not the only person in the world who wants this or has thought of this.

Re:There is some bad news too

[Hadlock]

10% of 14 million is still a sizable market share. There are countries all over the world that are smaller than that number that speak their own unique language. The netbook might not be most people's primary machine, but 1.4 million people who are now OK with using linux that would have blindly bought a windows PC before is a giant leap in terms of consumer penetration. 10% penetration is a number Apple's been clawing after for years .

Short answer - no

[Daltorak]

Short answer -- No.

First of all, the obvious: Microsoft started working on Windows 7 late in 2006, even before Vista was released. Netbooks became popular in 2008. 2007 worldwide sales of Netbook-type machines were less than half a million.

Any self-respecting computer programmer knows what's really going on. When you spend months or years working on a major new release, you're often struggling to get the new stuff working at all. Your managers are pushing you to get the thing out the door; deadlines are looming; adding more people to the team would probably be counterproductive since they'd only slow down the people who need to be 100% focused on finishing things up.

Once you get that x.0 release out the door, you take a vacation, reintroduce yourself to your wife and kids, putter around at work for a while, and then dive back in and make your code faster, cleaner, more reliable, more useful. The x.1 release that follows ends up being the one everyone likes; people say "It's what x.0 should have been!" ... Right? That's what happens!

And that's exactly what's happening with Windows 7. This isn't a major "reinvent the wheel" release... it's all about optimization, performance, better user interfaces, and tacking on some new things that have become popular since Vista was released, like proper support for SSD drives, multi-touch, multi-core GPUs, and so on...

Re:End justifies the means

[CAIMLAS]

Microsoft's fascination with taking advantage of new hardware and technologies has led to a consistent decrease in performance over the years, with Vista perhaps being the most obvious and poorly received example.

Oh, please. A "fascination with taking advantage of new hardware and technologies" is not why Windows has sucked on an an epic level. Windows has always been an "also ran" when it comes to adapting "new hardware and technologies". Always.

Hardware support? Even the abysmal Mac OS 9 had more leading-edge hardware support than W9x and W2K on their respective releases. Windows XP and 2k3 can, and have been, a huge pain to install if you've got SATA and/or necessary USB devices on the system. Sure, decent support is available after you're installed - but that's not due to Microsoft.

Emerging technologies? Can you name one software/OS/desktop feature which MS was first-to-market on for Windows? I seem to remember something called Cairo that was making news back in the mid-90s, which had a feature list similar to what we now know as Time Machine - on OS X. MS still hasn't come up with such a functionality. Hell, they don't even have simple search indexing working well in Vista, yet.

No, MS has been behind the curve with implementation - and well ahead of it with outright lies and broken promises ("Vista Ready", anyone?)

Historically, these are the things a new version of Windows has been certain to bring to the table:
* Slower performance
* Bigger memory footprint with little related advantage (see "slower performance").
* The first release/pre-SP will be buggy, unstable, and nearly unusable.
* A lot of stuff that's supposed to work, won't. This includes applications which are supposedly designed for said OS.
* If it's a complete lemon, they'll silently drop actual support and focus their efforts on their next release (See: ME -> 2k, Vista -> W7).

Yes, there are various other improvements to new Windows releases. But, consider: Windows still can not approximately estimate the time it will take to copy a file from one local directory to another. That's hardly a focus on new technologies.

Though, I absolutely agree with you on the whole low-end focus in the IT industry being a good deal for everyone. Now, if only we could get away from the "the browser is the OS" idea, as we're running into all sorts of the same bloat and instability we got with OSes, as browser developers re-implement containers and other OS-level features at a highly abstracted level.

Intense Rant: Don't fucking write it there

[kaiwai]

WARNING: Intense rant built up over years of raging against boy wonder dickhead programmers who think they're top shit.

Here is a great hint for all those boy wonders who write shit applications that spray their shit applications everywhere - fix your damn applications up.

It pisses me off when I see vendors spray DLL's everywhere, from their own directory to the Windows directory to the user directory and everything in between.

1) Keep your fucking application exe and all the bundled DLL's in your application director - leave the fucking Windows directory alone. It is not for YOU to place YOUR shit into. It is for Windows and Windows only.

2) Don't write shit to your application directory; if it is a universal setting then you should ask the user for permission and write it to the global registry. Is it a user related setting then save it to the user profile. No if's, no buts.

3) Don't use undocumented API's and hacks. You aren't cool, you aren't hip, it doesn't make you gods gift to the world because you're using private API calls never intended by Microsoft to be used outside their operating system development teams. Its private for a reason - private meaning it is not for you to fucking use. Hack away at Microsoft's private api's and I'll hack away at your privates.

Do the fucking job properly the first fucking time and stop turning a clean and pristine Windows installation ito a fucking dogs breakfast because you think you're top shit when clearly you're not.

Re:Intense Rant: Don't fucking write it there

[Khyber]

That's all well and nice, but there's one problem with that.

I'm just your average user, not a developer. Intuitively, when something is saved, especially something like a game save, I EXPECT it to be written to the game's fucking application directory.

Your sense of organization clashes with common sense, however I do agree with forbidding the assholes to write to system/system32 and other system-critical directories and spewing DLLs all over the place.

There is no 'we'

[mcrbids]

Wonder why 'we' are never happy here on slashdot? Why no matter what MicroSoft does, they are vilified by 'we'?

Here's a hint: take your user Id, and subtract 1. That's about how many DIFFERENT people registered here before yoi did. Each with their own ideas about priority and values, and what to lambaste MS for.

I lambaste them for lame things like email not working right with IMAP4 servers in WinMobile 5, 6, 6.1, and 6.5. That's 3 YEARS that some as simple as deleting an email hasn't worked right in a device primarily bought to (ahem) read email.