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First Look At Windows 7 On an Entry-Level Netbook
davidmwilliams sends in his IT Wire review of how Windows 7RC1 performs on an Acer Aspire One netbook. Summing up: it runs, it won't win any speed competitions, you won't want to play Crysis on it, and it's pretty OK for light-duty, everyday tasks. In related news, several readers have noted that Windows 7 RC1 is now available; one anonymous reader notes "This time, Microsoft was smart not to limit the time that it's available or the number of keys. It will be up for download until July, so there's lots of time to grab a copy."
as many others type this in at the same time - but it sounds like it pretty much runs like all other netbooks - regardless of the OS.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Would you really call those specs "entry level", as in "the lowest specs available"?
So its Shareware then. Nothing wrong with that and why shouldn't they get paid if you like it enough to keep using it?
Hold on, WTH:
- It takes 450-odd Mb of RAM to just sit at a clean, freshly installed desktop. I'm still running networks of machines that run on XP with 512Mb and suffer no appreciable performance loss (admittedly well-managed in terms of applications, but we run Office too).
- When you install Office 2007, it swaps like mad with 1Gb of RAM.
- It takes 7Gb of drive space to install.
That is *not* a comfortable operating system for a netbook, it really isn't. My XP laptop is about as powerful as that netbook (although mine is dual-core and has a much nicer graphics card) and yet it'll take all of the above amounts of RAM, for a basic Office install - but I have a ton of other crap installed and running (my current Opera session is taking 70Mb of RAM, for instance). So what you have is *not* a netbook but a run-of-the-mill laptop. However, if I was to try to run this on, say, an Asus EEEPC it's likely to fall flat on its face before you even start (4Gb flash, oops, bang). Where XP would be quite happy, I'd like to add (or at worst, a nLite CD would work). And that's before you even START actually using the damn thing to get work done.
Just off the top of my head, booting a Slackware CD, pressing "yes" to everything, etc. will get you into a full X-Windows environment with several window managers, thousands of apps, all in under 5Gb storage (most of that being silly stuff like gcc, KDE I18n, and TeX) and able to run in a few hundred Meg RAM. With OpenOffice, yeah you might get a bit of swapping went you first load but the point of netbooks etc. is the nice suspend options, and it sounds like it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad.
I know this is all based on a "blog-o-expert", but hell... it's obviously not suited to the task. Just like XP isn't really suited to the task. But it sounds like it does an even worse job. Yeah, with some tweaking you can probably get rid of a lot of crap but you're never going to be able to pare it down as far as XP, or any version of Linux.
So in the age of netbooks, where people are getting them thrown at them with their mobile phone contracts, MS's idea is to release (and thus force upon people) a new OS that doesn't really handle them at all unless you voluntarily soup them up and kill their performance/battery life. Good plan. I was seriously half expecting a special "7 mobile" edition at some point that would merge the CE and NT-based product lines for netbooks, seeing how that's the buzzword at the moment. In the absense of that, another growing OS is hardly a surprise. I'm actually pleasantly surprised that it wasn't a LOT worse than this. Vista upgrades were a really, really big deal and killed many an upgrade plan stone dead. This isn't in those realms, but it's hardly good news.
Some of us don't care? :)
Seriously, if I pay Apple for a copy of Leopard, I'll damn well use it wherever I please - with the full understanding that it is unsupported.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How many times per hour do you need to convert currency, or check what today's date is? If that's your business, then you're using the wrong tool. If it's NOT your business, then the widgets are just masturbation.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Nonsense. Nothing can force you to buy it; you could always go back to your previous OS. This is like saying at the end of a test drive, you're "forced" to buy the car. Only if you want to keep using the new car!
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
What are the minimum memory requirements, and how much of that will be eaten by the OS itself?
Both Vista and 7 strive to consume as much memory as possible to precache commonly loaded executables. This cuts down on execution time and helps minimize disk access to a small extent. It's a smart use of resources, and it flushes RAM as required for games and such. Why buy RAM just to keep it unallocated, right?
That's a really bad example. With Windows Vista and Windows 7 I *DO* have my desktop in 15 seconds. I've never had that with any previous version of Windows. Much of the "pre-loading" is actually done post boot. MS have even moved many services that don't need to be ready straight away (eg Defender) to the new "Delayed Start" setting (see services.msc) so they load after your desktop is already ready.
Vista and Windows 7 use a lot of RAM for caching so that your computer is faster. It's not using more RAM just to annoy you. After all, you PAID for that RAM, so why not actually use it to speed up your system? If an application needs lots of RAM and you're running short on physical RAM, it will free up that RAM and make it available for use by other applications automatically so you haven't lost anything.
If you're that bothered - just stick with Windows 98 which doesn't do any of this stuff.
Lets see...
* Spend $50-60 on a 2 gig ram chip.
* Spend $200+ on Windows 7 (Netbook Version)
* Spend $40-60 on antivirus.
* Spend $200 on Office
* Limited to three applications.
After buying a Netbook PC.
OR
* Spend $50-60 on a 2 gig ram chip.
* Download and install Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04.
* Stick with Open Office and still handle most Office documents.
* Unlimited applications.
After buying a Netbook PC.
Hmmm... tough choice there.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
There's a couple of things ... first there is a perception issue at hand. I've only dabbled with Vista on my parents computer, so I'm not sure how it reports ram usage. I would hope that it reports cached program data as free memory and once you activate the cached program, that memory is then displayed as used. People freak out when they see their system resources maxed out. It means they need to shut down program x so they can run program y, otherwise the computer starts thrashing trying to keep up with the user and that is a terrible experience. I would think that most users would rather waste ram than go through that hell whereby everything becomes unresponsive. Pre-caching sounds like a great feature to utilize your system's resources and if it really drops the cached program data without any notice to the end user, then I'm all for it. The critical thing is that the user needs to be educated which it sounds like Microsoft failed to do.
The other thing which would bother me is to see my hard drive cranking through bits when I haven't asked it to do anything. When I see that happening on my machine, I immediately open my activity monitor to check on all my processes. Again, this can be alleviated with user notifications and education, but it sounds like Microsoft failed to do that.
I think the meat of the issue is that people want to be in control of their machines. Even at the expense of wasted resources. If Microsoft can educate as well as provide a great service, then there is no issue. Alas, it appears that they failed in that regard.
I *DO* have my desktop in 15 seconds. I've never had that with any previous version of Windows. Much of the "pre-loading" is actually done post boot.
Right, which I find annoying. As soon as I have my desktop up I want to open my usual host of applications, and I'm stuck waiting forever for them because the system is thrashing about trying to load a bunch of other crap Windows thinks I might possibly want to load at some unspecified point in the future.
Besides, I have no idea what criteria Windows uses to determine what my "likely" programs are, but if it's even remotely like the criteria it uses to display "Often Used" and "Rarely Used" in the Add/Remove Programs applet, I have zero faith in it whatsoever.
I agree with the parent poster. Windows should focus on being stable, not trying to predict what I might want to do, because it's never been good at that and the performance benefits are dubious at best and counterproductive at worst.
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