Slashdot Mirror
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."
Post frist
Let's see how long until I can force it to crash, and then I can complain about it!
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Sounds like Win7 comes in a nice, tidy 3rd place to Ubuntu Netbook Remix or OSX. Given that you're not going to be whipping up a visio diagram or some other MS-locked-in application, why go MS on a Netbook ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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?
"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."
But it STILL expires after a certain date, forcing you to buy it, or switch to another OS. Ticking time bomb.
Would you really call those specs "entry level", as in "the lowest specs available"?
Why don't they just make an operating system that is nothing more than a browser? No command line, traditional kernel, file system just a browser written in assembly and a SQLite database that stores all the browser settings and maybe a few small files like your credit card details on a small SSD.
If they do this, then maybe just maybe your "netbook" will be able to load the bloated sites of the interweb in 2 years time
Dos this version have the 3-app limit? What are the minimum memory requirements, and how much of that will be eaten by the OS itself?
I remember previous versions minimum requirements being enough to open paintbrush and wordpad...
Besides, those netbooks are not exactly known for their huge amounts of memory not for their easy upgrades...
hehehehehehe
"However, at all times it was a stable experience, just increasingly slower as I attempted to do more simultaneously."
Phhhhwwwwbbbbbbttttt...............
i thought it was funny
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
This is the 7100 build so for all us leechers: nothing for you to see here, please move along.
The one thing I really like about Vista is the sidebar, I find it pretty useful having currency converter, calendar and such immediately to hand. In Windows 7 they seem to have done away with it and made the gadgets stand alone such that they either obscure windows if set to always on top, or they hide behind them otherwise making them either annoying or useless depending on which setting you have.
As the performance tweaks in Windows 7 don't matter to me because my machine is powerful enough that I've not had performance issues in Vista nor noticed a difference with Windows 7 beta anyway and as I don't find the new taskbar worthwhile is there anything in Windows 7 that makes it worthwhile?
I can see Windows 7 being good for those who held on to XP, but for those of us who did switch to Vista and have had no problems with it (so all 3 of us then :p), and particularly those of us who liked the sidebar it seems a step backwards. I can't see the gadgets being worthwhile to anyone in their current incarnation - has anyone found them useful when they're only ever out the way or in the way?
While nearly half the RAM being consumed without actually doing anything useful may be concerning itâ(TM)s not actually a big deal. Microsoft claim that Windows 7 (and Vista too, but its success is arguable) pre-loads parts of programs it expects you to use
Really? That is the line they are selling? I don't buy it. Why can't the OS just focus on being a solid, stable, efficient platform for running applications and let me worry about which application I want to run. You would think that pre-loading anything takes additional time at boot up and I would rather have my desktop up in 15 seconds then have to wait for all this other stuff that Windows thinks I may want to do.
sigh
But can I still use the dll overrides in wine?
I just tried installing the rc with virtualbox on ubuntu 8.04 and right away I get the dreaded blue screen! You win again world.
On the second try, the install is going smoothly.
hardware lock in like that is illegal in some areas even in the us the DMCA says that you can hack your iphone to put it on a other network.
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.
Could everyone please sign up to the Save Vista campaign. Like Hummer like Chrysler, like Edsel, Vista shows the might of full-sized American industrial production. Itâ(TM)s a monument to everything that makes us great. We can't let it be trashed for misguided corporate attempts to suck up to latte sippers.
Say No To Seven! VISTA VISTA VISTA! All the way!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I don't know if 1GB of RAM should be too little for an OS and MS Word.
I'm on ubuntu, using 871 MB of RAM atm, with firefox using a whopping 16% of my total 2 GB (= 327 MB).
My systems runs ok, but I guess it'll get a lost faster if I kill fi
Now that I've switched away from windows after getting stuck with Vista, it's so annoying that the next release by all accounts is actually going to be passably good (though is that astroturfing?).
It's annoying because Windows is like a wife-beating husband. You live with it for years and years of pain, disappointment and broken promises, but just when you think you're ready to leave forever they turn around all smiles and sweetness.
I'm tired of MS's patent crap. I'm tired of the DRM. I'm tired of the FUD. I'm tired of mediocre product after mediocre product. I'm tired of their high prices. I'm tired of them stacking the ISO. I'm tired of embrace extend extinguish. I'm tired of fixing other people's computers from malware. I'm tired of the overwhelming OS storage footprints, and everything else they do to ruin computing for everyone. I'm tired of the whole company and I wish everyone would dump them forever.
But just as people begin to consider it, they give you a bouquet of flowers.
Will this ever end?
haPpen. 'At le3ast
Dell won't sell me the Mini 9 without a Windows license
In what country? In the United States, three out of four pictured Dell Inspiron Mini 9 configurations have a "Customize with Ubuntu" button.
Excellent! The top speed of Windows 7 is 7.9 rather than 5.9. That a 34% increase.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All the positive media hype notwithstanding.... 7 will receive the same response from the user community as did Vista. Bloatware... just not suitable for Netbooks.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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! ~~
take my gadgets off the side bar and let them "float" in vista as is. Than Again I have a dual monitor setup so I got plenty of real estate for such things. I found the side bar to be obtrusive and when i wanted to click on a folder or something the sidebar would be in my way.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It's supposed to kick you off every two hours starting then, and then it will hard-expire in June.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You must not use OS X much, if at all. To install a common app you drop it anywhere on your hard drive. That's it.
To remove it, you delete the app. That's it.
Granted there are some apps that have an actual installer but they are few and far between.
Boot up time is not bad, but it's not five seconds. My Eee 900A does 10s from grub to desktop, and we ain't playin with no 'start services after the desktop is visible' crap.
The article says "....if your netbook uses a solid state hard disk then space may be more of a premium." It does. Most any linux distro will fit in under 4GB, with all the bells and whistles preinstalled: office suite, image editing, games, you name it. SSD drives are a must for laptops, certainly for me: I carried around a 2.5" HDD with my netbook for a week before it died of unrecoverable disk errors. By taking up so much storage (and CPU and memory), Win 7 is cutting itself out of the netbook market.
In a couple years Moore's Law will perhaps take care of that problem, but for the moment linux has a clear edge on netbooks. That edge will almost certainly continue to hold: Microsoft will probably never be able to match linux for size and power. This year, the battleground will be netbooks, next year it will be smartphones. With these kind of performance numbers, Microsoft is better off keeping XP alive.
As for me, I would like to see a good OS come out of Redmond, for once. If and when I get a desktop machine again, I'll probably keep a windows partition (or at least a VM) around for games, but Win7 is off the table until then.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I tried one of the Windows betas, but I gave up because it was buggy. I installed the new Ubuntu RC, and it was an absolute dream. It felt light years ahead of any Windows I had ever used.
As for your comment about Windows replacing Linux when the software support is there, I think it's going to take more than that. Ubuntu's slick UI and unparalleled driver support save the user time worth more than the entry price over it's lifespan. Oh wait. It's free. Double win.
Want a terminal emulator (for programming routers)? Want an SSH client? Want a network sniffer? Want an http server? Smtp? Want any of 10,000 software packages? It's a couple clicks away with Synaptic. Don't tell me that Windows beats Linux for software installation. That's pathetically riduculous to anyone who's actually USED Linux for anything. Just because you can't get -- specifically -- Photoshop or Office or... well, that's pretty much it -- for Linux doesn't mean that software support isn't "there." There are plenty of applications to get the job done, do it the way YOU want to, and not the one single way that someone else supposes you should.
Plus, you can get a lot more support for free because people can look inside the code, actually figure out what the heck is going on, and explain it. If that's not enough, I'm betting you can get support for Ubuntu from Canonical for less cost than you can get support for Windows from Microsoft. And better support. I've called Microsoft support. Three out of four times, their "advice" was "reinstall."
Look. Enough. I'm tired of these old chestnuts from people who install Linux once or twice, can't figure out how to do anything, and then claim that Windows is the only credible OS on the market. Please. I don't have a problem with Microsoft fanboys. I have a problem with ANYONE who raves about ANYTHING without really knowing anything about the alternatives.
(Disclaimer(s): I'm a Gentoo fanboy, but I have Ubuntu NBR on an Asus Eee. For some reason, Firefox is buggier than the Everglades in August, but otherwise, it's fantastic, and there are several other credible browsers available. Yes, I use Windows, but only on my main machine, and only for gaming.)
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
If you're that bothered - just stick with Windows 98 which doesn't do any of this stuff.
Gladly! Now please explain to me where I can get drivers for my ASUS EeePC 901 that will drive the video card, sound card, webcam, ethernet, bluetooth, and wifi... I'm more than able to make Win9x my bitch and get it to sit up, roll over, play dead, and beg but without fully working drivers Win9x simply isn't an option any more.
This is pretty sad too, because I've managed to run Win9x without the infamous bluescreens and other issues thanks to the patches and upgrades put out by the Win9x community at MSFN... Tihiy's shell upgrades and Xeno's kernel upgrades really make the platform look and behave much nicer than you'd believe! If you know anything at all about the history of the Win3x and Win9x systems and how they were constantly extended each time they were thought to have hit a brick wall you'd understand how tragic this really is.
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
I don't understand why the word illegal keeps coming up. I didn't say it was illegal, I just wouldn't characterize as running software on unsupported hardware as "win".
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?
I installed the 64-bit version Saturday night (MSDN download), and so far it is much better than Vista. As a developer who beats the hell out of his machines, I've had major performance problems with Vista no matter how much memory I give it. Vista chokes badly when I try to debug apps in Visual Studio on a 4GB machine with nothing else running where XP handles it fine with 2GB of memory and a bunch of other apps running at the same time (even with other virtual machines running).
I installed 64-bit Windows 7 on my home machine (dual-boot with 32-bit XP, just in case). It's a dual-core Athlon with 2GB of memory and a GeForce 8600, and while I haven't had time to beat it up badly yet, so far it seems as smooth as when I run XP on the same machine. Unlike Vista, it does not chew on my hard drive all the time and choke when one of my apps needs it. I just installed Visual Studio last night (which takes like 4 hours including the Service Pack install), so I haven't had time to play with Visual Studio on it yet, but it ran Crysis, Oblivion, and my own graphics demos (http://sponeil.net/) well enough that I'm hopeful about developing on it.
NOTE: I haven't disabled any of the default services 7 starts with. I wanted to see how it ran in its default configuration first. I'll try tweaking it for better performance after I've gotten comfortable with it. Also, for everyone saying it has problems with 1GB or less of RAM, what did you expect? I expected it to choke with 2GB, but so far I have been pleasantly surprised. If I buy Windows 7 when it comes out, I'll probably upgrade to 4GB to make sure I have some breathing room. I don't really like being forced to buy more for the OS, but sometimes you have to move on. (I'll probably keep XP on my old laptop because that's not worth upgrading.)
If you have 2GB of RAM or more and can easily set your system up to run dual-boot (i.e. have a spare hard drive, or can resize your primary partition to make room for a new one), I would recommend giving it a try. I would not recommend replacing or upgrading your only OS with it at the moment.
According to the message boards build 7077 is actually faster. Apparently build 7100 is the RC branch and 7077 was a different branch for the RTM.
teque5.com
I'm much more exciting about the upcoming ARM devices that start under $300 and are gunning for the under $200 pricepoint. That combination of price, size, toughness, and unbeholdeness to the Win32 ecosystem
Which would likely be quickly replaced with beholdenness to the WinCE ecosystem.
You could just have linked to the appropriate Microsoft marketing page instead of copying and pasting this text.
Funny, but I have an eeePC with the original Xandros and I had to Google it to find how to get a command line. You can do anything at all within the limits of the hardware without a command line.
For example, I recently switched got a new broadband connection at home and the difference in effort to configure the eeePC compared to my older Compaq nx9005 with XP was amazing. In Linux all it took was a couple of mouse clicks in clearly marked buttons, a very intuitive process. "Internet" -> "Network" -> "Create..." -> "Local Area Network" -> "Static IP Address" and then enter the address, subnet mask, and gateway they gave me.
In XP I had to click "Start" -> "Control Panel" -> "Network Configuration" to start he wizard. Now the freaky part begins. One has to click on several pages that show only some warning text. You need to click on a box to make it disregard disconnected network hardware (WHY? I'm not changing the hardware, just the network address). Enter the computer hardware description and name (WHY? I'm not changing that, just the network address). Type a workgroup name. Tell it if I want to change disk and printer sharing (NO! I just want to change the network address!!!). Another nag screen asking me if I want to create a configuration disk (NO!!!). Then it tells me I need to reboot the computer (WHY? I just want to change the network address...)
All in all, configuring Linux is simpler, easier, more intuitive, and quicker than XP.
But, of course, having the command line available is handy when you have one of those "unsolvable" problems and you know what you are doing. For instance, we had an old monitor at work that was left over from a discarded VAXstation. It was a nice monitor, still in very good condition, but it didn't work with any PC because it had non-standard sync timing. With Linux it was just a matter of editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and create the appropriate Modeline parameters.
All in all, when you kick the Microsoft habit and learn to disregard those marketing blurbs you posted, Linux is both easier to use and more powerful.
Win7 for netbooks is Microsoft's solution for netbooks as they no longer sell XP and Vista is wholly unsuitable. Really I see this as just a failure in strategy as MS was asleep at the wheel. While MS was trying to fight multiple fronts with Linux, Google, Apple, Redhat, Sun, Oracle, IBM, and Sony, they allowed their OS to slip. By all accounts, Vista was late and an image disaster for MS. All the while they didn't seem to notice the trend of buying cheaper computers with slightly less computing power but more portability. Only late to spot this trend, they didn't have a suitable OS except XP which was being discontinued. So going forward they only have Win7 Starter. That OS seems mediocre at best. Even if MS can get a decent OS onto a netbook, the one thing that can't overcome is the economics of the netbook. Netbook manufacturers are not going to buy OEM licenses for $50 a copy when they sell their product for around $300.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This article and related comments make me think that netbooks will be a problem for Windows in ways that were not fully anticipated. There are two premises to this:
1) Where is the MinWin concept in all of this? It sounds like the concept of a small snappy kernel is only relative to where Windows was with Vista. If it just barely runs on an Atom based system, with no capacitance or wiggle room for big apps and data, then how could this ever be ported to ARM and various mobile devices like phones / PDAs etc?
2) Netbooks are about to become the new laptops. The current laptop form factor has been around about 15 years, successful only after technology worked its way through various large incarnations of "portable PCs" and performance became commensurate with desktops. Now, we are entering another era of miniaturization, and Netbooks at about half the size of laptops seem to be a nice balance between smaller size but usable screen and keyboard. And don't forget that iPhones and the like are a winning form factor as well.
The problem is that people are not going to settle for netbooks being just a glorified PDA or internet kiosk. They will see a familiar user interface, it will run most of their apps (even if slow and kludgy), and it will look and feel mostly like their desktops and laptops. So, expectations and demands will rise. The industry will respond by making chips, boards, screen technologies, etc. more capable, and within 5 to 10 years, smaller form factor netbooks will rival the performance of today's laptops and even today's desktops, just as 15 years ago "laptops" supplanted "portable PCs". The current form factor of laptops will not disappear - laptops are successful for a reason, and large screens and keyboards will remain of crucial importance for many users - but people will come to expect the smaller form netbook, handy and easy to carry, to nonetheless perform as a desktop and run all their apps while on the go.
Hardware makers will make these goals possible. In the meantime, people are starting to become familiar with other OSes as the cellphone-PDA-mediaplayer class of devices becomes more pervasive. As such, what people really want is easy, smooth, intuitive, bug-free transparent performance, and not necessarily a single given proprietary look and feel. This article and thread makes me wonder if MS and Windows are going to end up being perpetually a step behind, planning products based on today's marketplace and technologies, but delivering the product several years later when technology and people's expectations have moved forward.
What is all the fuss about Windows 7? What new features does it really have? It seems to me like they just cleaned up Vista and turned off most of the memory hogging things by default. The problem was that they made a tough change to their driver model in Vista and that cause problems while manufacturers learned the new model. Now it seems like the driver model is stable so they launch Windows 7. It the same drivers now and the same program compatibility. They just want $200 to "upgrade" to it.
How much of that is system cache and buffers though?
None of it. Otherwise the figure would be 100% memory utilization.
I don't know how that runs that slow. I run RC1 on my old laptop with a 1.7 GHz Pentium mobility, 512 mb of slow ram, a radeon 7500 mobility, and a 20gb hdd that is slowly dying. I use office 2003 on it for all my schoolwork, and I get it to desktop with word open in about a minute after I put in the hdd lock password. I even get 3 1/2 - 4 hours of battery on it, when with xp pro I was lucky to pull off 2 1/2.
Is this opposed to the Turbo Netbooks with 30 inch monitor and water-cooled processor?
Translation: I tried Windows 7 on the least powerful machine it could theoretically run on.
That's kind of like saying "I can carry 100 pounds so I don't mind if my phone weighs 25 pounds."
I don't consider a netbook with 1GB of RAM and a HD to be entry level. The entry level machines have 512MB of RAM and as little as 4GB of SSD for storage. The Aspire one used is perhaps at the bottom of the high end not having a 10" screen but is definitely not entry level.
If I am reading this correctly, this was a full install of the RC. No optimization for the netbook beyond what the OS can do for itself.
The dual-core Atom netbook with 2 GB of RAM or more and much better graphics performance can't be that far off.
The geek looks at the sub-netbook and sees a market where Microsoft [and x86] can't compete.
But he has been wrong before.
The sub-netbook at $150 is a gadget, like the pocket HD camcorder.
In a deep recession, that's a purchase which can be postponed -
and by the time shoppers return to the market, the tech will have evolved and expectations will have changed.
They wouldn't try to make me sign up for a "Windows Live ID"®.
Which'll happen when pigs fly.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
How about a correct comparison?
Spend $25 on a 2GB dim.
Spend
Spend $0 on anti-virus and use a free one (AVG free works great on my Windows 7 RC install). I see see you are not bothering to get an anti-virus for your Linux example - is that a bit risky?
Stick to open office for windows - if it is good enough for your Linux example why is it not good enough for your Windows example?
I have a Samsung Q1U UMPC with 800MHz A110 CPU and 2GB of ram. Windows 7 RC *ultimate ed* is running very well on it thank you...
I do have an acer aspire one.. came with linpus, 8gb flash and 512mb of ram... day one I had ram lying around and stuck in an extra 1gb. So, fair's fair I have 1.5gb of ram. The reason I bought the aa1 by the way is that it was impossible to get anything else (still is pretty much except for the 7' eeepc's). I almost got a 900 eeepc when it was available, but the 901 came out so quick I thought I'd hang back. To this day, finding a 901 (or any of asus' newer models) is near impossible with linux (or anything other then acer actually - MSI, Dell, HP, none of them come with a linux distro down here in Australia).
After replacing linpus (i quite liked this OS by the way) with ubuntu 8.04 (or 8.10, i cant remember) just to try UNR I was quite impressed. I also tried windows xp, vista and MAC OS X on it. None of these were trivial to install at the time - which is not MS or apples fault in any way (mac os was slightly easier cause I could install it happily to an external HD). Vista was a nightmare, XP was OK but the speed of the acer aspire one's flash in the 8gb model is not fantastic (as people have noted in the past).
I recently changed to 9.04 ubuntu and WOW what a difference - they have a distro specifically for the netbooks now and it is much faster (in my experience) then 8 was and definitely faster then XP.
I've not tried windows 7 on it and im probably not going to, i've tried 7 on a few other machines with limited success. Its better than vista, worse then XP in some ways that just cant be quantified in a slashdot post (thats my general feeling).
Surfice it to say, win 7 on a machine where it works well is quite nice. But on a netbook I just dont really see the point when you compare it to ubuntu 9 (im a fedora guy by the way). With evolution or thunderbird and Open office 3 theres very little else that I need (on a netbook) that it cant provide and the UNR interface is quite well designed for it. Keep in mind the breadth of software IN the ubuntu repo's is quite substantial so if your looking for a game to play or an application targetting some facet of your life your likely to find it there somewhere, so from a "what software can I get for it" its pretty useful to the netbook and you dont have to go hunting that hard for software (it was even quite easy to get the citrix ica client working which my gf uses to connect to work - much to my supprise).
Hey, thats my humble opinion - and given the little article the other day about 2007's ODF support I feel much happier using open office!. By the way did anyone else find it strange that as soon as open office started to support OOXML (ooxml that works with office 2007 - not the ISO OOXML by the way) that MS do an about-face on ODF and produce a broken version?
The best thing about ubuntu 9 on the netbook though is that given the target hardware its quite impressive from a perspective of people who dont know what a command line is. It supported my gf's 3g usb dongle out of the box rather then needing drivers (which crashed her vista laptop). But in reality I never really hated vista that much - the 3g driver thing was the hardware manufactures fault. I DO very much hate microsoft for many very relevant reasons - not worth discussing here.
Seriously though, if you've not tried ubuntu 9 on a netbook, its very very worth a look into - for the tasks you could expect a netbook to perform.
Since I am in the process of leaving my company for becoming a freelancer I recently had the necessity to buy a replacement for the laptop which my company had given me.
The machine had to be capable of doing the usual office stuff, software- and db-development with java, and some music production (entry level).
The laptop I had from my company was an asus M50VM. Wrt to performance this machine is really top notch. 2.53 GHz, 4GB ram, 1GB graphics card. Barely ever had to utilize this machine even 10 %.
My main concern was the weight of this monster. It weighs around 3.2 KG ('bout 6 pounds, for the illiterate ones of you...).
In addition the charger weighs about 500 grams. So altogether, in my backpack, I caried a whopping 3.7 KG while commuting on bike to my workplace. And one single battery charge was barely enough for letting this monster work for 2 hours.
So I thought long about buying a netbook. Knowing that the reviews all read that they are dog slow, barely capable of running their operating systems, just powerful enough for surfing, emails and that stuff. But in the end I gave it a try.
The machine I've bought is an asus eeepc 1000HE (Atom n280). I've upgraded the ram to 2 GB, plugged in an other hd (500Gb Seagate momentum). And: I am deeply surprised that _all_ of my computational needs are (almost) perfectly satisfied.
I've installed debian linux with gnome, java, apache, tomcat and all the stuff I need for software development. And all of this runs reasonable fast.
Then I tried to start the virtualbox with the windows xp instance I had copied from the other machine.
And to my utter surprise even this works reasonbly fast.
So I can do all the office-2007-stuff I have to do for my still-current-employer from within this virtualboxed XP, without the need for dualbooting.
And all of that for a mere 378 EUR plus upgrade costs. The machine weighs about 1.3 KG including charger. And on a single battery charge it runs for roundabout 5.5 hours.
Only problem I currently have is the rtc. Don't know why, but jack (audio), ardour and rosegarden always complain that the rtc is missing. But with rtc turned off inside jack even the music production stuff works.
Alltogether, this is a great machine and I am deeply amazed of what this netbook is capable of.
Don't want to switch back anytime soon...
Yt,
Gunnar
From the F'n summary: "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."
/., but sheesh!
Funny, I never realized unlimited time ends in July. Why the hell is there an inane quote from an anonymous reader in the summary? Why not just say, "MS is making the beta available until July, much longer than earlier releases." I realize this is
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
What won't it open?
Since OO.o 3.x came out, I have not found a single file it would not open. In fact I used it to fix a broken excel spreadsheet the Office would not read at all.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Most Windoze installs are ok after a clean install. Give it a few months and THEN see how it performs. The achilles heal of Microsoft has always been that the OS degrades (quickly) over time.
IMPORTANT: The RC will expire on June 1, 2010. Starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours.
Well duh - the same thing can be said about the same netbook running XP or Linux. Where's the Windows 7 RC1 review?
The prefetcher works by watching what code and data is accessed during the boot process
How many applications have data that are accessed during the boot process?
I have Win7 build 7100 running on a Compaq Presario 2800. This is a laptop with a 1.4 Ghz P4M, and 384 MB of RAM. It takes a little while to boot, but once it's up and running it's usable. All I'm doing with it is random web browsing and serving up audio to a HT, and it works for that. If I can find some more RAM for it I'll try serving up video, but for now streaming audio works well enough.