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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."
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
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?
I'm pretty sure Dell Mini 9 + OSX = breaking the license. Or has apple suddenly made an about face in this regard?
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"?
The license agreement may not even be legal.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Oh, come on. It doesn't take two years to load a web site.
Just breaking the license doesn't make it illegal. We've all seen unenforceable clauses in licenses and until Apple's license is tested in court, we won't know if the "Apple-branded" hardware bit is legitimate or not.
Of course, if you pirate a copy, instead of buying one that is illegal.
But if you buy a copy of OSX and install it on a non-Apple-branded computer, somehow I doubt that Apple will make too much of a fuss.
hehehehehehe
"However, at all times it was a stable experience, just increasingly slower as I attempted to do more simultaneously."
The RC is Ultimate so it does not have the 3 app limit. Although there's a hack that can be done to allow one to install the different Win7 versions. I'm still using XP on my netbook, I'm a little skeptical with running Win7 on it.
a browser written in assembly and a SQLite database
FAIL
Let's see your browser written in Assembly with Java and Flash 10 support.
What you want is called Damn Small Linux. With a little hacking and whacking you could do the sqlite thing but it just stuffs things into flat files IIRC. There are others as well but I've found it to have a good balance between size and functionality. It has a lot more than the browser, but once you have the kernel, X, the browser, and the JRE you might as well have some other stuff.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So its Shareware then. Nothing wrong with that and why shouldn't they get paid if you like it enough to keep using it?
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?
Limited support? Lack of drivers?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Maybe it was, heaven forbid, some Windows fanboy defending the latest incarnation from MS.
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.
Really? Try running OS X on a non-intel or with something other than a broadcom wireless card. it will shit all over itself.
To run os x on the aspire one, you have to swap the wireless card, the touchpad drivers are a pain and sleep doesn't always work.
probably the only time we will ever see a crack at M$ modded troll (and now flamebait) Fan bois, your thread is here http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/04/2039219&art_pos=9
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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
It's not a production software and it's not freeware.
It's an unfinished piece of code that's released by MS to enthusiasts who want to try it out and participate in ironing out problems and bugs that remain in it. We all know that they won't completely succeed, but still...
In any case MS is very upfront with how long the RC will function and what will happen when the TESTING period expires.
People who have any other expectations from this code are probably not paying too much attention.
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?
I tried one of the win7 betas but gave up quickly because I could find no working network driver for my onboard NIC. I installed the new RC on Thursday and the OS is an absolute dream. It feels light years ahead of everything I've ever used, and the streamlined interface has forced me to re-evaluate my insistence on turning off new features to make it work more like win95. You should give it another shake - my compatibility issues have been very minimal.
As for your comment about Linux replacing Windows when the application support is there, I think it's going to take more than that. Windows' sleek UI and excellent vendor driver support save the user time worth more than the entry price over its lifespan, plus Microsoft offers tech support for its products. With Linux it's inevitable that an end user will be forced to do something at the commandline, and realistically that's a huge time sink or maybe a deal breaker for the average user. This is just my opinion but Linux just feels like it is eternally playing catch-up, and by the time they're 60% of the way there Windows will have jumped forward to an entirely new era. Linux gets better every single month but it's never been on par in terms of the holistic computing experience - drivers, software, productivity, and even freeware are all in better shape on Windows, so that's why I've stuck with it despite trying many new Linux distros from time to time.
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.
OS X doesn't even support Apple's own floppy drives.
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.
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?
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.
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! ~~
take a look at the crunchpad. It hasn't been released yetbut it will be a tablet and a modified Linux that boots into a browser only. No shells just a browser.
Personally I can't wait. No bqckground apps means decent betterylife.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I would not agree to that. Having been on Ubuntu as my primary desktop for 9 months now, I can say that there are no reasons for loosing any time. Maybe you should remove those critic's goggles and approach Linux with a more open mind. Because your commentary stinks of prejudice.
The only item that keeps me coming back to windows are some of the applications.
In any case most of things are done via the browser nowadays, so I don't really care about the OS much.
As for drivers?I have 2 proprietary drivers on my laptop: nVidia and Broadcom. Both were installed like a charm via one click. I mean it takes longer on Windows to update those things.
That is absolutely not true. I use as much of command line now in Linux as I do on Windows. I have people using my computer that are as computer illiterate as they get.
Oh phulease... Most support is done via the OEM channels, MS's consumer support is basically crap.
Now MSDN Premium was named Premium for a reason.
I will give you other items such as:
- broader support for drivers (more useful and useless options)
- more software(freeware or otherwise)*
- a more unified look and feel
On a sidenote, if you like holistic experience you probably will LOVE Apple products. They don't get much holistic as Apple Mac's.
* - though I have not had issues with not finding software that I or my, computer illiterate, family members needed.
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 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!
The average user has so many problems on Windows that there are an entire industries dedicated to fixing their problems.
The Windows UI is crap. The everything and the kitchen sink program listing is awful. Most of the admin utilities are hideous and about as unintuitive as they come.
If Windows was even marginally as "easy to use" as is claimed, then my name would not be in the mental rolodex of everyone I know where I am listed under "can fix my computer".
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?
So every company and organization copies from each other, it's not just linux doing it.
You're absolutely right. But (and I could be wrong), I don't think that's what the GP was referring to. The reason I say this, is I feel the same way.
I have tried a number of Linux distributions, and I have even really liked some of them (Gentoo was my favorite - used it for well over a year), but I always keep coming back to Windows. Why? I can't really describe it. I know Linux is powerful. I know Linux allows complete customization. And, the Linux community has been pretty awesome (again, Gentoo was the best IMO). But, Windows just "feels" better. It really feels like a seamless system. And, quite honestly, that's the best I can do to describe it. It's more of a feeling than anything.
Either way, both systems have their place, and I'm glad there are both options, but Linux has to find that missing piece before it ever has a chance of making a solid dent in the desktop market.
Sorry but have you tried Windows 7 yet? There is much more going for it than translucency. The UI actually helps me do tasks more quickly. "Sleek" doesn't only refer to cosmetic aspects - it also describes the ease with which you can perform tasks by removing intermediate steps.
When you copy files the taskbar thumbnail shows a progress bar. You can search from the Start button for any program, email, or document, and all without touching the mouse. When you're managing files you can drag 2 windows to either side of the screen to stack them horizontally, keeping each window fully in view, and when you're done you can move them away from the edge and they return to their previous size. You can pin document shortcuts to program icons so that you can right-click the program to directly jump to that document with that app, instead of having to open the app and browse to the desired document. You can repurpose the "shut down" button on the Start Menu to restart, hibernate, sleep, or whatever you want.
I could go on and on (just ask me if you want more examples - I've been playing with the OS all weekend). I loved Vista but Win7 makes it feel like an old clunker. It's a very user task-minded UI design, and it doesn't take a Microsoft salesman to see this.
One of the major issues with the typical package manager is information overload. It's just way too much stuff, and there's no way for someone to easily compare two apps that do the same thing. No screenshots, no user reviews, nothing but a typically terse description of what the app is supposed to do (which may not even be what it really does).
Unless you like installing apps and playing around with them, you're stuck going out to freshmeat or something similar to read more detailed descriptions of thigns, but then you're in the same boat as the typical windows users that goes to download.com or similar. In other words, the information overload combined with the lack of detailed information to make judgements with make the typical package manager very difficult to use for most people.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
You have a valid point there, it also does not help that packages which are simple lib files or dependencies for other applications are listed too. I have grown used to the applications I install on every system that I forget sometimes what it's like searching for something I've never heard of, let alone compare them. I do sometimes look in the information section for a site to visit, but you're right, even that involves opening a browser, copy & paste etc.
Some package managers do have a star system which goes a little way towards addressing this but not all. Debian have started their screenshot program, but that's hosted on a site, not inside the package manager, and it is only screenshots. Package managers are most certainly the best option available but they do need refined still.
Yes, but if caching stuff to RAM impedes running applications, it defeats the purpose it began with.
It doesn't do that. It caches things when its idle, and it takes no time at all to flush pages of memory that don't need to be written to disk if something running needs the memory, so why bring it up?
It does however show that its using a lot of RAM so twits looking at total ram allocated and then running around squawking about how high it is aren't contributing anything to the discussion.
I don't think Linux distributions are a different era, they're a completely new paradigm and Linux is a different 'holistic computing experience' from Windows or Macintosh. I've used Linux at home for at least 10 years as my primary machine and while I use Windows at work I *insist* on a linux machine to ensure productivity.
Workspaces for me are a killer application and I simply can't go back now and I feel lobotomised when I use windows. With windows, I never feel like I can extract all of the power of the machine to use on my application, primarily music production, for which Linux has allowed me to heavily customise for performance. Yes I tried it under windows and frankly with the money I saved on *not* buying the mac/protools combo I invested heavily in microphones. I want all the cpu time I paid for.
So while my Fedora 10 install annoys me cause it can't play flash or wmv's it records 16 channels of hi resolution audio all day and mixes and masters music in a way that's simply not available on a Mac. When I want to play flash or wmv's I (dual) boot to Ubuntu where the eye candy is pleasing and, when I run wine, it happily runs my instance of ERwin and most of the games I'm interested in. If I need other software within a few clicks I've installed Eclipse (maybe not as friendly but seems much more powerful than VS), MySQL, Umbrello, OpenOffice and a bunch of other software without a single license key. Old hardware, media server, older hardware Asterisk box.
Perhaps, one day, when propriety software vendors key on to how easy it is for a user to search for and install software for Linux they may offer a similar facility to licence and pay for their software to install under Linux distribution. Until then I'll just be satisfied with the limitations of the free software and donate some of the money I've saved to those projects so they can enhance it.
If I want to upgrade an Ubuntu install? I Upgrade, restore users home directory, done. Environment maintained, missing a program? add/remove, done. With my new builds I offer users an Ubuntu install first and install their applications, so if they don't like it, then they can shell money out for windows. I think this time around there has been 2 or 3 releases of Fedora and Ubuntu since Vista was released so because fixes are soon and improvement is often, satisfaction remains. I don't understand how you can make the comparison if, as you say, 'you've stuck with windows'. Every time I've fixed a windows box is why *I've* stuck with Linux and none of my Ubuntu users have seen a command line, let alone used one.
So, you're probably right, Windows probably is a familiar 'holistic' experience that comforts windows users, but I don't think it's a paradigm the average user enjoys any more, I don't. As the 'release soon, release often' matures Linux's 'holistic' experience it's paradigm get's better sooner and get's better often. Comparing Linux's 'holistic' experience with windows or mac is just not relevant anymore. I compare it's 'holistic experience' to that Linux distribution's last release. Freedom means more than 'freeware'
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
i've only been using os x since 10.5 (on a santa rosa macbook), and had to get a new printer because it wouldn't reliably print to my canon i860 attached to a print server, even though it could see it, and the printer works with our xp and vista laptops. i replaced that printer with a hp l7580 aio- the printer works fine, but it pretty regulary can't scan.
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.
Here's good evidence that you don't know you're talking about. Win7 (and even Vista for that matter) doesn't display any data about how often it thinks you use a program.
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.
Perhaps you should try installing Win7 and seeing what happens before drawing your conclusions. Based on your previous comment, you haven't even tried.
-Shippy
Seems to me that the best answer would be to lay out the package manager like Amazon's review pages, showing one of each of the top voted good/bad user reviews, a link to the package homepage and maybe a link to its screenshot page.
I/O is precious. As a user of nLite, I've seen first-hand what disabling prefetching, auto-defrag, and thumbnails can do. Folders open quicker in explorer, games start faster, and Firefox does too.
Why buy RAM and keep it unallocated?
Because the Windows security model requires that memory pages be zero'd out before being used. I wonder how long it'd take to zero out 400MB and allocate it to other processes? 10ms? 20ms? 150ms?
There is a delay. It's not as bad as java garbage collection, but it still has to be done!
This prefetching stuff doesn't actually boost performance - it simply shifts where the load is to when the computer is idle, which is a lot of the time with an average user. If your computer is (almost) always busy, or you do I/O heavy tasks like video encoding, just disable it and performance will go up. But if you are an average user, don't disable it.
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.
Well duh - the same thing can be said about the same netbook running XP or Linux. Where's the Windows 7 RC1 review?