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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"?
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."
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.
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.
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!
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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
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.
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! ~~
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'm tired of MS's patent crap.
It's not really your problem, unless you are working as a competitor, but I doubt you are.
I'm tired of the DRM.
Don't purchase DRM protected content. Two birds, one stone
I'm tired of the FUD.
Oh, you made a poor choice with Linux then. There's plenty of FUD to be had. Been to BoycotNovell lately? COLA? Read any Kdawson posts?
I'm tired of mediocre product after mediocre product.
Linux is a good choice for you then. It's not even a product. More of a garage band of programmers trying to find solutions without a problem.
I'm tired of their high prices.
Considering as important and widespread as Windows is, its price is pretty reasonable. You can even upgrade for a discount.
I'm tired of them stacking the ISO.
Yes, because God forbid Microsoft, who knows about creating software to handle documents, gets involved in creating a document standard nobody really gives a shit about in the first place.
I'm tired of embrace extend extinguish.
You got FOSS dude, why shed a tear for proprietary crapware?
I'm tired of fixing other people's computers from malware.
Fortunately for you, Linux will never be popular enough to be a prime target.
I'm tired of the overwhelming OS storage footprints, and everything else they do to ruin computing for everyone.
Correction: Ruined for you. Don't push your beliefs on everyone else. You are just one person, and a pretty grumpy one at that. If your budget for computer hardware is tight, then Linux is your obvious choice.
I'm tired of the whole company and I wish everyone would dump them forever.
Ha ha, dream on.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
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
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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