Microsoft Kills 3-App Limit For Windows 7 Starter Edition

Chabil Ha' writes "Heard the rumors that the much-maligned Windows 7 Starter Edition would be able to run more than three concurrent applications? Today, the Windows team made it official: 'Based on the feedback we've received from partners and customers asking us to enable a richer small notebook PC experience with Windows 7 Starter, we've decided to enable Windows 7 Starter customers the ability to run as many applications simultaneously as they would like, instead of being constricted to the 3 application limit that the previous Starter editions included. We believe these changes will make Windows 7 Starter an even more attractive option for customers who want a small notebook PC for very basic tasks, like browsing the web, checking email and personal productivity.' Small consolation, of course, if you want to watch a DVD natively, but I'm sure this won't stop the Slashdot crowd from enabling it."

Comments

Who says netbooks are only suited for basic tasks?

[Entropius]

Microsoft's line about netbooks being only suited for rudimentary computing tasks is full of shit.

I'm typing this on a eeepc: 1.6GHz Atom cpu, 2GB ram, blah blah blah. Microsoft (and others) may have this attitude that netbooks are only suitable for checking email, updating Facebook status, and the like ... and that you need a "real computer" for "real computing". That's absurd.

Yes, they're not the most powerful computers around. But they're about as powerful as desktops of five years ago. I run dozens of Firefox tabs, Skype, OpenOffice, GIMP, Picasa, Pidgin, my camera's timelapse software (Olympus Studio), and other stuff, often at the same time ... with no problems at all, and with plenty of CPU to spare. Of course I can do this -- people were loading old desktops this hard and nobody complained that they weren't "suitable for serious computing". If I wanted to run apache and serve webpages on this machine I certainly could -- I did it on my old crappy desktop when I was an undergrad, after all!

Saying that a netbook isn't a real computer is like saying a Toyota Yaris isn't a real car just because it only has a 100 hp engine. Sure, if you want to tow things you need something different -- just like if you want to play Crysis you need a desktop (replacement), and if you want to do lattice quantum chromodynamics you need a supercomputer.

A netbook is a small, full-featured computer that can make use of all of the flexibility of a full-featured operating system.

Re:THIS JUST IN

[stfvon007]

The atom processor dosn't have the performance of a 1.5Ghz Pentium M. It has the equivalent performance in benchmarks of a 1.2Ghz P3 processor (circa early 2001) or a core2 with only one core running at about 750Mhz, or a 500Mhz Core 2 Duo. comparing Mhz between different processors is often like comparing apples to oranges.

Oh for crying out loud

[Sycraft-fu]

You know, for posters on a technology site, there are a lot of people here who have no idea what the hell they are talking about when it comes to technology. I'll type this slowly so people can keep up:

WINDOWS 7 DOES NOT NEED XP MODE TO RUN XP APPS!

Windows 7, just like Vista, has native compatibility for XP apps. Win32 binaries execute just fine. It does not use a new API, etc. You can take just about any program and install it on Windows 7 and it'll work out of box. That even includes 64-bit Windows 7. It has the same thing that 64-bit Vista and XP do, called Windows on Windows 32. It allows for 32-bit apps to run in a 64-bit OS with basically no speed difference.

Here's a brief list of apps I've personally tested and found to work in Windows 7 64-bit RC1. This is by no means complete, just ones I've tested myself that I remember:

Firefox 3, Thunderbird 2, Office 2003, Office 2007, SSH Secure Shell 3.2.9, FreeSSHd, Textpad 5.2.0, Winamp 5.55, Acrobat 9.0, Cadence SPB 16.02, WMWare 6.5, Visual Studio 2008, WinMIPS64, Labview 8, Steam, Impulse, World of Warcraft, Mass Effect, Sony Vegas 8, Sony Sound Forge 9, Adobe Audition 3.

There's plenty more, this is just what I remember off the top of my head in a small sampling of different areas (consumer, programming engineering, audio production, video production, networking, etc).

Almost all apps will run fine in Windows 7 as is. Thus, most copies of Windows 7 do not have XP mode available, and even those that do don't ship with it, you have to download it.

So, what's it for then? Well three major classes of things you might encounter:

1) Apps with a 16-bit component, or entirely 16-bit. While 32-bit Windows 7 can run 16-bit apps with WOW16, 64-bit Windows can't. So, if you need to run a 16-bit app, XP mode will do that for you since it is a 32-bit XP VM.

2) Apps that interface with hardware that doesn't have Windows 7 drivers. An app that uses a dongle might be an example. If the manufacturer won't release a driver that works with 7, then you are out of luck. However, with XP mode, you install the driver in XP (is passes through USB devices) and you can use it.

3) Apps that install a kernel mode driver that is incompatible with 7. Again a lot of this will be 64-bit stuff since while 32-bit apps run fine in 64-bit Windows, all kernel mode code must be 64-bit. Again you might encounter this with old copy protection since that kind of stuff often like to use kernel drivers.

Now as should be pretty evident, that is really rare shit. This isn't something most people will have a problem with. However, some businesses do, and thus MS is offering them a solution. They are saying "If you have an old app that just won't work in 7 and you can't get it updated, just download a free XP VM from us, and run it in that."

That's all. Most Windows apps run JUST FINE with no update at all. Even those that do need to be updated, it is an update, not a complete rewrite. The fundamental APIs are still the same. You aren't redoing the whole thing from scratch for new architecture.

So please, stop with the FUD. Get your information correct.

P.S. Not including DVD playback is highly unsurprising because it isn't free. MPEG-2 and CSS both require licenses to include in software. It is not surprising MS isn't going to pay for those licenses on low cost software.