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Windows 7 vs. Windows XP On a Netbook
Justin writes "Many in the industry are counting on Windows 7 to bring the netbook market to the next level. Having netbook manufacturers ship netbooks with 7+ year old Windows XP pre-installed surely deterred some from joining the ranks of households with the small, light and portable netbooks. It seems Microsoft has addressed most of the pitfalls of Windows Vista on a netbook by increasing battery life and performance to be very close to that of the lighter-weight Windows XP. Legit Reviews has the full scoop of battery life and performance tests pitting Windows 7 against Windows XP on the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA Netbook." I'd like to see a follow-up with a few different Netbook-friendly Linux distros, too.
I thought the point of netbooks was to have a computer for accessing the internet and that's about it. Last I checked, XP could access the internet. I don't see the point in putting Windows 7 on your netbook at all.
Doom 2 versus Quake 2 on a 386.
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Should have used the RTM that came out... the RC is months old... lots of stuff has changed
Let's see... a bunch of hardware benchmarks, which would be expected to result in negligible difference between different versions of Windows. Does Vista REALLY come out significantly worse than XP on these kinds of benchmarks?
How about something relevant to netbooks? What's the memory footprint? Disk footprint?
What a fracking joke! That the new product is almost as good as the 7 year old one that it replaces.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It might not be Ubuntu's fault, but it's Ubuntu's problem.
Do you honestly think that a stock install of Ubuntu 9.04 uses fewer CPU cycles than, say, Debian Woody? Hell, grab some floppies and fire up that old 286; with all the improvements to Linux over the years, new distros must run circles around the old ones we had back then!
Software becomes more complicated with each new version. Features get added. The UI gets improved. Security gets heightened. The fact the Microsoft managed to include all the new features of the past seven years without significantly increasing power consumption or decreasing performance is indeed an accomplishment.
Also, note the difference between performance and productivity. A GUI is a good example. A command line will always perform better than a GUI. It can run on even the lightest of hardware. But you can (usually) be more productive with a GUI than by typing long, obscure commands into a Bash terminal. Another example is the search indexer: It may be more work for your CPU and hard drive, but it saves you lots of time hunting for files or emails.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
It's about how well they run on these machines. It's ALL ABOUT the hardware!
Your comment is some retarded shit. RTFA
Yes, that's good, isn't it? A 7 year old OS vs. a not-yet-released OS running on current hardware... and the not-yet-released OS performs almost just as well as the 7 year old OS?
I'd say that's pretty good. Typical idea is that older OS's will run faster since they were smaller and HAD to run on .. less hardware. Hardware is better, so OS's can plan on using more of it. An OS that is able to run almost as well as a 7 year old OS on CURRENT hardware is doing pretty well.
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Bare in mind that netbook hardware is most certainly anything but current. Performance is roughly equivalent to a 5 year old Pentium M. The only difference is that it has been shrunk and power consumption reduced to the point where 5 year old mid class laptop has been reduced significantly in size.
Running Win 7 on a modern mobile (Core 2 Duo) CPU would give a much better comparison, and really show the true benefits it has.
From experience I can tell you that Windows 7 (64-bit version) can be installed on a 10 GB partition. Barely, but it does work.
If you want light, Minix still can't be beat but I don't see anyone using it as a desktop OS. I wonder why.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Because most people get whatever their OEM will sell them and stick with it 'til they buy something newer, and those of us who build our own jumped ship to 64-bits *years* ago.
The market of "people not ready to upgrade their 32-bit hardware looking for a new OS" is statistically insignificant.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
In 1993 I had a Compaq Concerto. It was my favorite computer of all time (even more than my Macs that I have now). It was a pen-based machine and also had a keyboard. (Contrary to popular opinion, handwriting recognition actually worked: the catch is that it required the user to adapt and learn how to write so that the system can read your writing. If you were willing to do that, it had a very high rate of recognition.) The machine came with 4Mb or RAM but I put 12Mb in it - and that was considered HUGE at that time. (The battery lasted for four hours, and I had two so I could go for eight hours.) I ran Photoshop with NO PROBLEM on the machine, and many apps at once, including Netscape, etc. - which as you might recall had Java and lots of things bundled into it. I used to program in C++, Java, and Pascal on the thing. I seem to recall that it had a 128Mb disk drive.
So what the heck is the 16Gb of Windows 7 for????? In terms of the value of my computing experience, they are about the same - except that the Concerto would not have been able to handle the large media files of today unless you increased the RAM and disk space - but the OS certainly would not have minded as long as the codecs were installed. And let's not say it is because Windows is now multi-tasking where as Win 3.1 wasn't, because the original Unix was multi-tasking, and it fit in 4k or something like that.
I recall that I once installed Photoshop 3 on a Windows ME machine at a time when the latest version of Photoshop was 7. (Photoshop 7 was designed to run on Macs and Windows 3.1.) It started and was ready to use in under one second!!! And it was lightning fast. Using the current Photoshop of that time required the usual 30 seconds to start up. Yet, Photoshop 3 did everything - it just did not have some of the bells and whistles of later versions that one normally does not use - things that should not be part of the runtime anyway. In any case, any new features were not worth a factor of 20+ in startup time and a similar factor in memory footprint!
So my conclusion is that the current bloatware is somehow designed to be bloated. Something is fishy! Is it the large OS libraries that must be linked in now? The .Net, layered on top of the Win API? (talking about Windows here - similar questions for other OSs.) I suspect that our software could be much leaner, and run on much smaller footprints, and start and run much, much faster, and therefore use much less power - and therefore run for much longer without recharging. Again, I wish someone would decompile the code of some of these programs (and OSs) and see what the extra bloat is actually doing and what the source of it is.
Good point, if there was only some way we could balance things, rather than going to the extremes. Unfortunately, we all know the law, forcing us to adopt either the biggest or smallest OS footprint.
So, if I understand this right: 7 is faster than XP because it offloads things to the GPU XP doesn't do (window compositing)? -S