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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.
Lighter weight Windows XP - now that is a contradiction in terms!!!
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.
"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."
Who, exactly? Anyone who doesn't know what they're doing will blindly buy anything. Anyone who DOES know what they're doing will install any OS they like.
Or was the submitted actually suggesting that netbook buyers were actually LOOKING for Vista?
Vista jokes aside, the fact that people are willing TO PAY EXTRA to get their computer with windows XP is a very good indicator.
Most people/companies are not interested in the new features offered by Vista. They just aren't that compelling.
Then add the fact that Vista is new, slower, compatible with less hardware, some of your current software won't work on Vista, and many people find UAC annoying.
Not a lot of upside, and a big downside for many. The value proposition just isn't there.
Microsoft pulled XP from the retail market to avoid Vista looking like a flop.
Intel describes a netbook as a platform for playing media and a notebook as a platfrom for creating media. So what Windows 7 is aimed for? Play or create media? If you put both for a netbook, you just waste lots of cpu power for bloat you add in order to create new media.
One of the biggest strenghts of Open Source is to give opportunity to tailor systems for a specific needs. That's why Moblin or Plasma mid and couple of other products aimed to play media only and not bother creating any will succeed in netbook market sooner or later.
Microsoft has a platform gifted with applications aimed for creating media, and that's why it's still dominant and biggest player in desktop/notebook market. But netbooks need none of these applications so their OS.
The RC of Win7 was released as both a 64bit version and a 32bit version. While they may not be pushing it, 64bit computing is making inroads into the consumer market.
Windows 7 betas have been greeted with remarkable positive press. "Of course," said Steve Ballmer, "the betas preview the 'champagne and hookers' edition, which would be way too much for netbooks and explode users' brains. Imagine thinking those little things are computers! So we're releasing what we call Windows 7 Dumbass Edition(tm). It lets you log in and look at the shiny. Even Spider Solitaire has the ribbon toolbar! And you can buy an upgrade to the version that runs programs! It lets you do that!"
Dumbass Edition(tm) comes with pre-installed viruses to make the computer part of the Storm, Conficker and FBI botnets. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
"Some manufacturers were going to release netbooks with ARM processors, which would run Linux or Chrome OS at twice the speed, half the heat and ten-hour battery life, but wouldn't run Windows 7. Microsoft assures us this is a crushing blow for ARM," said Michael Silver of Gartner. "ARM didn't have anything to say to that, just a guffawing sound down the phone. Obviously they're upset and hysterical."
In future news, Microsoft Corporation has announced a limited one-off extension of availability of its Windows XP operating system to April 2101 after criticism from large customers and analysts. This is the fifty-sixth extension of XPâ(TM)s availability since 2008. "Windows XP is currently in the extremely very prolonged super-extended support phase and Microsoft encourages customers to migrate to Windows for Neurons 2097 as soon as feasible," said William Gates V, CEO and great-grandson of the company founder. "Spare change?"
Illustration: Steve Ballmer's joyous expression when announcing seeing the latest Microsoft quarterly figures.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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The intel atom cpu is 32 Bit. Shipping no 32 bit whatsoever would eliminate you from this very popular market.
The "bastard child" appellation applies to XP 64. Under Vista, hardware manufacturers have been pretty good about providing 64-bit support, as far as I can tell.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
May have been me.
32-bit should have died with XP.
Vista should have been 64-bit only.
No existing applications / devices that were 32-bit only had to worry, there was still 32-bit XP dammit.
But ok, whatever, fuck it, Intel was still flogging 32-bit CPUs for some reason, and people are morons. Fine.
But Windows 7? WHY THE FUCK do we need 32-bit versions of Windows 7? FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKK
Ok, the article isn't off the scale in terms of inaccuracy, but when you see comments like this, how can you trust anything they do or say?
Aero is automatically disabled when unplugged in battery saver mode which makes sense
Aero is NOT disabled when unplugged; instead, translucency is turned off. (The Blur/Glass effect)
Aero itself remains enabled. I know people confuse 'Glass' and 'Aero' and 'DWM' and what the OS, but come on this is a technical review right, shouldn't they get the basic facts that you find on Wikipedia correct or at least maybe, just maybe have a clue themselves?
There are other more subtle errors in the article, and even though it basically says Win7 is doing fine. However, do you notice it forgets to mention that Win7 is performing as well as XP while having search, defender and many other 'heavy' features working properly and still performing as well as XP on a very modest CPU and GPU platform.
Going to leave it here...
... is probably the same one running their web-server. Holy Slashdotting, batman!
Having run Windows XP, Ubuntu and Windows 7 on my MSI Wind U100 I can say Windows Seven has by far been the best OS. XP ran fine, but it wasn't particularly pleasing to the eye and had some issues running multiple programs at once. Ubuntu looked marginally better but performance wise it was terrible, I couldn't watch a flash video without it seizing up. Windows Seven looks pretty, runs faster than XP and is just better overall.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Because you can just go out and grab a $300 netbook with 6GB of RAM, right? Even if you could, not all of the Atom processors support EMT64, though the most-popular ones do.
32-bit is still faster for a lot of things, too. The i486 has been around for 20 years now, amd64 not so long. The compilers haven't quite caught up.
To Microsoft's credit, they are requiring 64-bit for a lot of their enterprise products now. IIRC, Exchange 2007 and SQL 2008 both require either 2k3 or 2k8 64-bit.
Why not have 32bit? There is no real compelling reason for most people to have a 64bit OS so why force people to buy all new hardware when what you're trying to do is sell an OS? Most people that brag about having a 64bit system have no idea what they're talking about, they just brandish it around and keep yammering on about it like it's some awesome thing.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
So, in my interpretation, the Windows 7 netbook had slightly shorter battery life, and performed slightly worse in all but two benchmarks. One of those two was dealing with "next generation gaming performance" that really isn't point of netbooks, and the other was essentially identical to the XP performance.
And the conclusion the reviewers take from this is that Windows 7 is good? Just because it isn't as bad as Vista, and isn't too much worse than XP?
With these sorts of results, XP is going to be with us for a long time. Why is it so hard for Microsoft to make something comparable?
Should have used the RTM that came out... the RC is months old... lots of stuff has changed
We're running several RAID configurations, even on many of our notebooks with dual-HD configurations. RAID 0, RAID 1, etc...
Not sure what issue you are seeing, but maybe you should complain to the HD Controller MFR as this would be the first place to yell, as they not only make the driver, but once the OS passes off HD read/write commands to the driver and then the HD Controller for the RAID, the OS has little to do with what happens then.
I personally know that some RAID MFRs are crap sadly, but even running Linux, the drivers are and HD controllers are still crap.
Haven't seen the ATI Black screen, unless it sets your video mode to a native resolution and you havea 1990s monitor, but even then it should pop back or you could reboot and adjust this in safe mode.
Do you want to tell him about XP 64, or shall I?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Unfortunately, Windows has been kind of lagging on the 64-bit front. By treating it as sort of a bastard child (like they treated all their non-i386 NT versions), Microsoft managed to ensure that hardware manufacturers wouldn't make an effort to support 64-bit windows in a non-server environment. Which is frustrating as I've started bumping up against that once-awesome 4GB barrier.
Please, stop spewing bullshit. Just stop. For almost 2 years now, it has been a requirement to provide both 64 and 32 bit Vista drivers if a manufacturer wanted to get the WHQL stamp of approval. And these same Vista drivers install and work just fine on 64bit Windows 2008 Server as well, I know, because I actually run 64bit Win2008 on a rather obscure combination of hardware and haven't had any issues. I am sure some old hardware does exist that still doesn't have 64bit drivers for Vista/2008, but you really really need to try to actually find such hardware.
Before you jump to that extreme, have you tried running the 64-bit versions of Vista or 7 on your machine? A lot has changed since Vista dropped back in 2006, and compatibility has drastically improved. I'm currently running the Windows 7 RC on two machines, both in 64-bit flavor, and have had no problems thus far with driver or software compatibility. Try downloading a copy of the release candidate and give it a test run, as I think you will find this to be a much simpler and more effective (not to mention much, much faster/better performing) alternative. If you still have problems, then you can jump to virtualization. But even then, consider VirtualPC or VirtualBox on 64-bit 7 running a 32-bit 7 client.
No existing applications / devices that were 32-bit only had to worry, there was still 32-bit XP dammit.
Anyone know if the XP-mode of Windows 7 is available in the 64-bit version? (I haven't tried it)
But ok, whatever, fuck it, Intel was still flogging 32-bit CPUs for some reason, and people are morons. Fine.
PAE, which allows up to 36GB on 32-bit. Intel has another 64-bit architecture, dontchaknow....it's called Itanium. They didn't license the amd64 instruction until Microsoft decided to embrace "X64."
In a lot of respects, it was a bad decision, as it badly breaks a lot of backwards compatibility (this is why 16-bit Windows apps no longer run), but it is what it is. (not to mention stupid stuff that POWER, MIPS, and Sparc figured out, like how to access 64-bit registers in 32-bit mode, etc. etc.)
Well, Google OS will be aimed at netbooks and it will be based around the Linux Kernel.
Follow me @MisterLinOx
Somewhere out there in the ether is a blog post or a transcript by someone at Microsoft mentioning that Windows 2008 would be the last 32 bit OS. They would then push 64-bit everywhere.
It didn't happen. Windows 7 is coming out (I don't care if it's Vista Redux, it's another OS) and it's still available in 32-bit. Not want. As for your question, to be completely vague - I'm using Windows 2008 x64 as a primary OS. It sucks that 32-bit will continue to exist, and judging by the reviews already, it's going to be around for a long time. There go any hopes for decent support for x64 on Windows.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Because having 2 versions makes shit harder for those who make hardware, for consumers who are confused, and for software developers, who will take the lazy route and support 32-bit primarily, while shafting the 64-bit users with shoddy, half-assed implementations and support.
64-bit is fucking awesome when done right. In many cases you can get more than double the performance vs 32-bit (anything to do with photos, audio, video, etc. decoding, editing, encoding, etc, or sciency shit, or porn simulators.). Add on the ability to natively address more RAM than the paltry 4 GB, and you've got yourself a winner.
You want 32-bit instead of 64-bit? You have legacy hardware and drivers and shit? You're a goob? Last I checked you could still buy 32-bit XP licenses, and your current licenses wouldn't expire.
I'd also like you to show me a case where someone who wanted to upgrade from XP to Vista/7 would be able to (no hardware changes needed) go with the 32-bit version of Vista/7, but not the 64-bit version.
Odds are it's because of a printer or wifi adapter that doesn't have a 64-bit driver.
Well not quite. There are 64-bit Atom processors. However, they're currently not being used in the mini-notebooks. Those are currently use the N series of chips which are 32-bit only.
Because you can just go out and grab a $300 netbook with 6GB of RAM, right? Even if you could, not all of the Atom processors support EMT64, though the most-popular ones do.
You probably meant the most popular ones don't. Only the desktop versions of Atom (230 and 330) support 64bits and those are very rare. The most popular are the N and Z series which you find in most if not all netbooks and UMPCs and those are 32bits only.
Mada mada dane.
That was in reference to the server division.
he said SOFTWARE RAID. i've had this problem as well. it involves the resync/resbuild process which fails.
you click on resync and it resyncs to healthy and then about half a minute later with software raid windows 7 marks the raid array as degraded. sync is seriously broken. hardware raid just works but is not portable if your controller fails.
Now Microsoft is facing the same game from the other end. Very carefully timed announcement by Google that all the OS you would need to run a netbook is coming soon. Vendors do not commit wholeheartedly to Microsoft. Device driver writers do not just hack something that will work in Windows alone and be done with it. Consumers also do not rush out to buy the latest and greatest. Corporations add another action to their evaluation. "What about Chrome OS?". That buys some time. Most vendors cite Chrome OS and demand hefty discount for Win7 in netbook market. Microsoft is forced to sell its OS at bargain basement prices in the fastest growing segment of PC market.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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?
We probably don't need it, but I bet millions of people are willing to buy it.
(Personally, I will probably upgrade to Windows 7 when I buy a new computer and 64 bit will probably be a shopping point, but I don't expect everybody to wait)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
64bit programs are still "bastard children" under Windows, because they're trying to keep everything as backwards compatible as possible.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
If you want decent graphics, you need to run it on a Mac for OK graphics performance, or run it natively. None of the other platforms offer anything like as good graphics performance, mainly because their target market isn't interested in it.
The "bastard child" appellation applies to XP 64. Under Vista, hardware manufacturers have been pretty good about providing 64-bit support, as far as I can tell.
Really? Well, then you don't have a Broadcom 5700, 5701, or 5702 NIC. These NICs work fine on 64-bit Linux with the tg3 driver, but on Vista, they're not even supported. You have to use the XP driver, which doesn't work right.
My blog
VirtualBox is very easy to use and it's GPL. If you use the free-as-in-beer desktop integration tools, then it's quite slick as well. I run a 64-bit Gentoo desktop with 32-bit Windows XP as a guest OS. This gives me all the power of Unix with MS compatibility when I need it. In full screen mode, I might as well be running XP for all you can tell.
I haven't tried 3D accelerated graphics. I understand that VirtualBox has been making strides in bringing OpenGL to the guest host, but they don't have any expectation of getting DirectX working any time soon if ever.
I hope Oracle decides to keep VirtualBox alive. As it is, VirtualBox is great for desktops, but the server side tools aren't in the same league as VMware. With Oracle backing, VirtualBox could become a serious contender.
KTHXBYE
Because you can just go out and grab a $300 netbook with 6GB of RAM, right? Even if you could, not all of the Atom processors support EMT64, though the most-popular ones do.
32-bit is still faster for a lot of things, too. The i486 has been around for 20 years now, amd64 not so long. The compilers haven't quite caught up.
To Microsoft's credit, they are requiring 64-bit for a lot of their enterprise products now. IIRC, Exchange 2007 and SQL 2008 both require either 2k3 or 2k8 64-bit.
I disagree. At least on x86-64 there's almost a doubling of the number of registers (twice the number of general purpose and SIMD FP registers). This greatly reduces the register pressure for compilers, which have been keeping up with processors thus far. For example, I use Povray a lot. I can guarantee you that a custom compiled 64-bit binary will definitely render faster than a custom compiled 32-bit binary on the same system.
XP mode runs a copy of XP in Virtual PC, so I would imagine so.
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."
Well, you don't need to try too hard if you have older Dell or HP equipment. See what I mean?
My blog
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?
XP x64 was awful, unstable, etc. Vista x64 wasn't too bad. I'm using Win 7 RC x64 and it is working very well, actually, and I haven't run into anything (casual gamer, programmer, use Sibelius and East West sound libraries extensively) that I haven't been able to do... except for one piece of hardware that lacked 64 bit drivers (a rather old 1x1 midiman box).
I initially upgraded to Vista x64 for the RAM issue. I love using Linux, but it wasn't an option since I mostly use my desktop for music (Sibelius is Mac/PC only, does not run well in Wine or virtualized due to midi support, I think... plus there's the sound samples/library issue...) and games (obviously not going to work best on Linux... under wine or virtualized), so it only made sense to install a 64 bit version of Windows. Vista x64 was ok and I didn't have many problems. Windows 7 RC x64 has impressed me so far.
Is it better or worse than Windows? It's stable so far. I'm not stupid, so it's plenty secure for me. Antivirus doesn't slow it down much, etc. I haven't had any software or hardware issues, I haven't had any crashes. In fact, I've had more trouble with Ubuntu running on my older Dell E1505 laptop than I have had with Win7.
I've used VMWare, Xen, and VirtualBox. I like VirtualBox from the "ease" perspective. VMWare was a little more clunky. But I guess the real question is why do you want to virtualize Win 7 instead of just running it? Win 7 x64 is fine... unless there's something you want from a Linux distro that is lacking in Windows, I don't see why - if Windows is more convenient for whatever reason - you don't just run it.
Well, it depends what he meant by "software raid". The "professional" editions of Windows have built-in software raid requiring no special hardware. Then there are things like built-in raid on motherboards which are actually implemented in software. If it's the former, Microsoft is to blame. If it's the latter, Microsoft is not to blame. Or maybe he was using special hardware (controller, etc) that has a faulty driver in the IO stack.
Buy a Lenovo or Samsung 12" netbook witht the NANO processor. Full 64 bit (cheaper than Atom in the Lenovo), faster than the atom and the graphics processor kicks The GMA's butt. Running 64 bit Win7 with no problems.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
But Windows 7? WHY THE FUCK do we need 32-bit versions of Windows 7? FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKK
Why? Intel Atom - N and Z series cannot execute the x86-64 instruction set. Aren't netbooks (in which those Atom processors are used) major part of Windows 7 implementation? Isn't it what this article is about? Where is the securty? Is this the right hotel?
jesus christ, it isn't any better than xp!
I went and looked at a few before I posted, and had the model numbers mixed up. That they didn't was my initial thought, since I was thinking about Atom's heritage. Some of the newer ones (230) do.
It's about how well they run on these machines. It's ALL ABOUT the hardware!
Your comment is some retarded shit. RTFA
Atom is the justification
Well, you don't need to try too hard if you have older Dell or HP equipment. See what I mean?
You do realise that your own link contains download links for the 64bit Vista and Win2008 drivers?
A Netbook is a system with a very low powered single-core CPU. Everything you can do to move things off the CPU makes everything else faster. Windows 7 can offload GDI, window compositing, and many other effects to the GPU (even one as relatively weak as in Netbooks), saving a ton of CPU performance. And thus making everything else faster, even if it's just looking at a web page that's running some Javascript or Flash.
I just upgraded my kids' Dell Mini 9 (1 GB RAM) to Win 7 RTM from its OEM XP config, and it's remarkably snappier even just doing web browsing, even with a GMA 945.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7#Desktop_Window_Manager
My video compression blog
64-bit hasn't been a bastard child since Vista. You can't get WHQL driver certification without a 100% feature complete 64-bit driver. I haven't seen any hardware without a 64-bit driver in a couple of years now.
The real problem with 64-bit windows isn't the drivers, nor is it the fact that there are so few 64-bit clean applications out there. The real problem is the installed base of 16-bit applications. Last month I purchased a couple of educational games for my 3 year old. Turns out they are 16-bit, and won't run on a 64-bit OS. The developer doesn't have any plans to update them. This is far from unusual, I've been running 64-bit windows on one of my machines since the beta releases (a couple months after the initial opterons became available, it just took another year and a half for Ms to release it). That was a long time ago, and while lots of things work that didn't initially (.net support for example) some things never will.
That is because all 16 bit operations were removed from long mode, so MS didn't integrate any kind of 16-bit compatibility layer in windows. The only choice is a virtual machine. So, while getting a 32-bit application with a 16 bit installer is getting rarer, there are whole classes of applications which work just fine on a 32-bit OS but not on the 64-bit version. I expect that this short sight is part of the reasoning for XP compatibility mode via a VM in win7. Usually, the OS just acts like an older version for particular apps. That is because every version of the OS since w2k (maybe earlier) has had compatibility modes going back to very old versions of windows (right click your application, properties, compatibility ). From the average user of this site, that doesn't mean anything because they only see the small minority of applications that are very popular and therefor are updated regularly. The total set of windows applications is much larger, many of which run in niche markets, or are company specific. For example, I have a very capable eeprom burner which is driven by a 16-bit application, and doesn't work for a shit in a VM.
Also, it is possible to support more than 4G of ram with 32-bit windows, you just have to have a version that supports PAE, something Ms has been silently trying to kill, and has been helped by willful ignorance by a lot of people.
I disagree. At least on x86-64 there's almost a doubling of the number of registers (twice the number of general purpose and SIMD FP registers).
And also a doubling of the size of every pointer, meaning an inflation in the size of every instruction, causing an increase in the number of cache misses and an increase in the size of application binaries which means greater memory usage.
64-bit is *not* a panacea. It's better in some cases, worse in others, and which is better, 32-or 64-bit, depends entirely on workload.
All this astroturfed media about how great Win7 is and how it is going to kick butt on netbooks. Funny.
They always forget the one critical problem. Price. The only way XP clawed market share away from the penguin was by Microsoft basically giving it away. They aren't planning on giving 7 away so there is going to be a five tiered price structure on netbooks and that is about three too many.
1. ARM Netbooks/smartbooks will be the hot new low cost item this Xmas. They will be at or below where ASUS introduced the EEE PC 700. And just maybe they hit the $200 price point ASUS originally aimed for and missed. Does anyone think WinCE will be the big winner in this market? Ok, maybe they can horn their way in by Xmas '11 but the rumormill hasn't been talking WinCE it has been Android and a little Ubuntu with most trying to roll their own.
2. x86 based machines running Linux. Go look at the HP Mini Mi 110 if you want to see how low x86 hardware can get without the Microsoft tax. I have seen em as low as $249 but they have crept up a bit lately.
3. x86 hardware with an XP preload. Seem to run at least $30 more than a penguin and usually $40-50 more.
4. x86 hardware with Windows 7 starter edition. Hasn't shipped yet but we can assume it will cost at least as much as XP. Odds are it will be mostly useful as a platform to harvest the customer's credit card to upgrade to a more complete edition.
5. x86 hardware preloaded with Windows 7 Home. Either Microsoft gives up on the idea of profits or this puppy boosts the sticker a full $100 over a penguin preload. x86 netbooks have already crept up a hundred or so in average selling price and now Microsoft expects customers to pony up another portrait of Franklin? In this economy? Hello? Anyone remember why the netbook revolution got started in the first place? Wasn't price as big a factor as the form factor?
Ok, so how will the marketplace solve the 'too many SKU problem'? Starter will probably get ditched as a customer relations nightmare. Linux on x86 will probably finish its vanishing act from retail although a few online sellers might continue if the sales are there. That gets from five to three. So it will depend on how many customers think Win7 is worth a premium likely to exceed $50 over XP. If most pay XP dies, if not....
Democrat delenda est
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Yes, but those are 5+ years old and there are no Vista drivers at all, neither 32-bit nor 64-bit. So your post is completely irrelevant.
Atom has 64-bit support built in, and Intel disables it on most parts to a) to provide market segmentation and b) to save a bit of power. If MS had made Win7 64-bit only, Intel simply would have flipped the switch and sold the Atoms as 64-bit.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
I thought the point of netbooks was to have a computer for accessing the internet and that's about it.
That is the network appliance.
The geek's all-time-favorite pipe dream.
The rock bottom price and specs for the XP Atom Netbook at Walmart.com is $238 with 512 MB RAM and your choice of an 8 GB SSD or a 160 GB HDD.
$348 buys an 11" screen, 2 GB RAM and a 250 GB HDD.
That makes the netbook a viable budget platform for mobile media and games and pretty much everything else as well, of course - and the dual-core ATOM netbook with NVIDIA graphics is just around the corner.
Don't you just love how you get all these replies but no answers?
I've been using a VM to run some Windows only games and misc. application, kind of sounds like what your looking for so here is the run down;
Hardware is a HP laptop with a dual core AMD Turion 64 bit running at 2GHz with 4G RAM.
I use the amd64 version of Debian Etch with KDE3.5 and Sun's VirtualBox 2.2.4 for those MS Windows applications that I still need to use, currently 1 old game and some file conversion apps that I'm still figuring out the Linux versions of.
Setting up VB was a breeze, just follow the instructions on the site to add the repositories and use apt-get to install. Once VB is installed it has a set-up wizard to create the VMs so that part is a snap, just accept the defaults at first, you can fine tune them later. My experience has been that VB's interface is intuitive and direct, everything you need is easy to find and the best part for me was that I didn't have to jump though any registration hoops like I did with VMware. Also the on line support forums are very usefull when you have questions or need to tweak something a particular way.
Installing XP in the new VM was simple, direct and effortless, no special drivers needed by XP If you use a bootable iso of a Win XP install disk as your VM's "CD drive" the install is fast. Once you have your base XP VM you can update it and install the "Guest Additions"(login to your new XP VM and look under "Devices" on the VM's toolbar). From there your ready to go, I exported the VM at this point so I have my base image.
Another fun thing about VB is you can use its "seemless mode" to put the Windows toolbar/Start button on the KDE desktop and the Windows apps look like they are part of KDE desktop, your wife will love it.
I don't know how usefull this is going to be but I hope it helps.
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Have you tried using 64-bit Vista on the desktop though? It's really not that straight forward. Not everyone bothers with WHQL certification, and not every application plays nice on a 64-bit platform. I put it on my laptop for a period of time but had issues with a number of 3rd party apps and drivers behaving incorrectly. I was able to manage most of the time (the majority of my problems were with games), but the show stopper for me was the OpenVPN drivers - I just couldn't get the OpenVPN drivers to work at all. All-in-all, it just wasn't worth the headache (didn't really need 64-bit other than for the shits and giggles)and back went 32-bit XP. I'm not sure who is more to blame here - MS or the 3rd parties - but in any case it wasn't a pleasant experience.
OTOH, I've been running 64-bit Ubuntu for years now without an issue (except for Flash, but that's been resolved by Adobe). To the user, there is no difference between the 32-bit or 64-bit install and everything 'just works'. I realize this has a lot to do with the nature of Linux, the use of package management and my specific hardware, but I have to agree 64-bit Windows does feel like a bastard child in comparison.
The intel atom cpu is 32 Bit. Shipping no 32 bit whatsoever would eliminate you from this very popular market.
Paul Thurott says Windows 7 will be the last 32-bit Windows although with the popularity of Atom I wonder if this will be true, even if the next Windows release takes another eight years.
Penny - plain text accounting
It appears they're moving the remote-exploit forums over, and hard to get a good read on what works the best out of the box (both for OS install, as well as which has the best (Atheros?) built in wi-fi.
The older wiki I found seems pretty outdated, etc.
Can someone give some good examples of what they think is the best, cheap netbook/laptop to install Backtrack onto, to learn pen testing?
I had an old Toshiba that I got working with a linksys usb wireless, but, it went tits up the other day, so looking for a replacement.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
PAE is a hack, and you are stuck with the same amount of addressable memory per process as you are with normal 32-bit addressing. Also, a correction, PAE adds up to 64 GB, with a 36 bit address space.
The Itanium architecture fails because of total lack of backwards compatibility with 32-bit without emulation. Also, even after licensing the amd64 instruction set, they continued to make CPUs without it. And now, even with a WinXP VM included with Win7, they are still making x64 CPUs that won't support the required virtualization tech. Intel just can't seem to get their shit together with 64-bit.
As far as accessing 64-bit registers in 32-bit mode, I thought that was one of the things that "VT-x" or whatever adds. I know that after enabling that I was able to run 64-bit guests VMs on my 32-bit host system.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
I must admit, I don't know what you mean. XP x64 was a dog, I know, although a lot of people quite liked it.
But for about a year and half I've been running Vista x64, and I have noticed absolutely no problems. Certainly, I have had no problems with hardware support (although a few of my x16 games won't work... shame, really), and in fact, many PC manufacturers are preinstalling x64 Vista on their PCs.
I've also been testing Windows 7 x64 RC lately, and I've had absolutely no problems with that, either, even on a variety of custom-built hardware.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Well, you don't need to try too hard if you have older Dell or HP equipment. See what I mean?
You do realise that your own link contains download links for the 64bit Vista and Win2008 drivers?
Oh Cmon, Give him/her a break, (s)he just suffers from this ---> http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/25/1757253/Linus-Calls-MicrosoftHatred-a-Disease
Evidence? http://slashdot.org/~morgan_greywolf/journal/219467
http://slashdot.org/~morgan_greywolf/journal/226315
This space for rent.
When my friend told me he had Windows 7 on his Netbook i was suprised, I was even more suprised upon using it though.. snappy, responsive, I was impressed (full disclosure, don't remember all the details but it had 2 gigs of ram, single core 1.6 ghz atom)
See http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2007/05/welcome_to_the_jungle.html
It's fun to bash Adobe, but they have real problems on their hand. Even Google had trouble picking/developing a graphic toolkit for the Linux version of Chrome.
This space for rent.
Arstechnica has an amusing fact about Microsoft's devotion to backwards compatibility:
I'm running Windows 2008 x64 on my Intel Atom computer. It's a great little in-office staging server, with x64 Sql Server and Windows. Oh, and it's dual core.
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.
I run 64-bit Vista and everything 'just works' - old and new games included.
in a netbook, it comes down to the CPU, the display(LCD and GPU), and the disk system. So what exactly do they expect to see comparing Windows with Windows on a system with probably over 30% of the power sucked up by a spinning disk? They should have tested with an SSD for the HD and then you're really just talking the CPU and display sucking up most of the power. Still, it's Windows vs Windows so I would not expect too much of a difference if you throw enough RAM so neither version of Windows feels constrained.
And do they even mention the amount of RAM in that? It comes stock with 1GB but 2GB is possible, maybe more. Too bad they didn't compare with what a Linux distro could do on some of those tests and with an SSD.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Can you provide a link? I'm having trouble finding a Nano-based Lenovo computer.
The PAE switch doesn't always work as written. I used it in server 2003 32 bit. The machine worked fine for a while. Then after a few updates (the updates killed it) I needed to drop the RAM to 3GB to get the machine to have clear video. I thought the video card went bad at first. It was not the case. Removing 1 GB of RAM fixed the issue. I wanted a stable and safe machine. 3 GB of RAM was plenty for what I did on that machine.
Has anyone tried Ubuntu remix on a touch screen netbook (or tablet)? That interface looks like it was designed for a touch screen.
This was supposed to be in quotes in the bottom half of my comment. Need more coffee.
This is what happens when you don't have any competition. Its not an operating system, its a bloated behemoth born of a monopoly that wants to kill competition in every software market it can.
Microsoft should have been split up in 2000.
You can't create competition through regulation
This space for rent.
That's what I was referring to ;)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
And also a doubling of the size of every pointer, meaning an inflation in the size of every instruction, causing an increase in the number of cache misses and an increase in the size of application binaries which means greater memory usage.
64-bit is *not* a panacea. It's better in some cases, worse in others, and which is better, 32-or 64-bit, depends entirely on workload.
While true, on x86-64, the the positives tend to outweigh the negatives. However, on architectures where 64-bit was not an afterthought, the negatives seem to outweigh the positives.
Because performance is not the only thing that defines a new OS. If that were so, we would all be running DOS or Minix. The latest Ubuntu is slower than the oldest Ubuntu(on the same hardware) but is still an upgrade. Same with OS X vs. OS 9. People don't notice it because usually they're using faster hardware with the latest version. But Windows 7 adds a lot of security, reliability and UI features while almost remaining at par with a 7 year old OS on the same hardware. That is the real news here.
This space for rent.
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I kmnow this is off-topic but...can anyone confirm if the following has been fixed in Windows 7?
Vista's copy progress dialog doesn't even tell you the name of the file you're copying any more. It only tells you part of the path it comes from. XP gives you the filename and full path.
If you move a folder containing files to a different place that already has a folder with the same name, XP merges them properly. Even with UAC turned off, Vista comes up with a supremely annoying dialog to confirm each file in turn, and even after a succesful move, the source folder is left behind.
If there's even one file in a folder that Vista thinks might be a media file, it presents the file list of the whole folder with media attributes instead of 'all files' attributes by default. It does this every time you create a new foler and you can't turn off or even force it to use a particular profile.
Vista's DRM means it can't play some of my media that XP can play without problem.
Vista still forgets window settings even if you set "remember each windows settings". This is a problem way back to Windows95 I think.
Those damned slashtotters!! They've taken the frigging site down!! Oh - wait. . . .
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The tests confirm what many of us have been saying all along. Using XP as a baseline, Vista sucks gangrenous donkey balls through a garden hose. Win7, on the other hand, runs about as well as XP. Depending on configuration, of course. It wouldn't be terribly inaccurate to say that Win7 is XP with a better security model, and missing some of the bogus legacy shit that should have been dropped almost a decade ago.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
But Windows 7? WHY THE FUCK do we need 32-bit versions of Windows 7?
At the launch of Vista, MS stated that it would be the last 32-bit OS and that the next one would be 64-bit only.
Now fast-forward a little, and observe the dismal marketing failure that Vista turned into - for a big part thanks to application incompatibilities and the lack of drivers for many hardware components out on the market. To the average Joe, Vista == problems, especially thanks to all the media attention it received over these issues.
Microsoft absolutely cannot afford another disaster from a PR point of view, so they need Windows 7 to be an overwhelming success. If Joe Public gets disenfranchised enough with windows to start looking at alternatives, then it's the beginning orf the end for MS, and they'll do everything in their power to keep that from happening.
Removing 32-bit altogether at this stage would be a major speedbump in that process (there's still a lot of hardware that only has 32-bit vista drivers available, and older programs that don't function properly under 64 bit)
More than likely Windows 7 will be last 32-bit release, though. The more time passes, the more peripherals without 64 bit drivers will be out of servers, and the more old software will have been replaced by new programs -- it will become less of an issue in a few years than it would be now.
I don't find that surprising, it could be a problem even back in the win2k days. In general back then, running WHQL drivers, the machines generally worked. I had a number of machines with >4G of memory in the 2k time frame and they worked fine as long as you were careful about what hardware you plugged in.
As soon as MS released the 64-bit versions of windows, the PAE support became a 3rd class citizen, primary because the official line was use the 64-bit version of windows.
Running 64-bit isn't a bad idea, and not to sound a little old, but i'm not really sure what your average desktop user does with 6G of ram. Its way more than you need for general use, and things like HD video processing are still fairly constrained until you get over 10+G of RAM. About the only time I go over 4G of RAM is when I have a few virtual machines open. Heck, right (64-bit w2k3) now i've got a win7, suse and sles VM running along with a shed load of local applications and my current physical memory usage is 3G on a machine with 4G of ram. The peak commit on the machine is 5G over a few months. At home I edit HD home movies on a machine with 2G of RAM, and it works just fine except when it becomes disk constrained and then I need a lot more than 6G of ram to cache the whole movie. Frankly, I've thought about putting more RAM in that machine, and I would if every time I think about it I check my current ram usage to find 1G or more free.
Now, the servers I use eat RAM, but that is different...
It could be that you have bad RAM or the timing is incorrect. Have you ran memory diagnostics (through Windows or Memtest86) yet? If not, I highly recommend that you do so.
Life is not for the lazy.
To be fair, it's easy to configure Vista to run about as well as XP too. It's just that journalists are too thick (and don't get me started on why microsoft released vista with the default config they chose).
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
My uncle did his masters thesis on the difference an operating system makes in doing calculations and how long batteries last on the same hardware (power consumption).
It does make a difference -- one larger than he had anticipated.
You're nothing; like me.
It tends to use a lot of cpu when doing simple tasks like moving the mouse around the screen,
Sorry that is a fail. Obviously Windows 7 does NOT run effectively on that size processor with that amount of RAM.
MS is not in a good position right now to start forcing the issue with the OEMs w/regard to netbooks. They have to tread lightly. Remember, just last year OEMs were perfectly happy with selling Linux netbooks until MS came to their senses and conceded to the XP licensing extension for netbooks only.
Especially considering that all the netbooks that were/are on order or in production right now are slated to be 32-bit only both by the chip manufacturer and OEM (for both hardware and software), it would be hard. I imagine there would be a significant backlash from netbook OEMs if they were forced to upgrade their hardware orders and drivers to 64-bit only. They would opt to either (1) continue with Windows XP, or (2) experiment more w/Linux. Obviously, MS doesn't want either of the above - they want everyone to start using Windows 7. They can't afford to alienate right now - it's not straight shot it once used to be.
Why would we *expect* the benchmarks for *the same hardware* to be very different under *controlled* conditions? You're just aggregating small differences in things like system call overhead over a long, long time. Why *should* the battery life playing a movie be any different, unless one or the other OSs had horribly broken power management?
The place where things get gnarly is on the edge; when you have *just* enough resources to run the current set of tasks; when you're just about to run out of memory, or the hard disk heads are skipping all over the place and disk I/O requests are piling up. These devices aren't intended for severe work loads, so the relevant questions are how many resources do these operating systems consume and does it leave enough headroom for what you have in mind?
A third question I learned to ask from using Vista is how much statistical spread is there in the average performance. Mildly poky performance is something you can live with. Great performance 99% of the time and 1% of time encountering painful slowness is much worse. Find a benchmark that measures that under a wide variety of realistic circumstances and you have a winner.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It could have made sense - if they'd showed us what the dreaded Vista did on that machine, but nooooo...
It would have been more useful to see boot times instead of 3DMark scores, but noooo...
Available free RAM right after bootup? Noooo...
What we are told, however, is that an OS can change the memory bandwidth. Who would have thought...? Microsoft's R&D division have really surpassed themselves this time!
In short, a pretty retarded test.
No sig today...
*facepalm*
An 8 year old production operating system with three service packs and too many patches to count.
*versus*
A pre-production release canidate that has alot of patches and service packs ahead of it in it's lifecycle.
The fact that XP can barely scrape a lead of 1-2% doesn't seem like any kind of victory. If anything, it's a fail. I can't believe the article didn't make this observation. In this case, Windows 7 is looking like a better choice than XP for netbooks.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Windows 2003 32-bit supports more than 4GB of ram (16GB) although the per-process limit remains the same. 2003 is very closely based on XP. It seems microsoft artificially locks 32-bit XP/Vista/7 down to 3.4GB in order to promote 64-bit adoption.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Contrary to what a lot of people thought, Vista loads most XP drivers quite happily - but only for the same architecture (of course). WinXP has almost no x64 drivers, meaning that the hardware support issue for Vista would have been *MUCH* worse than it was.
A lot of people still have CPUs incapable of x64. The original Core series and its accompanying Centrino chips, and the mobile Atom chips (that this whole article is based on, in case you hadn't noticed), are major reasons to keep around a 32-bit version for at least one more release (Win7, not Win8).
Why does this bother you so terribly much, anyhow? Are you also of the opinion that OS X 10.5 (comparable in time to Vista) should have dropped x86 (not to mention PPC, which Apple is dropping with the next release)? I really don't understand your vehemence.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Whether or not you or I can vLite a copy of Vista or grab an optimized image off of bittorrent isn't the point of this. It's an out-of-the-box test of the computing experience that your typical I-don't-give-a-shit-about-how-this-thing-works-just-let-me-watch-YouTube user will get.
Considering the variation seen in Vista/XP benchmarks, it's a valid concern and of interest to both home users and corporate shops.
Sure, that's what I was alluding to about msft's default config of vista. It's retarded, and has done immense reputational and financial damage to them (boo hoo). But it's hard to fix. About five minutes on google will do 95%.
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
erm, that should be "not hard to fix".
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
The intel atom cpu is 32 Bit. Shipping no 32 bit whatsoever would eliminate you from this very popular market.
Paul Thurott says Windows 7 will be the last 32-bit Windows although with the popularity of Atom I wonder if this will be true, even if the next Windows release takes another eight years.
He said that about Vista as well. It will not be the last 32 bit OS from MS. No way
"a lot less reboots when installing software/drivers/updates" is the first and best argument that might persuade me to migrate - do you have any references this is the case with Win7 ?
Lenovo IdeaPad S12 - 295956U - Black is $429 on shop.lenovo.com
(while the 295955U and 295954U are Atom-based and +$70).
Not really.
My 4-year-old 1.83GHz Pentium M laptop works just peachy with Vista and Windows 7.
It's a 32-bit CPU, though -- 64-bit laptops didn't particularly exist yet at that point in time. There is also no rational upgrade path to get the machine running some manner of x86 CPU.
Yeah, sure -- I'm statistically insignificant because I'm just me. But apparently someone at Microsoft seems to think I'm part of a substantial enough sample set to continue to release 32-bit OS's. So, I guess: Your opinion on the matter didn't count, and won't count until folks like me stop buying 32-bit operating systems.
Kid-proof tablet..
What would that be then: a 250GB HDD and a 17" screen? MS already managed to coerce the netbook market into turning netbooks from niche web-based appliances into mini-laptops which more closely resemble the power laptops of five years ago. Enough!
IYAM a netbook should:
- have solid state storage
- have a small footprint (no more 12" screens)
- be largely a web-based client: minimal local apps.
You want anything else: go buy a laptop!
Win7sp0
Wait a few years until Win7sp2 or Win7sp3.
XP is more mature. Linux is even more mature.
No it isn't. We should all buy new hardware just so we can run Vista?
Fsck that.
My blog
Not for the 5700, 5701 or 5702.
My blog
We need WIn7 to piss people like you off.... Mainly the reason Win7 is on 32bit because netbooks are able to run Win7. Hell, My Eee PC Seashell 1008HA runs Win7 like a beast with upgraded to 2gb RAM.
ITTechN00b
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I'm pissed because there already exist working stable OSs for the 32-bit users who absolutely can't go to 64-bit.
Yet we keep catering to these fuckers, so we'll never get the big push for 64-bit software and drivers.
Is there some reason someone on a 32-bit platform NEEDS Windows 7 over Vista or XP?
Fuck netbooks.
Worst thing to happen to computing in the last 2 decades.
Atom is shit.
Atom-based hardware doesn't need to be running Windows 7.
It wouldn't be that way if MS said "64-bit only" when they started talking about Windows 7.
XP licensing for netbooks only?
WTF is this bullshit. I've heard this FUD for almost a year now. I can STILL go to Dell's site and get XP on a regular desktop.
PAE is a trash hack, and it's not supported in Windows 7 anyway (as far as I know).
Itanium LOL.
Windows 7 is not a server OS.
No one with half a brain is going to run it on their fucking server. Actually making it impossible for them to do so would be helping them.
Well, that's your opinion, but if you were in charge of the Windows team would you choose to:
1. Release a 64 bit only OS and condemn yourself to failure in the netbook space, or
2. Release a 32 bit version which can run on Atom and have some chance of competing.
Only an utter moron would opt for option 1. And in case you hadn't noticed, MS owns the netbook market.
I still haven't seen a single reason why I need Vista or 7. Heck, Windows 2000 is still fine; I run it on one of my machines. I'm only running XP because that's what came on the machines. I could replace it with W2K and hardly notice the difference.
It wouldn't be that way if MS said "64-bit only" when they started talking about Windows 7.
Announced as 64-bit only restriction originally? That would not have been very smart considering they had even less say in the netbook market then, compared to now. Besides, as I already said in my other post, if they had done that, OEMs would be installing XP and Linux on cheap netbooks, not Windows 7, which is definitely not what MS wants, as they reportedly only make $15 per XP license on a netbook and not shoving their new product into the market.
XP licensing for netbooks only?
WTF is this bullshit. I've heard this FUD for almost a year now.
WTF bullshit - because that's when the shit was announced - just over a year ago. WTF - you couldn't find shit in the shittank? Here is your "bullshit" served on the shitplate just for the shitseekers who don't know WTF they are talking about. Shit!
I can STILL go to Dell's site and get XP on a regular desktop.
The XP downgrade program? Yes, you need to buy Vista "BONUS" system, meaning you are paying for a Vista license, then for the license to downgrade to XP on top of that - Dell does all that for you right here. I believe you can also get XP if you have volume licensing program from MS, mostly for large organizations who refused to use Vista. Besides these and netbooks, MS is finished w/selling XP licenses to OEMs.
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From the review:
But from what I can tell, Asus & Dell do not.
I think netbook customers will have to wait until 10/22 since the valid upgrade path is for Vista OEM'd products.
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
Wow someone had a bad day.
You keep spreading the FUD about XP being impossible to get though.
Netbooks don't have much memory, and fancy operating systems such as Windows Vista or Windows 7 use up a lot of system resources.Why use such a fancy OS for a computer meant for reading email and accessing the Internet.
Wow someone had a bad day.
Not really. Just replied with the same choice words just for fun.
You keep spreading the FUD about XP being impossible to get though.
Hmm... I remember saying XP licensing period was extended for netbooks. Nowhere did I say it was impossible to get. If that's how you took it, that is your problem. Feel free to go back and read again.
1, and tell Intel to stop gimping their 64-bit chips for no reason. Atom chips are 64-bit, but Intel flips the "lol fuck you" gate at the end.
"netbooks only"
That was a lie.
XP was extended multiple times in various forms, including support, site licensing, oem licensing / sales, and retail.
XP can be had for any fucking system you can buy.
That's what happens when you don't/can't read, even if the information is put right in front of your nose.
Sure does.
Maybe you'll learn to read in the future.