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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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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
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
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."
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
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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.
That is why I recommend DSL Linux on older laptops where the battery is starting to lose charge. On this 733MHz SFF I'm typing on it is using barely 40Mb of RAM and that is with the TORAM option flag set, which loads the whole thing to RAMdisk! Which means on even a machine as old as this 733MHz with 384Mb of RAM it flies and programs load as fast as I can click them.
To be fair though, there IS a version of WinXP floating around the Internet called "TinyXP Beast Edition" that gives you all the Vista pretty and still only consumes 63Mb of RAM running the desktop. MSFT has just never been good at tweaking their OSes for speed. Maybe they should hire the TinyXP dudes to make a "Tiny 7 Monster Edition"? And for those that scream "Piracy!" for me daring to mention TinyXP? You can actually use your own key with it like I did and it works just fine. It is just easier to download a pre-tweaked version that to spend all that time tweaking it yourself. Oh and it has SP3 already slipstreamed, whereas my retail disk is XP SP2.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I've tried a stripped-down pirate version (called XP JACKed Edition, IIRC) that would boot and run in a virtual machine limited to 20 MB RAM. It worked fairly well, I even used it to play games like Oblivion for a while (not in a VM, though). XP can be remarkably lightweight.
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
Just use nLite, which is probably what TinyXP was made with (to begin with). Getting rid of everything you don't use and disabling unnecessary services can save a lot of disk space and reduce memory usage significantly. It works with Windows 2000 too.
There are even analogs of nLite for Windows 98 if you want to go even slimmer.
No existe.