Windows 7 a do or die effort for Microsoft

By Stan Beer
Monday, 02 February 2009 15:19

Market

The so-called failure of Windows Vista has been heralded far and wide by industry watchers and assorted Microsoft haters. Microsoft was caught flat-footed without an operating system when the netbook phenomenon hit. Can Redmond can turn it around with Windows 7?

Personally, I don't have a problem with Vista. It works fine on the machine I'm using right now. The problem is this is my noisy, power chomping desktop with a super fast processor, giant monitor, tons of memory and all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a full blown desktop.

On the other hand, my dear little Eee PC netbook, with its 10-inch monitor, 92% keyboard, Celeron processor and 1G of RAM, was shipped with seven-year old Windows XP. There is no such thing as Vista for netbooks - therein lies the problem.

Vista is the antithesis of Green IT. It's bloated; it requires huge gobs of computing power; it's an anachronism in an age where everyone is talking about doing more with less.

With netbooks already an established hit in the consumer space and threatening to permeate the business world, Microsoft desperately needs, to paraphrase Steve Ballmer, the upgrade to Windows XP that Vista should have been.

Enter Windows 7. This is an operating system that has many of the features of Vista, hopefully without some of the bad ones (please no more endless UAC dialogue boxes).

Above all, however, Windows 7, unlike Vista, has a small footprint and is not a resources glutton. I know this to be a fact because I have the beta version running on my Eee PC and it works fine - and it's just a beta!

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