No. 1 Story
ACCC clears Optus to scrap HFC network and use NBN instead
The ACCC has cleared, provisionally, the proposed deal between Optus and NBN Co under which Optus is to be paid around $800m to shut down its HFC network and transfer customers onto the NBN. read more"Windows 7 crippleware!" scream outraged netbook owners
Stan Beer
Monday, 01 June 2009 06:08
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Comments from irate users centered mainly around the
artificially imposed lack of DVD playback, no media streaming, no
personalisation and no media centre. Fewer have noted the lack of XP
mode.The fact that Windows XP runs so well on netbooks and requires fewer resources to do a similar job to both Vista and Windows 7 has been an expensive embarrassment to Microsoft.
So strong has been user loyalty to XP that Microsoft has been forced to offer "XP Mode" as a feature of Windows 7 in the hope of enticing existing XP users to make the switch to the more expensive new operating system.
For price conscious netbook users, however, Microsoft is playing a different game. New netbook users won't even get basic features already available on Windows XP, such as DVD playback, unless they upgrade to a more expensive version of Windows 7.
Windows 7 requires considerably more resources than XP to run and hardware vendors such as Dell and Asus have fallen into line by considerably beefing up their versions of netbooks to 10 inch displays, 1 GB RAM minimum, 160 GB hard drives and at least Atom N270 processors. Small notebooks is a more apt description of the new generation of so-called netbooks.
The ground breaking Asus Eee PC 701 running Linux (and later XP) seems to be disappearing into distant memory. Once again, Microsoft looks like it is succeeding in manipulating the hardware market by flexing its Windows muscle.
The issue for Microsoft, however, is that the Eee PC 701 revealed an underlying demand for real netbooks.
The question is whether Linux implementations such as Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Intel's Moblin 2.0 and Android, running on a new range of small netbook hardware based the Atom and VIA hardware platforms, could once again sneak under Microsoft's guard.
Microsoft managed to beat off the Linux netbook challenge by resurrecting Windows XP at give-away prices. It can't do that again using an artificially crippled version of Windows 7 that doesn't even have DVD playback.
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