Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 04 November 2008 13:11
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference brought forth the
unsurprising news that Microsoft wants to take the netbook market back
from Linux and XP, and to dominate it instead with Windows 7.
An
article over at APCMag asks the question if Windows 7 for netbooks is coming, before answering it by explaining that Microsoft’s Windows man, Steven Sinofsky, had demo’d Windows 7 on stage at PDC running on a Lenovo netbook with 1.5GB of RAM.
Just as plenty of other publications have now tested Windows 7 running on a netbook, I’ve done the same too, loading the Windows 7 pre-beta on two netbooks: an Asus Eee PC 1000H and HP Mininote 2133.
As I reported in my
article “Windows 7 pre-beta: it really rocks”, the Windows 7 experience on netbooks with 1GB of RAM is much better than that of Windows Vista, speeding things up even at this early pre-beta stage.
APCMag’s article
quoted Sinofsky explaining why Microsoft thought Windows Vista wasn’t popular on netbooks, which boiled down to small capacity SSD’s on early netbooks.
But with netbooks now coming with up to 160GB of hard disk space, Windows XP’s lower hardware requirements and faster speed are obvious reasons why XP was the preferred Microsoft choice, although Dell is running Windows Vista on its new 12-inch netbook, bucking the XP trend.
The threat from Linux is another loud and clear reason why Microsoft needs to make sure Windows 7 works as smoothly on netbooks as possible, bucking the other trend of new versions of Windows always needing faster equipment.
In today’s world, we’re certainly getting faster processors with Intel’s Core i7 processors, ever better video cards from AMD and NVIDIA and ever larger hard drives and SSDs.
Continued on page 2.
