Windows 7 is good, maybe even great. But it's not magic

I'll have to try this on my Q1 sometime. Vista ran relatively well on it, all things considered; though it did not have aero enabled. I actually preferred using Vista on it rather than XP, amazingly enough. ironically, the opposite is true about my dell M4300 -- while the laptop is a powerhouse as I've configured it, the display adapter isn't nearly powerful enough to drive the 1920x1200 display with graphics enhancements and stuff using the quadro FX 360M in vista. it's painful to use, and I'm not sure if the problem lies with dell's custom driver or the card itself, but i regret not getting a system with discreet graphics, in any case. while vista's processing performance is flawless on that system, the graphical performance is less so.

Did you try disabling Aero? I just recently installed Windows 7 6956 on a 1200MHz Sony VAIO laptop with 512MB RAM and it run fairly well, considering.

While I'd guess from the demos that Windows 7 may have lighter hardware requirements than Windows Vista, it's pretty silly to assume it will run on any arbitrary hardware. As Paul said, it's not magic. And nobody claimed it was. Now, when we actually see the hardware requirements then we'll know something.

i am going to test win7 on my netbook when the beta is released to us, hopefilly tomorrow. mine has 2gb of ram, though. it's an asu 1000ha.

FYI: Mary Jo Foley says her sources say Windows 7 Server beta goes out on Thursday and Windows 7 Client beta goes out on Friday. Take that for what it's worth since it's totally based on rumor.

This surprise me, actually. I'm assuming that the machice is Fujitsu U810/1010. This is the machine that my mom used for quite some time. While it's not really smooth, I can run vista with Aero enable and have a very usable machine. The only scenerios that seem to make what Paul said happen to me is when I try to 1. Work with a video running 2. Video Chat 3. Put it with Dell 2407WFP monitor. I'm not sure what make the different here.

A netbook with a 1.6GHz Atom runs Win7 really well... I have been using a Dell Mini9 for the last three months as my main non-dev machine and it runs great (as in really great). I sprung for 2GB of RAM ($20) and I have a 16GB SSD. It goes everywhere with me, even shopping and the dentist, which shows how sad I am. But I love the combo.. a truly personal computer at last. Great for watching movies on flights (on Media Center). I love the power supply (effectively a cellphone charger) and lack of moving parts / fans.. more like a consumer electronics device. The suspend/resume performance is wicked. I haven't turned on the iPod touch since I got this thing. And it runs full office and windows live essentials. And I only paid $350 for it.

Zero: How do you like the keyboard on your Mini?

"Are you comparing the computing experience with Ubuntu to MS-Dos?" Hmmm. Both are serial character stream operating systems with the option of a GUI pasted on... But, no, even I'd admit that Linux has had more stuff kluged on top of their serial character stream OS over the years. Of course, that may be because MS-DOS hasn't had people adding a bag on a bag on a bag to it in almost 20 years now.

I can confirm that Windows 7 runs very well on old or slow hardware like netbooks or 5 year old notebooks (I'm running it on two old notebooks - 2,66GHz Pentium 4, 1GB RAM, very very slow 80GB IDE harddisk).

Lindy "It funny how the "Winmin" concept has just been dropped and you dont here much about it anymore." Actually, nobody who understood "MinWin" (not Winmin, btw) was discussing it much at all because refactoring and other maintenance isn't that exciting or, for that matter understandable to non programmers. The people with the bizarre concepts that it was a rewrite of the OS didn't have a clue about what they were saying. But, that didn't stop them from making it up as they went along. And getting lots of people to claim the bogus stories were true. Consider it another of those tests that help you figure out which "journalists" deserve having the air quotes around the title and which don't.

so paul personally owns a vista capable piece of junk computer that chokes on it, and he thinks apple is evil? chutzpah this man has.

I think Paul should just turn Aero and all other eye candies off. I don't expect my 7 year old Dell to run Vista but it did. Slow it was, but usable, as long as I don't turn all the fancy stuffs on. Why I did that? I had to try.

I knew COWS probably had several other acronyms for COWS. There's probably many more. i also anticipated that you knew more than most of us. My next avatar will be a fish, but he's camera shy.

The Free Dictionary lists 37 acronyms for COWS. And since we're on trivia, it's nice to see acronym used correctly rather than as a substitute for abreviation. (For those not aware of the difference, an acronym has to be pronouncable and typically pronounced as a separate word. If it isn't pronounced then it's an abbreviation. COWS, RADAR, SCUBA and LASER are acronyms. CP/M, IM and AC are abreviations)

>>I'm sure, to some people, it is.<< It is. It can do all of the most common tasks just as well as Windows and Mac OS X, and some of the more uncommon ones too.

I am sure there is a future in netbooks and 7. When it ships the standard netbook will probably have 2gig min, and the dual core atom. SSD drives are the future. Netbooks today, are single core and 512meg of ram on the average. http://www.target.com/ASUS-8-9-Netbook-Computer-Windows/dp/B001E1OQW2/sr...

Couple things: * As mentioned above, did you try turning Aero off? * It may be that the Intel chipset commonly bundled with Atom is actually useful in accelerating Aero, while your UMPC may not be bundled with a similarly-capable chipset. * Some good, comparative Atom performance data is here: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3321 * Based on what I've seen, an Atom is about the same speed as the 1.0 GHz Pentium M CPUs shipped several years ago. Useful and affordable Atom alternatives include used Dell Latitude X1 and X300 PCs for $250-$350. They're similarly light about the same speed and include 12.1" screens, so the physical dimensions are slightly larger. Atom battery life is better and hardware acceleration allows Netbooks to play high definition video, which an older Pentium M might struggle with. For $600 or so, you can get a used Compaq 2510p, which is around an inch thick, includes a built-in DVD drive and a Core2 CPU that stomps the crud out of the Atom CPU.

"It may be that the Intel chipset commonly bundled with Atom is actually useful in accelerating Aero, while your UMPC may not be bundled with a similarly-capable chipset." As of right now, the Atom processor only comes with a 945GC chipset, which includes the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950. NVIDIA wants to change that with their new Ion platform, which couples it with an NVIDIA chipset with built in GeForce 9400GS. Intel won't let them - yet. The GMA 950 supports Aero, but it's the lowest-end graphics chipset from Intel that does. It is a DirectX9 part (some processing is still done on the CPU though), and since Vista SP1, Microsoft has changed the WHQL cert for "Premium" Windows experiences to require a DirectX10.0 GPU (SP1 includes DX10.1 support too), even though Aero only requires DirectX9 hardware. That means that for the foreseeable future, no Atom-based system will carry the Designed for Windows Vista Premium logo certification. I hate that. In the Samsung Q1, the Celeron systems shipped mostly with Intel 915 chipsets, which include the 915G graphics controller. It doesn't support Aero, but I wonder if the current beta of Windows 7 includes the "WARP10" technology that supports DirectX10 (and Aero) in software.... Paul, that might be why the graphics are so slow. Also, the 915G doesn't always support 128MB of graphics memory, and for that chipset, it's up the OEM to decide if the graphics controller has reserved system RAM, as well as the maximum amount of RAM that can be used by the graphics controller. With the advent of the GMA 950, Intel made more options available to OEM's, but always allowed enough RAM to be available to graphics as to insure that Aero would function properly.

>>You said it is both "as useful" and that it can do "all of the most common tasks" and "some of the more uncommon ones". If it's "as useful" it has to be able to do ALL the tasks, not just a selected subset.<< If we're going to turn on semantics, Ok: Linux can do anything Mac OS can. Mac OS can do anything Windows can. Windows can do anything Linux can. It may not run the same software to do it, but all three do the same thing.

Windows 7 benchmarks: http://lifehacker.com/5124955/windows-7-beta-boasts-sub+30-second-boot-time

@mikegalos: "Or, for that matter, MS-DOS or Windows 95 as long as we're going to talk about old operating systems." Not worth the virus and trojan troubles that your typical Microsoft OS brings with it - including the old dogs like MSDOS and Win95.

Log off ocean. For good. Thanks.

Ocean The Windows 7 boot time article was interesting (although premature since beta OS timing is always suspect) For those not reading it, the author time both boot to fully loaded desktop and boot to logon screen. In both cases: Fastest was Windows 7 Ultimate build 7000 (assumed to be the upcoming beta). Next was the PDC build of Windows 7 Ultimate Third was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 Slowest was Windows XP Professional SP3. Interestingly for all those people who believe the stories about Vista performance, Windows Vista was faster than Windows XP by a greater margin than Windows 7 was over Windows Vista.

Im running Windows 7 Beta 1 on an old Celeron 2.66ghz, 1gb of Ram and a Nvidia x5600 with surprising results. I thought it would be lagging to hell but its actually quite smooth, not as smooth as my higher end machine but more than bearable. Any ideas what they have took out or modified to make it run better on low end machines?