Microsoft Kills 3-App Limit For Windows 7 Starter Edition 352
Chabil Ha' writes "Heard the rumors that the much-maligned Windows 7 Starter Edition would be able to run more than three concurrent applications? Today, the Windows team made it official: 'Based on the feedback we've received from partners and customers asking us to enable a richer small notebook PC experience with Windows 7 Starter, we've decided to enable Windows 7 Starter customers the ability to run as many applications simultaneously as they would like, instead of being constricted to the 3 application limit that the previous Starter editions included. We believe these changes will make Windows 7 Starter an even more attractive option for customers who want a small notebook PC for very basic tasks, like browsing the web, checking email and personal productivity.' Small consolation, of course, if you want to watch a DVD natively, but I'm sure this won't stop the Slashdot crowd from enabling it."
Who says netbooks are only suited for basic tasks? (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft's line about netbooks being only suited for rudimentary computing tasks is full of shit.
I'm typing this on a eeepc: 1.6GHz Atom cpu, 2GB ram, blah blah blah. Microsoft (and others) may have this attitude that netbooks are only suitable for checking email, updating Facebook status, and the like ... and that you need a "real computer" for "real computing". That's absurd.
Yes, they're not the most powerful computers around. But they're about as powerful as desktops of five years ago. I run dozens of Firefox tabs, Skype, OpenOffice, GIMP, Picasa, Pidgin, my camera's timelapse software (Olympus Studio), and other stuff, often at the same time ... with no problems at all, and with plenty of CPU to spare. Of course I can do this -- people were loading old desktops this hard and nobody complained that they weren't "suitable for serious computing". If I wanted to run apache and serve webpages on this machine I certainly could -- I did it on my old crappy desktop when I was an undergrad, after all!
Saying that a netbook isn't a real computer is like saying a Toyota Yaris isn't a real car just because it only has a 100 hp engine. Sure, if you want to tow things you need something different -- just like if you want to play Crysis you need a desktop (replacement), and if you want to do lattice quantum chromodynamics you need a supercomputer.
A netbook is a small, full-featured computer that can make use of all of the flexibility of a full-featured operating system.
Re:Windows 7 is a good release (Score:0, Informative)
shill much?
Re:Windows 7 is a good release (Score:3, Informative)
From what I hear Windows 7 has as much chance of running on a netbook as Vista does, it'll be interesting how they take the knife to it to make it work as they are desperate to deny customers the choice of XP anywhere, while also denying Linux any of the market. All the while convince people to cough up a significant percentage of the netbook price for Windows. It's a fine balance and one that's gonna be hilarious to watch.
Still a POS (Score:3, Informative)
I especially like the part about not supporting XP mode... so it can't run XP apps... which are the only apps spec'd to run on it. Granted, XP mode is a VM hack that really can't run on it, but if you're not sticking with Windows for compatability on your netbook, wtf are you sticking with Windows for? Honestly, the only remaining compatibility issues on Linux are precisely the things Microsoft has banned from starter.
Re:Windows 7 is a good release (Score:3, Informative)
You don't have enough RAM, plain and simple. Instead of $5 worth, you should go for $20 worth.
Re:Still a POS (Score:3, Informative)
XP Mode doesn't work on Home, either. It's a tool to support business apps that couldn't be bothered to follow best practices for the last 10 years, not goofy consumer software. They don't mention it, but you can't logon to a domain from Starter, either.
Re:Windows 7 is a good release (Score:1, Informative)
Try putting XP and Vista both on modern, mid-range hardware. Say a C2D or C2Q with 2-4GB RAM. I guarantee you that Vista will run circles around XP.
What most people on Slashdot apparently don't realise is that XP and Vista are two different animals. XP will run fine on a machine with a small amount of memory, but guess what? It doesn't scale. Put a ton of memory into an XP box and you'll still see generally the same performance from the OS (though you may see performance improvements in programs that will use that memory). Vista won't do well with a small amount of memory, but give it 2 or 4GB and you'll see an overall performance increase that far surpasses anything that XP could do with the same amount.
This isn't even getting into Vista's DWM which offloads the UI from the CPU to the GPU, providing yet better performance. A simple test. Open up a CPU monitor in XP and open up a few explorer windows. Grab one of those windows and move it around the screen. Watch as your CPU spikes to 100% just by moving a simple window and watch how that window leaves ugly trails and blank areas in the underlying windows before it is able to redraw. Now do the same with Vista and watch how your CPU is barely touched and how all UI elements remain clean and fully drawn.
I have an XP x64 and Vista x64 dual boot setup on my PC (C2D 2.26GHz, 4GB RAM, Geforce 9600 GT). Vista is certainly faster than XP in every aspect of the OS. Running applications or games that are CPU dependant the two offer almost exactly equal performance.
Re:THIS JUST IN (Score:5, Informative)
The atom processor dosn't have the performance of a 1.5Ghz Pentium M. It has the equivalent performance in benchmarks of a 1.2Ghz P3 processor (circa early 2001) or a core2 with only one core running at about 750Mhz, or a 500Mhz Core 2 Duo. comparing Mhz between different processors is often like comparing apples to oranges.
Re:THIS JUST IN (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, it really should be ALWAYS, because anyone who knows a little about computer hardware design knows that there are a huge number of factors besides clock rate and in fact clock rate is really meaningless by itself. Things like length of the pipeline, in-order vs out-of-order execution, cache size and associativity, etc, are all probably as or more important than clock rate. For example, if you have a tiny cache or a badly designed one, your processor is going to keep hitting main memory, which wastes a ton of cycles, so most of the clock cycles will be wasted waiting for memory to respond anyway. I would expect someone on slashdot at the least to know that you can't just compare clock rates like that, and possibly even understand why the Atom does much less per clock than other architectures.
Re:I think they're finally listening to slashdot (Score:2, Informative)
Ummm, I was in Thailand when the Starter Edition was first introduced, and it was in response to the "Eua Athorn" computer that Thaksin was targetting toward low-income people. It was a Celeron computer based on a localized version of Linux created by NECTEC's OpenTLE team, and the organization sold (pre-order) almost a million of them. Before that, retail copies of MS Windows were the same price all over the world, but MS broke that rule for Thailand, establishing the $5 Starter Edition and getting it as an install option on the "Eua Athorn" computer when it was picked up.
Needless to say, most people chose to have the Starter Edition pre-installed for $5 rather than to learn a new operating system.
That's the first place the OS appeared and it was the first hole to appear in the MS price dam. There's no thinking or opinion about it -- it's just history. The anti-piracy spin happened later, but wasn't successful, at least in Thailand. No one wanted to pay $5 for a crippled version they had to install themselves when they could get a full one (pirated) for the same price. Since there's no real enforcement of consumer-level infringement, there's also no concern about the legality.
WRT the netbook issue, these are two sides of the same coin. Netbooks appeared with Linux because the early ones couldn't support Vista on 256MB RAM (as opposed to running like crap, which some later ones do). XP was scheduled for EOL. MS had to react. In order not to lose the market on those devices, it had to extend the life of XP, and in order to be competitive, it had to lower the price.
Oh for crying out loud (Score:5, Informative)
You know, for posters on a technology site, there are a lot of people here who have no idea what the hell they are talking about when it comes to technology. I'll type this slowly so people can keep up:
WINDOWS 7 DOES NOT NEED XP MODE TO RUN XP APPS!
Windows 7, just like Vista, has native compatibility for XP apps. Win32 binaries execute just fine. It does not use a new API, etc. You can take just about any program and install it on Windows 7 and it'll work out of box. That even includes 64-bit Windows 7. It has the same thing that 64-bit Vista and XP do, called Windows on Windows 32. It allows for 32-bit apps to run in a 64-bit OS with basically no speed difference.
Here's a brief list of apps I've personally tested and found to work in Windows 7 64-bit RC1. This is by no means complete, just ones I've tested myself that I remember:
Firefox 3, Thunderbird 2, Office 2003, Office 2007, SSH Secure Shell 3.2.9, FreeSSHd, Textpad 5.2.0, Winamp 5.55, Acrobat 9.0, Cadence SPB 16.02, WMWare 6.5, Visual Studio 2008, WinMIPS64, Labview 8, Steam, Impulse, World of Warcraft, Mass Effect, Sony Vegas 8, Sony Sound Forge 9, Adobe Audition 3.
There's plenty more, this is just what I remember off the top of my head in a small sampling of different areas (consumer, programming engineering, audio production, video production, networking, etc).
Almost all apps will run fine in Windows 7 as is. Thus, most copies of Windows 7 do not have XP mode available, and even those that do don't ship with it, you have to download it.
So, what's it for then? Well three major classes of things you might encounter:
1) Apps with a 16-bit component, or entirely 16-bit. While 32-bit Windows 7 can run 16-bit apps with WOW16, 64-bit Windows can't. So, if you need to run a 16-bit app, XP mode will do that for you since it is a 32-bit XP VM.
2) Apps that interface with hardware that doesn't have Windows 7 drivers. An app that uses a dongle might be an example. If the manufacturer won't release a driver that works with 7, then you are out of luck. However, with XP mode, you install the driver in XP (is passes through USB devices) and you can use it.
3) Apps that install a kernel mode driver that is incompatible with 7. Again a lot of this will be 64-bit stuff since while 32-bit apps run fine in 64-bit Windows, all kernel mode code must be 64-bit. Again you might encounter this with old copy protection since that kind of stuff often like to use kernel drivers.
Now as should be pretty evident, that is really rare shit. This isn't something most people will have a problem with. However, some businesses do, and thus MS is offering them a solution. They are saying "If you have an old app that just won't work in 7 and you can't get it updated, just download a free XP VM from us, and run it in that."
That's all. Most Windows apps run JUST FINE with no update at all. Even those that do need to be updated, it is an update, not a complete rewrite. The fundamental APIs are still the same. You aren't redoing the whole thing from scratch for new architecture.
So please, stop with the FUD. Get your information correct.
P.S. Not including DVD playback is highly unsurprising because it isn't free. MPEG-2 and CSS both require licenses to include in software. It is not surprising MS isn't going to pay for those licenses on low cost software.
Re:Who says netbooks are only suited for basic tas (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who says netbooks are only suited for basic tas (Score:1, Informative)
If 10 years ago you would have told me that I'd be running a miniature search engine on my computer, crawling and indexing my filesystems to save me the trouble of finding files, I'd say you were nuts.
LOL. Ten years ago I was running a search engine on my desktop. Microsoft's content indexing server was introduced in the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack in 1998 and it's a standard part of Windows now. Bizarrely, it didn't come with a search UI but it only took a couple of hours to knock up a web page to interface with it. And I've been using it to index my machines ever since. Google didn't invent search.
Re:THIS JUST IN (Score:4, Informative)
I would expect someone on slashdot at the least to know that you can't just compare clock rates like that, and possibly even understand why the Atom does much less per clock than other architectures.
While we're on the subject, Anandtech made a good article explaining the technical details behind the it. [anandtech.com]