The superlight sub-notebook computer format has interested me since at least the mid-90’s, but for the most part tiny, portable computers seemed like a half thought-through niche product. Starting about a year ago, it appears that Asus and now pretty much everyone have hit on a winning formula that deservedly opened a huge new segment of the computer market.
Like most professional scientists Dr. Mrs. Dr. F and I usually arrange our talks at the last minute, often on the plane on the way to a conference. Given the bulk of most laptops and their life support systems, it is hard to ignore the appeal of a super-battery life computer the size of a day planner. Too bad for me, when I walked into Best Buy today they had just cleaned out their PC shelves to make room for new models that run Windows 7. For travel reasons we need one of these things pretty soon, so I am turning to you guys for help.
Has anyone tried Windows 7? I could wait until Monday and buy a new model, but past experience makes me skeptical. I had the dubious pleasure of managing digital microscopes separately controlled by Windows ME and Vista , the two biggest mistakes in the history of operating system rollouts and I fucking dare you to convince me otherwise. Plus I’m still coping with post-clippy stress syndrome. I like the idea of a portable computer running a minimal necessary OS*. Should I find an XP-powered netbook online and hope that it ships in time? Maybe you guys can convince me that Win 7 will not crash and burn like Windows f*cking ME.
If you have a netbook and want to let others know how great it is, or if you want to warn others away, feel free to share. Any and all advice will be appreciated.
(*) One other baffling point – as I recall Windows XP is just a prettier and memory-intensive graphics upgrade of Windows 2000. So why not ship netbooks with Win2K? That should free up the minimal processor and the RAM to work on computing tasks rather than unnecessary microsoft crapware. Apparently I don’t know anything about computers.
Kid G
I haven’t personally used it, but Windows 7 sounds like the bomb. I have a recently bought (2.5 months old) Windows Vista machine, and I am very happy with it so far. If it’s true that Windows 7 puts Vista to shame like most reviews have said, it must be a slam dunk.
As it is, I find Vista more stable than Mac OS X, and the only thing that annoys me about it is the User Account Control, but that’s only a minor thing.
Atlliberal
It has to be way better than Vista. My Desktop is a little over a year old and I’ve seen the blue screen of death more in the last year than I did since I started using computers combined.
I’d get the windows 7 one, or alot of places have advertised that if you buy a pc with vista on it, they’ll upgrade it for free.
Tim F.
@Kid G: You are wrong about the last point. Plug some peripherals into Win 7 and you will find hell on earth. Plus, for a laugh, check out your system monitor to find out how much memory Vista sucks just spinning its wheels on idle.
soonergrunt
I am typing this on a windows 7 beta install on a dell laptop. Win7 is fast, clean, and everything that Vista should’ve been. Don’t hesitate to get the windows7 machine if it’s available, and wait a few days for one if you can’t get it yet.
Most netbooks run either windows xp or linux. XP is XP. Linux–you need to be fairly technically savvy to use linux. Even with Ubuntu, which is the most user friendly version, you still need to be much mor technically savvy than you do with the windows platform.
I’ve used both, and I have linux running on a home server. Linux doesn’t bother me at all. That said, I’m upgrading all three desktops and all three laptops in my house to windows 7 as soon as I can.
James K Polk, Esq.
I have two netbooks, both running win7 release candidate.
Dell mini 9 (Supposedly, you can put OSX on the mini 9 with no loss of functionality)
Asus eeePC 900a
Both are fantastic, light machines. They have small advantages and disadvantages to each, I like the Asus one because of the multitouch trackpad. Because of the solid state hard drive, they don’t produce enough heat to require a fan, and thus have zero moving parts (completely silent). The small keyboards are somewhat cramped, but you get used to it. Battery life with heavy WiFi usage is about 3.5-4 hrs.
Everyone who gets their hands on one of my machines wants one of their own.
Kirby
@Kid G I’ve heard good things about Windows 7, especially as it compares to Vista, but more stable than Mac OS X seems a little weird to me. I’ve been running 1 Windows machine and 3 OS X machines for the last 4 years, and have literally never had a system failure on any of the mac machines.
Kirby
@Kid G I’ve heard good things about Windows 7, especially as it compares to Vista, but more stable than Mac OS X seems a little weird to me. I’ve been running 1 Windows machine and 3 OS X machines for the last 4 years, and have literally never had a system failure on any of the mac machines.
Kid G
@ Tim F:
I haven’t plugged serious peripherals into Vista, but I have no problems with Plug and Play devices like USB keys and a mouse. I have 4 GB of RAM, and at startup, Vista uses 31%. After going into and out of hibernation and using programs for a few days, it seems to top out at 42%. I have not reached over 60% memory usage since I started using it. I have read that Windows 7 is comparable to XP in memory usage, meaning that on today’s PCs it should be a rocket. It also has solid power usage characterisitics (I will admit readily that Vista is a resource hog, and that I can only squeeze about 2.5 hours of battery life even in power saver mode), although it’s not quite as efficient as OS X:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31012_7-10319612-10355804.html?tag=TOCmoreStories.0
Airmon
I’ve been using Windows 7 for most of 6 months now and I’m very happy with it. It’s much more like Vista than like Windows XP, but for my money it’s better and faster than Vista, at least it feels like it. I have not had many problems, but all of the computers I have it on ( 4 of them ) all are pretty modern with dual core processors and 3+ gig of memory.
While it still uses a lot of memory, computers today HAVE a lot of memory, so I think that’s less of a problem. I have run Windows 7 on computers with just 1G of memory and it’s better than Vista, but not as good as XP, IMHO.
I haven’t used it on a netbook ( I don’t have any…) and while I’ve heard it’s good there, I’m not sure I’m ready to give the combination of netbook and Windows 7 my stamp of approval due to the reduced CPU and memory available. Netbooks are, performance wise, like laptops of a few generations back and I’d not recommend using 7 on one of those…
Doctor Gonzo
One thing about Microsoft: they do learn from their OS catastrophes and haven’t had two bad releases in a row.
ME was rightfully panned, and XP was a huge upgrade. Vista was again rightfully panned, and Windows 7 sounds awesome. I’ve played around with the beta and had no complaints, and I pre-ordered it in July and I’m actually looking forward to installing it next weekend to replace my four-year-old copy of XP 64-bit.
@Kirby, I think it’s debatable whether Windows 7 is more stable. My girlfriend has a Mac, and let me tell you, that thing has just as many problems as my XP machine. Hopefully it will have less as I replaced that useless bloated iPhoto with Picasa for Mac.
Uloborus
I have no personal experience with Win 7. My experience with Vista is limited and unbelievably bad. However, my father is the head programmer and partner in a UK-based PC utilities company, and I will pass on what I have heard, which isn’t much:
Vista is an awesomely badly made product, but if you get both service packs it becomes basically functional. It has some very serious flaws built into its design.
Windows 7 has a reputation among the technical set for being actually functional and not riddled with crippling bugs. This is damning with faint praise, but apparently Windows is not a quality control wonderland in general.
Old versions can’t be used effectively because industry standards of how memory, graphics, and so on have changed. Old versions would be crippled trying to use current applications.
Win 7 may work, but changes in Microsoft administration do not suggest quality will go up.
This is all hearsay, but admittedly it’s hearsay from a man who can build a computer from the ground up, including motherboards, CPU design, and operating system. But that may mean the things he cares about are TOO technical.
Comrade Jake
Pick up a MBA running Snow Leopard and never look back.
Kid G
@Kirby:
I have an iMac, admittedly it’s a couple of years old, but I run Snow Leopard on it. There are regular random program crashes that I experience, which doesn’t ever happen to me on Vista. One thing I absolutely hate about Macs is that if one window of a program runs a troublesome process (e.g. a Java applet in Firefox), the system will often hang up (rainbow spinning wheel) and I will have to force quit the entire program, with even the unaffected windows closing. Maybe you could blame this on the application’s programmers, but it still affects the overall feel of the system.
Beauzeaux
I have a Samsung NC10 (Samsung offers some of the sharpest screens available on netbooks) and run both XP and the pre-release version Windows 7 on it. I bought it pretty much as a toy, but I have been quite surprised at how much I use it and enjoy using it. The only thing I don’t like is the stupid rocker-button instead of dedicated left and right click buttons beneath the track pad.
Steve Balboni
Given the track record of new Windows roll-outs I don’t see what could possibly go wrong.
Triumph
Win 7 is pretty good, but if you don’t plan on doing much other than some word processing and internet browsing than you don’t really need anything more than a netbook running xp.
If you DO want a nice, new model I would recommend the HP 311. Otherwise just pick out an older model to your taste that runs XP. I like my MSI Wind just fine.
bago
@Tim F.:Tim, you are correct. You don’t know much about computers. What you see as idle ram usage is actually superfetch, preloading files you are likely to load into memory so that when you ask for them they are already there, and don’t have to be spooled off of disk.
cleek
@Uloborus:
nothing personal, but i disagree 100%. i’ve been using Vista on multiple machines since it was in beta, and i’ve had no problems at all with it. not one. after i turned off the UAC, that is. after turning that off, Vista is great.
in fact, in the past five years or so, the only machines which have given me any significant problems have been the XP boxes i’ve used.
i haven’t used Weven, but i’ve heard from many knee-jerk Vista-haters that it’s awesome.
Mike E
I am looking to get an Acer lappy and win 7 is being highly touted–by friends and random commentors. One tip: diligently remove all unnessary programs immediately, and rub cheetah blood on the HD
bvac
Windows 7 is pretty solid. I don’t know about your microscopes, but it has had drivers for everything I’ve thrown at it (except for an old, discontinued sound card). The 64-bit support seems excellent, and installing 64 and 32-bit software side by side is not a problem, which I think was a pain in the ass in Vista 64. That said, I’ve used Vista for 2 or 3 years and it was the most stable, resource friendly windows OS for workstation use I’ve ever used… period. I think Win 7 will get there by the time it’s finally released and a few updates are released.
For a netbook, try an OS designed specifically for netbooks. Jolicloud or Moblin, for instance.
toujoursdan
I have an Asus netbook with Ubuntu on it. It works well enough for simple browsing, but I miss the number of choices for 3rd party software that comes with Windows. If you can get a netbook with Window 7 go for it.
I seem to be the only person who didn’t have much trouble with Vista, and I am power user who does video conversion and other tasks. That said, I am looking forward to the speed boost of Windows 7.
Michael
We got the HP netbook, and love the thing. we get a solid 3.5 to 4 hours out of the battery and it runs XP.
Bad Horse's Filly
Ooo, a Netbooks thread. How timely for me. Once you get past Tim F.’s Windows 7 question, can you fill me in on what to look for in a Netbook. I’m just starting my research and trust you guys to pass along the good, bad and ugly of what’s out there. Thanks.
Martin
Windows 7 is nice (we’ll see how security shakes out), but netbooks blow. If you have a very specific use for them (I’d consider one if I was constantly travelling and giving presentations, for instance) they’re fine, but they suck for getting any real work done and if you’re just going to check your email and surf the web, you’re probably getter off with an iPhone or other non-sucking smart phone.
Just my $.02.
And you can pry my Mac laptop w/VMWare out of my cold, dead fingers. Mac OS X is great, but Mac OS X + Windows 7 is better.
Joe
I’m using Windows 7 at work (corporate clients have had it since August.) I like it a lot for e-mail, document management and web usage. It feels less intrusive than my Vista boxes at home. I wouldn’t hesitate to get it on a new notebook. I have not yet seen it on a netbook, but I have seen it perform adequately on a 2006-era Pentium D with 4 GB of RAM.
daveX99
gulp. Do I have to be the first to step out and suggest Ubuntu?
I have a 9 inch asus eeePC (& an eeeBox – their desktop version). They both came with XP installed, but I only boot that up once to make sure the machine is functional. I then put Ubuntu on it.
That’s not necessarily for the uninitiated, but you can buy eeePC’s with Linux pre-installed (Xandros, as opposed to Ubuntu).
In any case, I love my little netbook. It never crashes. My one regret is that I should probably have bought the 10 inch version as it comes with a more normal-sized keyboard. The more I use this itty bitty one, though, the fewer tyypows I make (smiley).
Mine came with a 160G hard drive as opposed to the solid state drives. The solid states are supposed to be faster, but come with much less capacity. I decided I wanted to be able to load all my mp3s on my netbook so I’d always have them w/me.
Go down to BestBuy (or whatever), and check them out and type on some of them. You don’t have to buy it there, just check them out to see if the size is okay for you. I really dig the portability. It makes my old thinkpad look like one of those room-sized ENIACs.
Jon
Win7 is the best version yet, but only a fool would buy a machine with a new version of Windows in its first week of release. No OS survives first contact with the user base.
XP is old as hell, but has most of the corners rubbed off by now, so it should be easy enough to cope with.
As for the netbooks themselves, the Mini 9 is great except for some odd decisions on the placement of certain punctuation which REALLY throws you at first. The Mini10 and 10v do not have this issue and I would say a 10-inch netbook is probably the sweet spot.
Most of all, don’t look for speed – the Atom-based netbook is about the same speed as a good laptop from 2005.
Google is purportedly working up a real game-changer – a netbook where the browser IS the interface, with just enough remaining OS to drive the hardware. If you’re willing to sell your soul to Google, it should be truly interesting, but that’s a ways off.
bago
That being said, win 7 is solid. The only way I have gotten it to bluescreen has been by re-enabling a driver after a fault was detected and shorting the USB bus.
srv
You can’t do science with atom chips
Fern
I had to replace my laptop last week, and wasn’t able to wait for the new operating system. People whose judgment I respect about these things are telling me that Windows 7 is definitely an improvement so I will go for the upgrade ASAP.
I got an HP this time – I’ve had two Acers in a row that each had to be replaced within 18 months of purchase. So far, I’m happy with the HP – I got a discontinued model and it was really inexpensive.
I have to say those netbooks are cute as anything – my brother got one because of the weight factor – he does a lot of international travel. I have not yet come up with a reason why I have to have one, but I’m working on it.
stinkwrinkle
I’ve been using 7 full-time at work ever since it became available, and I’d say it’s completely usable. I speak as a sysadmin who thinks XP is okay, but showing it’s age, and Vista is okay if you run it on a high-powered machine (which means 4 or more gigs of RAM, which means 64 bit, which can be iffy if you have niche hardware or software needs).
I have heard that some USB peripherals will make it bluescreen, but I’m all the time plugging in wierd USB stuff, and I’ve never had a problem. YMMV.
Bonus: it seems to run quite well on underpowered machines, which is another way to say “netbooks”. Are you thinking of using the netbook as your main computing resource? If so, man, are you going to be unhappy. I have one, but I wouldn’t dream of typing on it, or web browsing, for that matter. It’s extremely portable, you’ll take it with you when you might not take a more capable computer, but it is not a substitute for a real computer.
daveX99
@toujoursdan – I see you actually beat me by mentioning Linux 1st while I was typing… Not to be too zealous, but I will never leave Windows on any of my machines – & I’m really not keen on Mac, either.
I really dig Linux & the Open Source software (free as in beer & speech). I’m curious what 3rd party software you like that isn’t available in Linux. My experience is that there is an open source alternative for most of the common software out there.
-dave
bago
For the sake of reference, I’ve been running vista, ubuntu, and win 7 on my laptop for 6 months or so.
Wile E. Quixote
I’ve tried Windows 7 and it’s fast and crisp. I’m not sure how crisp it would be compared to XP, but it’s not as stultifyingly horrible as Vista was. It boots in a decent amount of time, has nice features and just seems a lot cleaner than Vista was. If considering a netbook I’d take it over XP just for the added security features it has.
Splitting Image
I might put them #2 and #3. Commodore’s release of Workbench 2.0 for the Amiga would be awful hard to beat. After pulling out of the business market and focusing on game machines, Commodore built an OS that was meant to convince people the Amiga was a powerhouse business machine and deliberately designed to be as anti-gamer as possible.
Predictable results followed.
Beauzeaux
@Jon: This isn’t really the first contact of the OS with its user base. The folks at Microsoft were smart to make two pre-release versions of Windows 7 available for free to anyone who wanted to try it, because this allowed them to test the OS on a wide variety of hardware and get rid of any major bugs. As a result the OS is extremely stable.
Wile E. Quixote
@dave
As someone who has been working with Linux for over a decade and UNIX for 20 years. I have to say that open source software is free only if you assume that your time has no value. Linux is great as a server OS but, and this is despite the impressive advances made by the folks at Debian/Ubuntu, is still lacking as a desktop OS. And as far as all of the great open source alternatives out there, yeah, there are alternatives, but a lot of them are crap, or perhaps you find the software that does what you want over at SourceForge only to find out that the project has been abandoned.
Wile E. Quixote
@Beauzeaux
Microsoft did this years ago when they rolled out Windows 95 and Apple did it when they were rolling out OS X. It seemed like a brilliant strategy to me, for a fairly low cost you get lots and lots of beta testers many of whom are really motivated to bang on new stuff and see if they can break it. But Microsoft didn’t do it again until Windows 7 came out and Apple hasn’t done it again either.
mclaren
Windows Vista Service Pack 3, AKA Windows 7, is of course worthless and useless. Grotesquely bloated, slow, buggy and needless to say with most (but not all) of the driver problems afflicting Windows Vista, Windows 7 represents one of the greatest disasters in the history of computing. It’s on a par with the DEC Rainbow and Windows ME.
The kernel for the bloated senile buggy WIndows Vista is exactly the same as the kernel for Windows 7. The corpulent dropsical installed footprint is the same lunatic 14 gigabytes. (The idea that any sane person should need to load 14 gigabyes of code onto a hard drive merely in order to get a prompt is so insane, no words exist in the English language to describe it.)
The only reason Windows 2000 Pro isn’t offered with netbooks is that it would hurt sales of XP/VIsta/Windows 7. In fact, Windows 2000 Pro runs twice as fast as XP on the same CPU, and 4 to 5 times as fast as corpulent bugfests like Vista or Windows 7. Beware of claims about the alleged speedup of Windows 7 over Vista: actual benchmarks show that Windows 7 runs no faster than Vista. If you love waiting minutes for Firefox to open and load a web page, by all means, make the move to Windows 7. If you’re thrilled with the prospect that your new printer or digital camera won’t work with your computer, Windows 7 is your dream OS. If you’re yearning to have your computer blackscreen on you, requiriing a lengthy reset and reboot several times per session, why, Windows 7 is just what you’re looking for.
If, on the other hand, you want to run standard Windows hardware and software fast without bugs or crashes or freezes, Windows 2000 Pro is the best idea. In fact, if you use this tweak to force Win 2K to load its entire kernel into RAM on startup, you’ll discover a startling increase in speed and an amazing decrease in the total commit charge of memory.
I found that forcing the kernel to load into RAM in Win 2K Pro reduced my total memory commit charge under high load (streaming audio plus muliple Firefox and Opera browsers open) from 165 megs down to 135 megs, and the CPU usage dropped on an open browser page full of Flash animations and streaming audio from 78% down to 35%.
Win 2K Pro with the kernel loaded into RAM on startup runs more than an order of magnitude of faster than Vista or Windows 7, with vastly less CPU usage. Dual-booting into Ubuntu Linux, I found that Ubuntu gets even better performance with less memory usage, but you’d expect that. Win 2K Pro lets you use Windows software, which is a big attraction.
There is absolutely no rational reason for a Windows user to run anything on a netbook other than Windows 2000 Pro with the registry tweak that forces the kernel to loan into memory.
Janus Daniels
Windows 2000 brings fond memories: the first decent M$ OS; XP just added eye candy and a couple improvements.
If you like to fool around at all, I have to recommend Dell Mini 9: runs Windows XP or Vista or 7, and any flavor of Linux, and OSX (with a little effort to install).
If you use Linux well, or if you only plan on word processing and internet apps, you can get better results and save money by getting any number of netbooks with a Linux designed for netbooks.
Once I turned off UAC and eye candy, Vista only caused me problems with networking; don’t get me started. After all the updates, it seemed fine though.
M$ did right with 7; even the beta went on my desktop and laptops after I used it for a few weeks. Again, off eye candy.
bago
@Wile E. Quixote: As you are no doubt aware, the insular society bit obviously extends into CS. Witness those posts. GIMP!
daveX99
@Wile E.
I have to say that open source software is free only if you assume that your time has no value. Linux is great as a server OS but, and this is despite the impressive advances made by the folks at Debian/Ubuntu, is still lacking as a desktop OS.
That’s fair enough – I’m an admin and have a lot of Linux experience. I’d never just point someone new to Linux at SourceForge.
I would say, though, that Ubuntu makes finding and installing software super easy. Nobody has to compile anything and the package management makes sure you get all the dependencies. Nobody should have to compile anything themselves – let Ubuntu handle it.
Another point is that most of the stuff in Ubuntu’s standard repositories is fairly well vetted, which is not the case for a lot of the unfinished projects on SourceForge.
Janus Daniels
ref. mclaren – Please cite URLs for any stats or any tests of the kernel > RAM hack working? It sounds unlikely to me.
MattF
The big question is resource-use– given that a netbook will have significant constraints on HD size and speed, memory size and speed, and video performance, will Win7 perform? I haven’t seen anyone really address this. Given that Win7 is a close relative of known resource hogs running on it-works-fine-on-new-hardware OS’s, I’d be very cautious.
toujoursdan
@Wile E. Quixote:
This is my perspective too.
The fact is if you’re a gadget geek like I am, you’ll end up going back to Windows.
Let’s say I want to bulk email photos to Facebook or flickr: Can’t do it in Linux. The version of Java isn’t compatible with that Facebook or flickr use (last I checked). So you’re stuck doing them in small groups which is MUCH more time consuming.
Let’s say I want to watch satellite TV over my Slingbox. There is no Ubuntu version of the Slingplayer (last I checked). Back to windows.
Say I want to use software to record internet radio to listen to later on my iPod on the subway. In Windows there is Replay Radio, which is easy to set up and works just like Tivo. Set it and go. There is no equivalent in Ubuntu. Back to Windows.
Even Open Office isn’t all that compatible with Microsoft Office, which 90%+ of businesses use. Try sending a Open Office spreadsheet with formulas and macros to a Microsoft user and see what happens.
If I want to convert a DVD to play on my Archos 605 or iPod touch. I can use DVD Decrypter to upload it and have the choice of numerous software applications (Videora, Handbrake, etc.) to convert it. There aren’t these equivalents in Ubuntu.
Again, it’s fine for the basics but most of the 3rd party software that comes with Ubuntu often doesn’t meet my needs or is much much less elegant and user friendly than the Windows alternatives. And while it is free, I got to the point where I would rather pay for stuff that works fairly well than use crappy free stuff.
daveX99
Oops. that first paragraph was supposed to be a blockquote from Wile. E. Q.s posting.
-d.
Ruckus
Have an Asus 1000H with xp and have been pretty happy with it. Looked at the HP and decided to go with Asus due to more usb ports and xp over Linux. I use it in the field and it has given me no problems. Battery life is around 3-3.5 hours, I’m not wild about the mouse but it works, it’s light and small. Used to lug around a Sony and this is better for on the road. Don’t think it would make a good desktop unit even with a monitor and mouse, but then I’ve never tried that either.
doxastic
I’ve got one for the same reason–to lighten my conference baggage a bit and to use as a powerpoint machine when teaching. I love my Asus EEE (runs Xandros), but it has occasional wireless problems. The Linux user community is good about helping out new users, but I still sometimes feel a little limited about what I can and cannot fix.
On the other hand, I’ve used a Dell netbook with Vista our department keeps on hand, and it is slow as hell. I’ve found that it’s better to keep the OS very very slim to increase speed and keep your use of the netbook targeted, rather than use a bulky OS that can do more but clogs up the works.
Brachiator
Because Microsoft ain’t gonna support it.
The tech guys in my office have run Windows 7 through a lot of paces (we anticipate that a number of our customers will buy new computers with Win7 and our software has to run on it) and are generally impressed.
They are not the kind of guys who worship the new for the sake of its newness, nor do they have general warm and fuzzies for Bill Gates just because he is a Master of the Universe.
And especially for laptops and notebooks, the memory, security and stability improvements of Win7 make it a no-brainer.
OldK
I have Windows 7 on something like 5 of my computers, and a few virtual machines at work. Love it. Only had Vista on one machine that I never used. It’s on my EeePC 1000HE, and hasn’t harmed my battery life at all. I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to make it more lightweight than Vista, while still being more capable.
Total side note, but it’s also the only version of Windows I’ve had that I’ve been able to “install” on new hardware by simply cloning the hard drive of a different machine. So a copy of my desktop woke up, found itself in a the body of a laptop, and figured out the drivers and such on the fly. Sort of like something on Dollhouse.
baldheadeddork
Windows 7 is good, Tim. I’ve been testing it since early in the public beta and it won’t bite you the way Vista and ME did. In my experience, which goes back to Windows 3.1, Win7 is the best OS at launch that Microsoft has ever made, and outside of Windows I’d compare it against Mac OS-X. It really is that good.
About Windows 2K – it’s a dead OS. Microsoft moved it into extended support back in 2005 and they are ending all support for it next June. Corporate users began migrating their desktops to XP Pro years ago, which is actually a much better OS.
I’d strongly recommend waiting a month to get a dual-core Atom netbook, like the new Asus 1201N. The dual core will greatly improve the ability to run more than one program without sacrificing battery life.
Beauzeaux
@mclaren:
Brick Oven Bill, is that you?
angrystan
@Beauzeaux: That’s what they said about Windows 95. I was an Apple-to-the-core type weirdo back in the day, but worked in a shop with two machines running Win95 rc2, iirc. Even I had to admit it was smooth, ran on slower, cheaper hardware as well as System 7 and … They actually did it. Apple was done.
Then the retail version came out. Never, repeat never, buy the first retail version of anything by Microsoft if you expect to get work done. Maybe this time they really did it. I ain’t buying it, well not for at least two years. I find it difficult to believe Win7 will run on non-bleeding-edge hardware smoothly or on anything well. It would be unprecedented.
Never buy an American car in its first two model years, if you expect to use it for transportation; it’s like that.
slippy
I am the lead tech in charge of making Windows 7 production-ready at my company. I’ve got it installed on every computer I use or own, except the ones that are simply not compatible.
It’s got a less aggressive algorithm for Superfetch, as far as I can tell, which means it has a smaller memory footprint (it doesn’t pull every single thing you use into memory), and it is noticably faster. It boots faster, and it recovers from driver crashes pretty smoothly. I like the interface additions except I want my reduce to desktop button back on the LEFT side of the toolbar.
I am using the 64-bit edition on two computers and I like it. A few things run more slowly on 64-bit because they’re 32-bit programs. I had the same problem getting 16-bit apps to run on 32-bit Windows back in the NT days. It’s stuff that I don’t think most people would notice: the tool that I use to build the images isn’t compiled for 64-bit yet so it runs like a dog when committing writes to a 3 gb image.
Other than that, I love Win 7. It is also, interface-wise, smarter than Vista. It seems to anticipate how you want to resize windows more sanely, and I love the aero peek function.
Judge Crater
Get a Hackintosh. I’ve got a Dell Mini 10 v running Mac Leopard. Runs great, but you do have to do a little research to install it. I’ve had various Macs for 10 years – they never crash.
Anachronym
I have a Dell Mini 9 that I take just about everywhere, combined with a USB cellular modem it’s far more usable than a smartphone/blackberry in my opinion.
I believe Dell is no longer shipping Mini 9s but the Vostro A90 in their business section is basically identical (we own one of each). Comes with XP, and unlike the Mini 10 you can upgrade the RAM and hard drive with inexpensive (ie not dell) parts from newegg.
However if you need it by Monday you are going to be disappointed — it took a month for them to ship ours. They may have adjusted to the popularity since then and gotten faster, but in any case Monday would be unlikely.
As far as things you can get from retail stores, the Asus machines are decent, the N10 in particular seems fairly beefy for a netbook. Microsoft has fairly restrictive rules about how low-end a machine has to be to still be shipped with XP, but like the Minis a lot of these can be upgraded aftermarket.
phoebes-in-santa fe
@Jon:
Jon’s right about the keyboard on the Mini 9. I have one – in “Hot Chick Pink”, they were out of red – and I adore it for travel. However, the punctuation keys do take some getting used to. But, as I always tell people who ask me about it in airports, hotels, etc, “you’re NOT going to write War and Peace” on it!
The Dell 9 works very well using XP. It is handy to use and the charge life is pretty good. I also have a 16 inch Think Pad with XP that’s about 4 months old. I was going to hold out til this fall and buy a new notebook with Win7, but I couldn’t wait to replace my failing notebook. I’ve heard great things about Win7, but when I asked my geek if I should get Win7 for the new computer (it would upgrade), he told me not to bother because I really only use my computer for Internet usage and a fair amount of word processing.
He has had Win7 beta for about nine months, though, and thinks it’s awesome.
For some reason, my little “Hot Chick Pink” Dell has been the center of attention whenever I use it in public. Maybe it’s the color or the size, but the “oohs” and “ahs” are endless!
slippy
@mclaren: Good luck getting Win2k to run on newer hardware. Once the standard disk drive model evolves far enough away from where it was 2 years ago, when Microsoft stopped making updates to Windows 2000, you won’t even be able to get the installer to recognize the disk.
Tim F.
@angrystan: Your experience sounds pretty close to mine, all the way down to my dad giving that exact same bit of advice about cars when I was ten.
Martin
Which is why I love my Mac so much. If there’s an open-source tool that I need, I can just compile it up and use it, but I still have my easy, shiny mail, browser, editor, and so on.
And if I really need a Windows app, running VMWare rootless is great. Vista ran like a dog in VMWare, but Win7 is pretty nice – much more like XP. It’s a good release so far.
For anyone doing web development, there’s simply no alternative. You can easily set up development environments using all of the tools you need on the server, test pages in all browsers on all platforms, and do it all on your laptop next to the pool. It’s awesome.
The Raven
By report, Windows 7 works about as well as any version of Windows. As has been noted, many older peripherals don’t work with it.
…but consider a Linux netbook. They’re a bit cheaper and for e-mail and web access they work fine. Also, Google Docs+netbook is a winning combination. For research use, Linux netboks can sometimes be better than Windows boxes–a lot of good research software is available for Linux, and a lot of it free.
On the other hand, if you need MS Office, get a Windows netbook.
mike black
When the beta version of 7 was released by MS, it was a matter of days before every “hack” site had someone tweaking it to run on a netbook. The consensus seemed to be that it was great, far better than Vista and equal to – if not better than – XP when it came to stability and performance.
XP is less labor intensive (especially with certain settings), but if you find a netbook with 7 and a decent HD, go for it.
Either way the only real issue most people have had (other than the small mouse pad and lack of a dvd drive; both of which can be solved via usb add-ons) is that netbooks – at this point, anyway – only have a single processor. 1.6Ghz is fine if you’re internetting or running Office 2003, but if you try to run any video/sound/photo apps, prepare for Vista-level amounts of stress.
Jason Bylinowski
I’m in computers on both a mid-to-large-scale deployment basis as well as a retail one. Windows 7 is great, have been using it on 3 computers since January. It started out rock solid and has only improved in that time. My netbook is a Samsung NC10 and it literally runs faster with Win7 than with XP. Vista Ultimate won’t even load on the netbook (at all!), whereas Windows 7 installs fine with all the graphical bells and whistles. It is a highly scalable OS; if it has a weak point it is that some of the games I run aren’t currently running perfectly on Windows 7 x64 (Fallout 3, Arkham Asylum) but MOST of them are doing great. Some people accuse Windows 7 of being Vista Service Pack3, and to me that is a fair charge but there is a lot going on under the hood for advanced users to make the difference worthwhile. My opinion is, if you already have Vista, just keep it and get Service Pack 2, because that basically fixed Vista (at least it did for me and most of my customers), but if you’ve been holding out, this is what you’ve been waiting for. I loved XP, but aesthetically it’s showing its age and I’ve really been getting into some of the features of Win7 (really great advanced filesearch, great multimonitor support, better cascading windows, etc)
I’m no MS fanboy, but in my view they have really upped their game with this release. (They basically had to.) They are most assuredly going to be able to get past the embarrassment of Vista, but because of the bad juju of Vista, it probably won’t get quite the fanfare that XP got back in 2001.
Leszek Pawlowicz
FWIW, Leo LaPorte, formerly of TechTV and now of http://twit.tv, has been using Windows 7 for his work computers in both alpha and beta, and thinks very highly of it. And he’s a major Mac fan, so he can be objective.
JGabriel
Tim F.:
Both Vista and Win7 will show high memory usage, whether or not the OS/Apps are using that much — because they both will use most of whatever free memory is available for application caching.
Win7 is decidedly better than Vista for netbooks, due in part to better video RAM management. Vista frequently doubled-loaded video into regular memory as well as vram, which caused a lot of performance issues.
.
Keith
I run Win7 on a netbook and have been doing so since April. Both are the real deal. Win7 absolutely SCREAMS on a solid-state drive, which is what I highly recommend go into a netbook.
Ranger 3
Apple is sooo overrated. I would do anything to avoid using their software. Ipods sound like crap, I use PSP now for all my portable entertainment needs. Vista isn’t great, but nothing Apple ever made is worth the high cost they charge.
Windows 7 will likely blow Mac away, but people will still buy Macs just to be contrarian.
Martin
So far, that seems to be the consensus, though. It’s the Microsoft equivalent to OS X – runs faster than Vista on the same hardware. Smaller memory footprint, too.
Apple’s advances in Snow Leopard are all for the developer – so it’ll take some real time to see them shake out, and it’ll be doubly interesting to see Linux take advantage of them given that Apple open sourced the whole lot.
Martin
How will it blow Mac away when my hardware runs Windows 7 and yours doesn’t run Mac OS X? Doesn’t mine do more, even when MS improves their OS?
I don’t think most ‘Apple is doomed’ people understand the market at all.
JGabriel
Clicked on the GOPAC link, to give John & Co. some revenue. As is the usual case with most of these sites, they wanted an e-mail address.
So, [email protected] is now a proud recipient of GOPAC alerts — I assume.
.
LoveMonkey
Not for nothing, but I added a netbook to my vast computer collection this last couple of weeks. It’s a Dell Mini 10, Intel Atom Z520 processor (low heat, low power consumption, which means decent batter life on a 3-cell battery, which means the thing is feather light). Windows XP and an HDMI interface as an all purpose reach to the outside world’s audio and video stuff. Also a cheap reach and one that serves a broad range of client devices compared to the old audio and video plugs.
The surprises are how fast the cheap Atom Z520 runs, how cool the thing runs, how light it is, and how readable the 10 inch screen is. On the down side, the touchpad is obviously the product of the Satan Peripheral Company, diabolically hard to use and intrusive. I am getting a cheap cordless mouse for the thing. Other than that, this gadget that I got for $270 online including shipping, with a gig of ram and a 160g drive, fits in my little purse that is made to look like some kind of business carry all so as not to tip off the fact that I am carrying a purse, is a success. I was all prepared to hate it. But I like it.
Tim F.
@Martin: FWIW, the Best Buy guys told me that Microsoft’s Vista problems have shot their mac sales through the roof.
In other news Best Buy now sells Macs.
beabea
When it comes to computers, I am about as well-informed as a townhall teabagger is about health care reform.
Yet I find myself in need of a new desktop system to replace the daily-crashing clunker I now have. I have been very wary about Windows 7, because like the teabagger, I know only the scare stories about the horrible things that can happen to you when MS releases a new OS.
This thread has been a huge help. Thank you everybody.
@Jason Bylinowski I need to run four monitors and have heard what a nightmare that can be to set up. So for me, your comment was FTW.
Gozer
I’ve used XP since it came out and bought Vista when it came out and hated it.
I’ve been using a copy of Win 7 that I got through the MSDN for a couple of months now and I love it. I have Vista Business on a laptop of mine so the jump to 7 was not that different. If I were coming from XP I’d say it was probably a bigger jump, but it seems to be just as good as XP in ease of use.
I really think MS has a good product with 7. It’s what that POS Vista should have been.
gnomedad
I’ve had little exposure to Macs; not on principle, just worked out that way. Recently I used one casually and it was stable all right — I couldn’t shut it down. I guess you’re not supposed to.
RareSanity
If a netbook comes with Win7 installed, it by definition had to meet the hardware requirements to run it. That’s no big deal…don’t worry about the OS because, by definition, by selection a netbook you are saying “I’m not going to be doing anything hardcore on this” so you won’t have to worry about driver issues.
But, as far as hardware, do not buy any netbook until you play with the HP and Acer versions. I have a HP mini for some of the same purposes you brought up. It’s not a primary PC, but my wife and I both love it for the purposes it is intended.
I have also played with a coworker’s Acer and I have the same opinion of both of them compared to especially the Asus. That is that they have the best build quality and “feel” the most solid. The Asus and Dell have a “plastic/toy-ish” feel to them, the HP and Acer really do feel like quality products
Maude
@The Raven: I do tech on different age machines with Windows, MAC and Ubuntu 9.04.
If I were getting a portable, I’d get a laptop and use Ubuntu. There are a ton of Debian based applications. I installed WINE and some windows apps run well on it.
I do install jre and plugin for ff and adobe flash.
I install mscorefonts for Abiword and Open Office, using the terminal and the fonts are fetched from Sourceforge.
It depends on what someone needs to do.
xj - not the auto
If you absolutely gotta have it, get one now with xp home. just remember it will not have enough memory for the long haul and the os will be obsolete within a year or so. If that’s ok with you, you can probably be happy with it. At $300 you could consider it expendable in a year or so. check costco.
We’ve started buying them at work and the Dell mini has gotten decent reviews from staff – good battery life which is unusual for a Dell. I didn’t like the Lenovo. Asus and Acer seem very good, but no first hand experience. The sony is very nice, if you like sony products (tend to be overpriced).
I’m waiting for a couple months before purchasing – let them shake out the OS and other features. My six year old gateway notebook will limp along until then.
Nash
I have a single issue with both Vista and 7: the audio API’s.
This probably won’t mean anything to you, but if you do any kind of audio recording at all with older, Windows XP software, it won’t work with Vista or 7 due to how the audio API’s have changed. It’s a small issue for most folks, but it’s been a bit of frustration for some of us who do internet radio.
As far as the OS itself, it’s stable and runs reasonably well. I have it set to dual-boot on my system, but personal preference makes me default to Windows XP for most of what I do on the computer.
LoveMonkey
As long as I am writing tech reviews for free today ….
Also got a Verizon MiFi wireless broadband modem/portable WiFi hotspot. Same data rate as the old Verizon 3G modem I was using, and the device was $50 after replacement credit and rebate.
The thing is size and thickness of half a standard Hershey Bar. It has one button, on and off. It sets itself up and activates itself in about 4 mins with built in software. It’s the most reliable 3G connection I have used and I have used several. Just bulletproof.
The WiFi hotspot supports 5 connections and puts out a solid and fast-connect Wireless-g signal for about 30 feet and that includes going around corners and through doors in the house. It’s the easiest setup and user interface I have seen on a broadband device so far.
Going out? Throw the thing in your pocket and your companion can use the WiFi signal in the car. Or at the restaurant. Run it cordless and it goes for about 4 hours on the battery. Tether it with the USB cable and it’s just a 3G modem that powers itself and charges off the USB bus. No WiFi when tethered. Or put it on the bookshelf, plug in the AC charger, and it’s a broadband modem/wireless router for the house. Turn off the overpriced cable broadband and save money.
I know that 3G is going to go away, but right now, this thing is just about the perfect broadband companion. And cheap, and usable by your eight your old with no support.
Try it, you will like it.
MikeJ
Ubuntu is the bomb. I’ve spent a good part of this week doing family tech support. Bootable Ubuntu cd’s allowed me to fix mom’s corrupt registry files. As a bonus, when I booted her system with ubuntu, right away I had full access to the net and could back stuff onto dad’s machine, use printers, hit the internet, etc. I’ve got her XP system running again and discovered that to do a fucking chown of the backup files I have to reboot into safe mode.
With linux everything just works as you would expect it to and it’s bulletproof.
LindaH
I don’t have personal experience with Windows 7, but my IT guy has been running it and seems quite happy with it. However, I truly believe that it is extremely unwise to buy ANY Microsoft operating system until Service Pack 1 has been released. That is just my personal experience with Microsoft operating systems (says the newly converted Mac user).
mclaren
As for the memory commit charge drop and the CPU usage drop under the Win 2K Pro kernel RAM tweak, those are my own personal results running tests on public wifi hotspots while streaming audio and/or video and various flash with multiple browsers open.
Slippy claimed:
New to computers, are we? When you install Windows on any hardware it waits during the install process to give you the option to enter F6 to load a custom driver. (By floppy, ugh.) So this is a non-problem under Win 2K. I run Win 2K on everything and haven’t had any issues other than the lack of Remote Desktop (which you can get on Win 2K with a third-party product like WIndows Anywhere — XP has Remote Desktop built in, but Win 2K doesn’t), but then again, I also run Ubuntu 8 on everything and that’s never given any problems I couldn’t handle either. YMMV.
General Winfield Stuck
@Gozer:
I had XP for several years and loved it until I killed the motherboard not being careful upgrading a new CPU.
Bought a new Dell with Vista and hate it with a passion, except it does seem to have better security and a more stable registry. But the media center programs are like a stoned person designed them. They have some better bells and whistles, but it’s like an old junker car you have to hit with a hammer in the right places to do what you want, at least for me.
If I may ask, can I get the W7 program from MSDN to replace my VISTA OS, and how much does it cost.?
LoveMonkey
@MikeJ:
Everybody things Ubuntu is the bomb until something goes wrong, or until you want to install an Air Card and its software. Then you are in driver and support hell, and unless you enjoy the flames of arcane shitty software issues and the worst support in the universe, you are going to curse that Linux box and the rue the day you bought it.
Unless you are totally happy with exactly what you get the first time you turn the thing on and NEVER intend to install, add, or change anything, I wouldn’t touch it with a stick. Because once you stray from the box of defaults, you are on your own in a world run by programmers and computer nerds who will make your life a miserable, sucking hell beyond your wildest imagination.
General Winfield Stuck
OH and also, I still have my XP CD reinstallment from the last my last computer, and have the OS serial ID number. Could I use that that to install XP on my current computer of would the OE thing prevent that/?
computer dumb, I is.
Fencedude
@General Winfield Stuck:
That shouldn’t be a problem at all.
When I built my new computer I used the XP CD from my then-current computer. (which was an OEM version), and I had no problems activating it.
BeccaM
I have a Samsung netbook, too, and it’s great. I loved being able to spend just a few hundred bucks and have a fully functional, highly portable, long battery life computer. It’s small enough to fit in my shoulder bag, even. I honestly don’t know if I’m going to bother upgrading its current WinXP to Win7… I’m leaning towards not bothering.
My desktop came with Vista Home Premium 64-bit…and I’ve never liked it. I even have 6GB ram and it bogs down miserably after I do system-intensive stuff. Also noticed horrendous memory leaks and a seeming refusal ever to release RAM. For these, I installed Systweak CacheBoost, which helped quite a bit. I especially have disliked the excessive Mommy-mode restrictions on Vista, such that I couldn’t even share my main Documents folder on my home network (eventually found the way around this, but it took nearly a day’s research). Last July when they had the half price upgrade promotion available, I went ahead and ordered two copies of Win 7 Pro — one for me, and one for my XP Pro using spouse.
General Winfield Stuck
@Fencedude:
What about the motherboard having OEM protections in it, that I bought with my new Dell? or would that not be a problem. I am really dumb on this stuff.
MikeJ
@LoveMonkey: That’s just not true. Yes, recompiling ffmpg (hell using ffmpg from the command line) is not for the weak of heart, but normal people won’t have to.
Linux has the best tech support in the world if you are capable of reading and of writing a request for help that makes you sound like a friendly person instead of a dick. If getting a response back after you act like a dick is a high priority, you’ll have to pay people for that.
Only once have I ever actually gotten to speak to the guy who put the bug in a program when using a microsoft product (obscure C compiler bug), but I’ve corresponded with any number of linux devs and had beer with them.
I’m constantly tinkering and still have no problem with linux, mainly because I can follow directions. Regular home users who don’t do the same sort of weird shit I do (like soldering odd add on cards together) should be able to use it with no problems at all.
Martin
Another side of it is that anyone that wants to do any kind of broad mobile app (iPhone, Palm, Android) development or web development is buying a Mac.
The platform shift among anyone I know doing development has been stunning. Almost 100% Mac. The guys doing computational work that hadn’t switched before are seriously eyeing Apple’s Snow Leopard technologies – it’s pretty revolutionary stuff, but the users won’t really see much from it other than faster and more stable apps as developers roll out 10.6 versions.
But the PC vendors are struggling. Apple is larger and more profitable than both HP and Dell combined and could buy Dell with cash-on-hand now. Those cheap PCs are killing the industry and as companies get cash-starved then innovation will stagnate. The Windows marketplace is at an interesting (and not particularly positive) crossroads. It’s good for consumers in the near term, but it hardly looks sustainable for the long-term.
AZrider
I got an HP mini and just went to Prague and Vienna with it. Runs XP Home, and it was just fine –about the size of a book, got plenty of hard disk space and memory. Keyboard is very easy to type on, and it fits nicely on an airplane tray with a beer next to it. Three USB ports, but no Bluetooth, but that’s easy to add with a USB dongle. I use it at home, too, when I want to check email, or use it to look up something when I’m not close to my desktop.
bago
I just came back from seeing the cray 1 supercomputer. It was 64 bit with 8 gigs of ram and freon cooling.
LoveMonkey
@MikeJ:
Nope, you are dead wrong. Any non geek who makes the mistake of trying Ubuntu and tries to fix or change anything on the box by using the “support” resources out there is going to rue the day they bought the thing. They will either abandon the thing or end up paying somebody to put Windows XP on it and turn it into a real computer.
If you are a person who thinks driving a car should include knowing how to rebuilt a fuel injection systems using a pocket scredriver and a nail file, then sure, get Ubuntu. Otherwise, avoid it like the plague.
There’s a reason why people write, and read, reviews on the internet. This is one of them. Buyer beware.
Nobody has to take my word, or anyone else’s word for any of this. Grab the nearest extra computer you have and throw Ubuntu on it. Or have somebody throw it on for you. Give it to a non geek for a while and then write back in 4 months and tell us how it went. Judge for yourself. The experiment is easy to do.
bago
http://twitpic.com/lxmrm <- cray 1
Big G
I bought an Acer Aspire One running XP last spring specifically for running PowerPoint presentations and email/web surfing. It has functioned perfectly for me; one down side is that I find it actually puts out a lot of heat for a little thing, so that even the touch pad gets uncomfortably warm after a couple hours of use. So bring a mouse with you.
I also struggled a bit with getting it to display PP slides undistorted on our classroom projectors , but maybe this was my Windows ignorance. (I switched over from Mac to get this, primarily because I didn’t have the scratch for a new Air laptop).
A caution about Best Buy – they supposedly had the Asus netbooks in stock, which is what I was originally after. However, first they tried to sell me their special “software optimization” package for $250, which seemed like a lot of add-on for a computer that was only costing $350. When I refused that deal, somehow they couldn’t find any of the models they had in stock. I wound up getting the Acer at Walmart.
General Winfield Stuck
I was all excited after installing Ubuntu about a year or so ago, then it went insane, and that was that.
Martin
I’d consider it more seriously if I were you. Windows 7 seems to have been developed with much more consideration for netbooks. It’s a very easy install for Windows (much kudos to MS for finally winning that battle) and 7 seems to be much happier with less horsepower and RAM.
Comrade Misfit
I’m going to follow the “never buy a new Windows OS until SP1 is released” rule, thank you very much.
me
Bullshit. The vast majority of people are going to have the same amount of trouble fixing anything on XP as Ubuntu. I deal with it every day.
Lee
I’ve had Windows 7 on my kids computer for about 2 months now. They are happy with it and have not crashed it. The few times I’ve jumped on it runs fast and seems stable.
The only item that I have found is that iTunes (9.0) seems to hang if it stays up for an extended period of time. Meaning someone jumps in on and if iTunes is still up, it might be hanging. Killing the process has not caused a cascade failure of other applications in memory as happens in older versions of the WinOS.
By all accounts Win Me was by far the worst OS MS has ever released.
The Grand Panjandrum
Michael Dell:
Martin
My webserver (and that’s all it is – all other services are off) runs Ubuntu and it’s harder to keep up-to-date than the almost identical development setup I have on my Mac laptop. When the Mac is easier to manage purely open-source configurations than a dedicated open-source platform, you’ve fucked something up.
I can’t even fathom using Ubuntu on the desktop today.
General Winfield Stuck
Tell me about it. My first computer had Me os. It’s an awful thing to hate an electronic device.
mclaren
@ LoveMonkey
Oh, please. If you have an obscure problem, you google it and mostly likely you find a fix. If you can’t find a quick fix on google, just go onto one of the many friendly support boards and ask politely and someone will post a solution within a few minutes.
Ubuntu 9 doesn’t need any support AFAICT. It just works. It’s actually easier to install than Windows. I am serious. With Windows, you need to run through the rigamarole of finding and inserting and installing all those audio and video driver CDs and blah blah blah. Ubuntu just automatically finds and installs all that stuff. With Ubuntu, it just works, right out of the box. Period.
slippy
@mclaren: You must be so good that you can also write those device drivers, can’t you? Or are you so “new to computing” that you just assume the device driver fairy writes them for free? I’m guessing whatever the next HD architecture change is will make it impossible to run Win2k under anything other than perhaps a virtual session. IDE is dead . . . I don’t know if you knew that.
Also, when you have a support issue with Win2k, exactly who are you going to call? I know, if you don’t know much about computers these things don’t occur to you but when you’ve been doing this for awhile this is one of those questions that becomes pretty important.
Or maybe you’re running a small business and can get away with crashes and incompatibilities and erratic system performance without having to explain them to your management. I wouldn’t know — where I work we’re held to actual performance and reliability metrics and we left Windows 2k behind a long time ago.
Plus, you may want to use more than 4 GB of RAM one of these days. Your 2000 machines are pretty soon not going to be able to even recognize their own RAM . . . or maybe the processor . . .
But, do as you like. My personal opinion is good riddance to Windows 2000. I said the same thing about Dos 6.x, Windows for Workgroups, and Windows 95-98-NT 3.51. And although it’s a nice machine I have long since realized I can’t keep current with computing by waving my Commodore 64 around. The emulator is a little fun, and I sure wish I could find all those programs I wrote for it in 1982.
Jackass.
LoveMonkey
If you think I am kidding, take a look at this, or the umteen thousand threads out there on similar topics just like it. Read it and laugh.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=460273
Here’s the lie the Ubutnu liars will tell you: Oh, they can make it work now, by using this xyz driver or this pqrst workaround. The problem is, it took six months or a year for those “fixes” to get invented and trickle into the support stream, by which time the original thing these guys were trying to do is obsolete. The modem they were using is now three versions down the road and if you get the current product you will be in the same boat they were in two years ago with the old version.
Don’t believe the lies. The shit doesn’t work.
General Winfield Stuck
Ubuntu less filling
Windows taste great/
Robert Sneddon
@MikeJ:
My own experiences with Ubuntu and Linux in general going back over ten years is that it’s not ready for the general public to use. I’ve had a Ubuntu liveCD black-screen a laptop when trying to boot from it; booting other Windows CDs in that laptop worked fine. I’ve got a popular HP flatbed scanner unit (the 4850) that doesn’t work under Ubuntu or any other Linux as there are no drivers for it; Windows 7 has driver support for this scanner independent of HP. I’ve had systems with video cards various Linux versions didn’t support properly (a 24 x 18 pixel screen, anyone?) but which have had working drivers from Win3.11 all the way through to Win 7. Power management on laptops and netbooks under Linux has been a black art and usually not possible to get right on a consistent basis, unlike the installed Windows OS most laptops come with where the power management just works.
Sure I could hack drivers together or recompile a bunch of patches and their dependencies to fix these bugs and problems in Linux and Ubuntu but I’ve got no-one I could bill for my time, and all my computing time these days is billable to someone.
mclaren
@slippy:
Yes, you’re definitely new to computing. Here’s a news flash for ya: businesses have shunned Vista en masse because its totally incompatible with their current hardware and software.
Where I live, essentially every business still uses Win 2K. They swear by it. Everything just works, and it never crashes.
YOU LOSE. GAME OVER. WANT TO PLAY AGAIN?
Brick Oven Bill
I have learned to blame Bill Gates for everything. This keeps it simple.
gyma
Tim,
Don’t have time to read through all the thread, but I was in Best Buy today looking for a new laptop, too. The sales guy said I could return tomorrow to LOOK only but no sales until THURSDAY for anything running Win7.
Lee
There is a very simple test to determine if/when Ubuntu/Linux is ready for general use.
When you can walk into Best Buy/Fry’s and pick a new piece of hardware and not think “mmmm I wonder if this is going to supported on my OS”. That is when it is ready.
mclaren
@Robert Sneddon:
So you boot with the option vga=788. Ooohhh. How hard is that? It’s easier than hitting F8 to boot in safe mode under Windows.
Jeez. This is what you guys call “problems”? They’re trivial.
ruemara
What kind of Macs are you guys using? I’ve worked with them for nearly a decade and I’ve never seen the problems you’ve had. And yes, I mean as an IT person. The last mess that happened was a coolant leak in my relatively new desktop that Apple paid for.
Back to topic, I want a netbook that’s top of the line because I hate bringing my beloved MacBook out of the house. I will then hackbook it. The only thing I want Windows 7 on is my work dell laptop, because I’d love anything that made that hunk faster. Not it’s fault tho, we have a crappy it department.
jmg
For what it’s worth, I’ve been running 7 on my 3.5 year old thinkpad since its beta release. Sad to say, I have a 1.6 gigahertz celeron processor and 1 gig of RAM–roughly comparable to a netbook. I wouldn’t use it for any seriously resource intensive apps, but for browsing the net/streaming video and MSOffice type stuff it works great. I’m planning on upgrading all my computers to 7. I jumped on the $50 buck upgrade earlier on in the year. I’d be a little harder pressed to spend $100 per license.
TheHatOnMyCat
@Lee:
Exactly. And bottom line, the experiment is easy to perform.
Grab a computer you can afford to use as a test sled for a while. Throw Unbuntu on it. It will probably install easily and look swell.
Then start trying to hook it up. Install an AirCard. A printer, a web cam, some software. Push it and knock it around and do things with it. Give it 4 months. Run into a problem and dive into the “forum” (the mob of confused and frustrated people trying to get their machines to work) and see how it goes.
YMMV. Good luck to you. Vote Democratic, vote early, and vote often.
Riggsveda
Don’t know if you’ll see this, but I’m using 7 right now. Seems to be fine, and Firefox is less touchy in it than previous Windows. The only quirk I’ve discovered is that if I turn on the computer before turning on the monitor, the resolution is all screwed up and can’t be fixed except by turning off the computer and re-booting, while leaving the monitor on.
Martin
Linux is never going to ‘just work’ and Windows will only hang on the edge of that state by injecting massive amounts of effort into it.
The problem with the market dynamics right now are that hardware is being added to these systems faster than drivers and support systems are being created. In the zeal to save a buck, users go out and buy whatever no-name Chinese doo-dad they can find at Frys, the swap meet, etc. and expect it to work. But the $3 wireless card can’t possibly fund adequate driver development and sure as hell isn’t going to fund support services, so they just don’t exist in any acceptable sense. Further, the $3 card probably shortchanged the spec here and there so when your new router supports some swizzy feature, that card often times won’t. Vendors, in their zeal to race to the bottom of the market are doing the same thing – swapping in components as fast as possible.
Intel and MS are trying to hold the whole mess together by putting out integrated hardware and certifying the software and drivers, but users continue to jam whatever shitty piece of hardware they get their hands on into that box and then wonder why the machine doesn’t work right.
Linux isn’t even attempting to hold the mess together – they just blame the user for buying wireless card 4592.45×12 instead of 4529.45×12 which, obviously, will have the most awesome Ubuntu 9.10 support if you just install the alpha drivers from some obscure website and recompile a few things.
daveX99
I’m sorry that LoveMonkey’s experience has left him so bitter, but I’d say he’s exaggerating a bit. I kind of feel the same way about windows.
Ubuntu is working hard to find that sweet spot for the Non-geek.
I’d strongly recommend taking it for a spin on a bootable CD just to take a look (Download it!). No risk – it won’t break your system. Just know that the CD usually runs slower than the OS would if it were installed on the machine.
Maybe it’s not for you. Maybe you gotta use some windows-only app.
I’m a web developer and a sys admin and I will always choose a Linux box as my main platform. (maybe I’m too geeky).
I don’t know any non-geek on any platform who likes dealing with tech issues that are beyond their knowledge. And I’m wondering how much they like calling tech support.
With Linux, it’s pretty simple: find the right forum and (politely) post your question. Or google it – with this many people using Ubuntu (& other distros), your question has already been answered. Another thing Ubuntu is working hard on is developing a community of users so that knowledge can be shared easily.
Martin
I hope that was snark because it’s trivial only if you’ve memorized the internet, because if you are installing Ubuntu on your only computer, you will have had to.
slippy
@mclaren: So based on your anecdotal evidence, you win?
You are hilarious. By the way, I’ve worked in IT for 14 years. At a Fortune 500 company. I support 18,000 workstations in 43 states. I’m pretty sure I know what the fuck I’m talking about, and so is my management since I still have my job.
BTW, I do believe that XP still leads as the most-installed OS in business. It’s more stable and usable than 2k but unfortunately it also is ending support.
So, you never answered who you’re going to call if your Win2k install base starts to have troubles. What would you do, for example, if a Conficker or a new variant attacks your network. Who will you buy antivirus from, since most vendors are now sunsetting support? Who is going to provide security patches? And what about when your company wants to deploy applications that are not compatible with Windows 2000? What are you going to tell them?
Oh, wait, I think I know: “YOU LOSE. GAME OVER. WANT TO PLAY AGAIN?”
That will go over well, I’m sure.
Final question: why do you post in the tone of someone who is literally no older than my career?
Martin
How do you test your website without Windows/Mac browsers?
me
This is true, but I guess you’ve never tried to install XP RTM on a machine with an SATA HDD.
burnspbesq
I am a dedicated Mac guy, but I am fine with XP on my Toshiba netbook. I won’t be in a hurry to upgrade to Win 7, and I am not enough of a DIY-er to go the Hackintosh route.
castellan
I do Windows Server/SQL Server administration for my day job. I’ll be perfectly honest: Windows Vista/7 and SQL Server 2008 just feel wrong in so many ways. The shoddy production qualities and lack of documentation (or docs that contain info that’s just WRONG) remind me very much of the Windows 98/ME days.
Windows 7 looks great next to Vista because Vista was such a turd. If you’re wanting to get work done without having to wrestle with a system, get Mac OS X. I’m not sure what some of the folks in this thread have been doing to kill their OS X systems, but the only issues I’ve ever had with a Mac have been hardware-related (failed hard drives after 5+ years, etc). If you’re hell-bent on getting a PC, by all means download the Ubuntu live CD and install that (or use WUBI to install it without having to partition your hard drive or wipe out your Windows installation).
For netbooks, make sure you’re getting something with enough screen real-estate to be useful, and make sure the keyboard is usable. I’ve got an original Asus eeePC 2GB and it serves extremely well for light web surfing/emailing on the go, but if I had to do any real work on the thing for more than an hour, I’d shoot someone.
bago
VGA=788. Of course.
It’s obvious this person has not really done enterprise level work.
Martin
Ask me about installing Mac OS X on a machine with a SATA HDD and you’ll get a better answer. I obviously don’t extend MS a lot of respect over past efforts.
As a general rule, OS X only installs on what it supports. But why would you install an RTM copy of XP instead of an updated one?
daveX99
On a machine running those programs – I said my MAIN PLATFORM. Linux is what I use all day long at work and at home.
Still not sure why you guys are so bitter. Each of the OS’s have something to offer. I’m not out here to trash Windows/Mac systems.
-d.
The Pale Scot
@ Kid G #13
That shouldn’t be happening, I run tiger on a G4-1.25 dual processor and i use Final Cut Pro 5.1.4, Maya 7 and AE 6.5, I can set them all to render before I go sleep and have no issues in the morning.
Do you repair your Hd from another boot disk with utility or even better DiskWarrior? Dw is the best $60 I ever spent.
The Moar You Know
I bought the first ASUS eeePC, and just love it. I use the Linux distro that came with it, no special skills required; given your ability to handle a digital camera, you should easily be able to handle a netbook with Linux.
That being said, I work mainly with Windows. I find Vista SP1 pretty awesome – granted, it took a few days to get it that way. Turning off UAC is something you shouldn’t do, but really need to in order to use the new generation of Windows operating systems without getting pissed off to the point of rage.
While most of these netbooks can run Vista, I’m not sure that you would want to, it would be slow. But then again, XP on them is slow as well, and you can’t buy a netbook with XP Pro on it, only XP Home (a dealbreaker for me, I need the ability to join domains for any machine I have). A netbook-optimized version of Win7 could be a great thing.
And speaking of Win7, the Win7 beta was great. Hopefully the actual OS will be equal.
Windows Server 2008 (the server version of Win7) is flat-out the best OS I have ever used by anyone. Using it right now, in fact.
A weird thing that I have noticed is more and more of my Mac-owning friends coming to me with issues with the machine or OS. Not too sure what’s going on with that, but definitely a move in the wrong direction.
Cain
@Wile E. Quixote:
As a contributor for GNOME for the past 12 years or so, we’re still making good advancement on the desktop. That said, the hardware support is the biggest problem, as long as you get hardware supported by linux it tends to just work. Case in point, I recently bought a wireless Brother laser printer. On Ubuntu, it was a 45 second affair, as Ubuntu found the wireless printer on the network, identified it and I just had to click one button and I got it going. On mac, (which also uses the same print technology) I had to actually reboot the machine for the drivers to take effect. Whoa. On windows, it took a little longer than Ubuntu and no where near as easy.
The next version of GNOME is going to be even more awesome. There is a point of acceleration as the desktop technologies mature. We will give Windows a run for it’s money, but our real competitor is Mac.
cain
me
Because the person wanted Professional instead of Home, but don’t tell me that slipstreaming SP2 is less trivial then putting vga=788 on the boot command line.
Mirthless Chopper - Frmrly TheFountainHead
You know, I was just thinking that it had been a while since we had had a decent OS flame war. And here’s Tim, lookin’ out for us.
I’ve never understood why anyone would fight about this subject. Get a Mac, install every flavor of OS, and then you can’t lose, amirite?
Cain
@toujoursdan:
Not true, F-spot can upload all your photos to Facebook or Flickr and does a pretty good job of it. I think you can also do it from Picasa, although I don’t think you can upload to flickr. But I know f-spot can upload to all kinds of online places quite easily. There are also software like Conduit that can also keep things in sync quite nicely.
In fact, I’m fairly sure future linux desktop iterations will be even more online saavy. You have big guns like Intel (Moblin) that are doing a lot of work in the netbook sector that will be fed back into GNOME for instance. Only a matter of time. :-)
cain
Bob In Pacifica
When I first got a Vista computer I hated all the crap it put you through saving you from yourself. Things are better now, or I’ve just gotten used to it, so while I’d like a better WIndows OS I don’t want to go near W7 until all the bugs are gone.
Martin
Oh, I know you aren’t trashing anything – and I knew the answer to my question, I was just baiting you to illustrate it for me. If you can afford to have multiple systems around, you have more options – that’s my only point.
As Mirthless points out, for many Mac users, you can run all of them on one piece of hardware – simultaneously, even. That’s why the ‘kill the Mac’ argument advanced above falls so flat. Linux is type O blood and the Mac is type AB. Linux runs on everything and the Mac runs everything. Neither one is going away any time soon because of that.
Martin
I don’t think either is trivial. Why isn’t there a newer build of Pro that has SATA drivers (are there even such things)?
And why are you working so hard to point out that Windows is just as hard to support as Linux?
Dream On
“…The only quirk I’ve discovered is that if I turn on the computer before turning on the monitor, the resolution is all screwed up and can’t be fixed except by turning off the computer and re-booting, while leaving the monitor on.”
———–
And so it BEGINS!!
MNPundit
I still use Windows 2kPro.
Arguingwithsignposts - ipod touchs
Totally ot but WTF?
http://www.politico.com/click/stories/0910/hosts_pick_best_guests_.html
Calouste
@Mirthless Chopper – Frmrly TheFountainHead:
Depends on how you define ‘lose’ :
Fanbois howl over data-munching Snow Leopard bug
Mirthless Chopper - Frmrly TheFountainHead
This is the Linux Distro Anthem.
Fencedude
this mclaren guy is hilarious.
Yah srsly, its easy, just do this that and other, recompile, and you’re done!
Fuck that noise, and go back to /.
Bodhi
MacBook.
Mirthless Chopper - Frmrly TheFountainHead
@Calouste: I think calling that a Snow Leopard bug is premature on the part of the tech news sites. No one yet knows what is causing that. For all we know, it could be something introduced by some third party software, but yeah, that’s the worst kind of bug, even if it is rare.
John D.
@me: The major difference with fixing problems on XP and Ubuntu is that there are a couple of orders of magnitude more information available about specific XP problems — and fixes — than there are for Ubuntu. I can send a non-tech to a site and get them to fix a problem themselves where I simply can’t for Ubuntu. The vast majority of fixes for Ubuntu issues assume a level of IT competence that most of my employees simply do not have.
MikeJ
MacOS cannot fail, it can only be failed.
Peter J
There are no bugs ever in a MacOS, only features.
;)
Roza
Mac OS
no discussion needed
Robert Sneddon
@mclaren:
“So you boot with the option vga=788. Ooohhh. How hard is that? It’s easier than hitting F8 to boot in safe mode under Windows.”
Ummm, when I said “black-screen” that meant I put the pressed Ubuntu 7.04 CD from Canonical into the laptop’s drive and rebooted it. Nothing happened. There were no prompts, no screens, no options to allow me to select any kind of safe mode or enter any command-line options, just a black screen. I left it for a couple of hours before giving up on it, just in case some processes were running in the background but I’d really expect some kind of spinning beachball or hourglass to show me the machine was still doing something constructive in that case.
I tried two different Windows OS discs I had to hand, NT4 and a W2k disc in that laptop afterwards. They just worked, as you would expect from a Microsoft product.
Martin
No, it’s a 10.6 bug and fixed in the 10.6.2 seeds. Should be pushed out any day now.
Wile E. Quixote
@daveX99
Ubuntu is really impressive, it’s the only distro that comes close to passing the grandma test, which is “would I buy a computer running this for my grandmother?”. It also has the cleanest and most integrated desktop of all of the Linux distros, Redhat and CentOS aren’t aimed at the desktop market and SuSE just seems to be more interested in loading lots of crap and eye-candy onto the desktop than they are in actually making it useful and functional. Dell’s netbooks ship with an Ubuntu option and if I were in the market for a netbook I’d go for it. Of course I view any windowing operating system as primarily a convenient means for having multiple terminal windows open.
Now, if someone would only come out with a decent alternative to MS Office I’d be set. And please, don’t tell me about OpenOffice, Open Office is big, bloated and stupid as well as being not fully compatible with MS Office. The lack of compatibility is largely Microsoft’s fault, I mean Microsoft Office isn’t fully compatible with Microsoft Office, but the big, bloated and stupid is all on Sun.
Wile E. Quixote
@mclaren
BZZZZZZ. Game over, thank you for playing. You really don’t know what you’re talking about do you? Here’s how businesses buy computers; you buy desktops and plan on them having a life of 3 to 5 years. When you buy the desktops you buy the OS license with them and plan on using that OS license for 3 to 5 years. You don’t run around and upgrade systems when a new OS comes out because it’s a pain in the ass and it’s usually cheaper to just buy new systems that are guaranteed to run the new stuff than it is to upgrade old stuff. The way you upgrade a user’s system to a new operating system is to give them new hardware with the new OS on it and then take their old system and if possible re-image it with the new OS or retire it.
Now, what does this have to do with your ignorance and Vista? Well most of the companies out there bought systems with XP licenses years ago and XP works just fine for them. If you’ve got a decent support staff and push AV updates and write the correct group policies XP is pretty solid and is very good at doing what most business users need to do.
Vista adds nothing to this except for some eye-candy and multimedia crap, Vista is no better at running MS Office, or Quickbooks, or PuTTY or FireFox than XP is. Businesses didn’t shun Vista because of the supposed incompatibilities you cite, they shunned it because it didn’t do anything for them that XP wasn’t already doing except for a bunch of shiny, multimedia crap.
joXn
Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft.
I have Win7 Enterprise RTM installed on an Asus EeePC 900, and I love it.
That said, there’s this caveat: the EeePC was a hand-me-down from my boyfriend who had it running XP and found it to be so slow as to be completely unusable. He sent it back to Asus for service with little improvement. When I got it it was out of warranty, and after running some hardware diagnostics I determined the problem was that his hard drive was a lemon. I ended up having to replace the SSD with a faster (coincidentally also larger) model before installing Win7, but now it runs beautifully.
I also have the Beta 2 version of Office 2010 and Word/Excel/Powerpoint start up in under 3 seconds from click to running. The Beta 2 version of Visual Studio 2010 is also impressively quick on this machine.
That said, the processor isn’t good enough to stream video any larger than YouTube Standard, and the video card and screen aren’t good enough to play graphically intensive games. But for an ultraportable word processing/web surfing device, I highly recommend it.
Cranky
Without reading through all the comments first…. I recently picked up an Acer Aspire One with a 10″ screen and a 7 hour battery. The first thing I did was wipe out WinXP and load Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix. It’s an absolutely rocking OS for such a small laptop.
Edward G. Talbot
Two points:
1.If your primary concern is battery life on planes, there are plenty of good laptops for the $600-$800 range with pretty long battery lives – mine lasts 4-6 hours in the real world and I got a large screen and pretty high powered chip. Drop $100 on a spare battery and you can fly from New York to Paris with the laptop on the whole time except for switching batteries. Now, if you want a netbook for other reasons – because it’s smaller, takes less power, etc – go for it. Battery life should not be your deciding factor, though.
2.If you’re concerned about operating systems, go with a Mac. Absolutely do NOT touch a MS Operating system that just came out if you have this kind of concern – it doesn’t matter how good it is, it has not been fully worked through. I say this as someone who has never worked with a Mac and who programs PC and Win Server applications for a living. But even MS apologists have to admit that Mac OS is more stable.
FWIW, I have had two Vista machines and 4 XP machines (including 2 specifically for work) and have only once had an operating system problem I considered significant. That was in 2007, MS released a patch that interfered with its web development tools. In any case, I reformat my hard drive and reload windows and everything else once a year on my personal machines. No, I shouldn’t have to do it, but I am satisfied with what it gets me. As I said, I’d recommend Macs for most people aside from the issue of them being a bit more expensive.
jhh
Tim–I am a world traveling physicist and and I know all about making up talks in planes and hotels.
As I recall, yr spouse is French and you yourself appear to be something approaching what Australians call a Hard Core Frenchy, ie, an Anglophone who speaks French well. (I know these things because our kids went to a French-English bilingual school in Australia. Our whole family are Hard Core Frenchies).
Anyhow, I have just netbook for you. It’s an MSI Wind u100-422CA, and you can get one RIGHT NOW from ZipZoomFly for $319 shipped.
The Wind is your standard Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz, XP running netbook. It has a MUCH better (ie bigger keys etc) keyboard than most other netbooks, and a brighter display. These things matter. The U100-422CA has bluetooth, a 160GB hard disk and a 6 cell battery good for 4+ hrs of real world use (I suggest getting a spare battery for about $60 and a back up HD. It is easy to open (I always have a screwdriver) and you can upgrade the memory, disk, or wifi card without voiding warranty (you are supposed to swap the originals back when you send it for warranty service). And you can, with some well documented hacking, run OS X or Linux on it.
Most netbooks (and indeed most Winds) in this price range have smaller disks, no bluetooth and 3 cell batteries. So why the deal?
Well, this model has the Canadian French Qwerty keyboard. It is marked both as a US QWERTY and with the Canadian QWERTY, which is mostly the same but with some rearrangement to allow you to type accents on letters without resorting to type numerical codes or odd key sequences.
(Note that this is the older so called French-Canadian rather than the new Canadian Multiligingual Layout, which is even better, I think. But both OK.)
Anyhow, typing in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian on this netbook is very pleasant. (I also have a quasi-phonetic Russian layout installed, which makes it easy to search Russian Wikipedia and Youtube). I bought it with a switch to OS X in mind (at home and work I mainly use Macs), but have not yet bothered because XP is fine, and even an advantage when traveling, as it connects to odd peripherals and mobile phones more readily.
Allez, bon courage.
jhh
Andrew J. Lazarus
One advantage to Win2K over XP is that it doesn’t Internet-register. It’s the last version that was easy to install more times than permitted.
I use Linux at work. Fine for running my home-brewed Java apps. But I agree that OpenOffice is as bloated as MS Office, and the chart support in Calc is even worse than Excel, which isn’t easy.
jhh
A few more details. The MSI Wind U100 has a 10 in screen. I have made up graphics and text intensive slides on an Asus 701a with a 7 inch screen running Linux, so it can be done, but 10 inches is MUCH nicer for talks. MSI also has 12 in model, the U210. But the 10 inch U100 weighs 2.7 lbs, while the U210 is something like 3.3 lbs, and more than $100 more expensive.
I’d ignore all the passionate pros and cons for XP vs Win 7 vs OSX vs Ubuntu or other Linux distro. I have not tried Win 7 yet, but have been able to get scientific work done on all the others, and on VMS and Sun Unix as well. You just have to look at what you are doing and what other gear you will connect with and go from there.
General Winfield Stuck
@cleek:
Thank you for this. I googled how and did it, and mucho better.
jhh
Another one more thing. Canadian keyboards (either the older French-English one or new Canadian Standard Multi-lingual) and laptops blessed/cursed with them go for reduced prices because American monoglots panic at the sight of the ALT-GRPH (which is the righat-alt) and accent-marked keys. Ew, yuck. (Somehow, they can’t bear to either ignore the smaller print or cover it up with nail polish or whatever).
This is why a new MSI Wind U100 CA model goes for $30-$50 less than an equivalent US keyboard model. It is also why a $100+ IBM/Lenovo Ultranav keyboard+touchpad with Canadian Multilinguage layout goes for 24.99 on ebay.
Being a contrarian and a skinflint by nature, I love this. Hell, if I could get a big discount, I’d buy a laptop with a Japanese keyboard and replace with a US spare part for $15 from ebay.
Arachnae
I’ve got a little Acer running XP, less than a year old and the ‘h’ key sticks. I’d look into how to clean it, but its primary usage is as a CPU, hooked up to my TV with a wireless keyboard and mouse. I run it from the sofa. Somehow, Excel spreadsheets don’t seem so tedious when they’re on a TV screen. And of course, it’s great for watching streaming movies from Netflix.
Flappy McScrotum
We have a 7in Asus running EasyPeasy/Ubuntu. We use solely when we are traveling. Use it mainly for web surfing, saving our travel itineraries, etc.. My wife sometimes it to work in the pharmacy and uses it read electronic magazines when things really quiet.
They key thing to remember about them is that they are in no way a replacement for a real laptop or desktop. I wouldn’t want to do any hardcore development on one. However, if I were a college student I would love for taking notes in class, that type of thing.
And, to be honest, it’s a fun toy to play with.
baldheadeddork
I slipped out for a few hours to go to a wedding. While I was there someone told a joke I didn’t get. Maybe you guys can help.
Here it is: What do computer geeks use for birth control?
Answer: Their personality.
Anyone get that?
The Other Steve
I’ve been running Windows 7 since beta and it’s rock solid. They finally got it right. I’m running it on my nearly 4 year old Dell laptop, and my state of the art modern as of last year desktop.
As far as netbooks go. Vista won’t work well on those, and 7 is a huge improvement over XP. Major huge, big.
On the netbook thing… Be careful. The problem I’ve seen with the early ones is the keyboards were intended for children. Too small. New ones might be better.
I did build a machine at home using an Atom 330 processor, and it is seriously intriguing. It’s not fast, but it’s fast enough for a lot of things. From what I saw running Win7 on it though, the main limitation is the graphics. It’s adequate I guess to do your typical internet type stuff, but it was sluggish. I didn’t try playing DVDs, but I think it might struggle there.
The Other Steve
Wow, reading through the thread. Glad I wasn’t here earlier.
Linux – I’m amazed people still suggest it as a desktop OS. Sheesh, try to install a printer or a wireless NIC. Plug in a second monitor. Get back to me next week when you have it finally working.
Windows 2000 – Umm, ok, dude, time to stop living in the past. I’m still suffering with Windows 2000 server at work. It’s time to move on.
PaulB
Speaking as another Microsoftie, and one who worked on Windows Vista, I can tell you three things:
1. mclaren *really* doesn’t know wtf he’s talking about, neither about technology nor about the market, although I do find his fantasies highly amusing. That combination of ignorance and arrogance is always entertaining.
2. Windows Vista pretty much sucked.
3. Windows 7 really doesn’t.
theturtlemoves
How many freaking Microsofties are on this site, anyway, myself included? Yeah, been running Windows 7 exclusively for several months now (well, dual booting Server 2k8 R2 on one machine for a HyperV lab environment, but…) and have been very happy with it. Interface has some nice tweaks, runs stable, etc. I never really had issues with Vista, but I have a horse of a system. My wife had problems running it on a laptop with only 1 GB of RAM, but doubling that solved the issues. So, I’d definitely recommend 7 to my friends and family and already have, actually.
Quiddity
Add me to the list: I still use Windows 2kPro.
Got the other stuff as well, but like the 2kPro for MS Office 2003. BTW, what’s new in Office that demands using the later versions? I find their UIs pretty awful (e.g the ribbon).
tripletee
Excellent thread – wtf are people living where Windows 2000 is still the primary business OS, for Christ’s sake?
I used to have Vista on my workstation at the office and it frequently drove me into insane bouts of rage, but the betas and RC of Win7 have been rock-solid on the same hardware that Vista made so infuriating. And it’s less of of a pain in the ass to administer in an Active Directory environment. We’re finally going to start moving people off of XP, which I was beginning to wonder if I would ever be able to say.
I also installed the retail release on a 3-year-old Shuttle box that I use as a media server earlier this week (I signed up for one of those ultra-dorky house parties to get a free copy of Ultimate), and so far so good – runs just as well as XP Media Center 2005 on a 1.86Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM and a shitty Intel mobile video card.
As for netbooks, meh. If I’m going to carry around something bigger than a phone, I want to be able to do some real work on it. Also not impressed at all with the build quality of most of the ones I’ve played around with; they feel exactly like what they are – cheap and plasticky. I’m with Martin – if you can swallow the price premium, a Mac gives you the ability to use whatever OS is most suited to the task at hand on hardware that doesn’t feel like it was designed and assembled by interns from the Heritage Foundation.
Doug Johnson
I have a Samsung N110 that I bought a few months ago from Amazon. It had XP installed originally. That worked fine.
A while back, I ordered three copies of W7 for delivery next week. In order to see how that was going to work out, I downloaded and installed the enterprise evaluation version of W7 a few weeks ago.
W7 runs very nicely on the N110. I use the machine during my ferry and train commute, and I have found that the networking is faster to connect and much less likely to get confused than XP was. It is plenty fast enough for the work that is appropriate to the form factor. For example, I’m writing this at a hotel using the netbook, which is connected over Hamachi2 VPN to my home desktop with MS Remote Desktop, running Firefox on the remote machine. The response time feels the same as it would locally as far as I can tell.
So I am a very happy user of W7 on Samsung N110.
Jordan Banks
I’m a big XP fan and a hardcore Vista hater. When I ordered my Dell Inspiron 530 which is a desktop last last may, I did everything in my power to avoid Vista and I got it with XP. However, about two months ago I decided to try the Windows 7 Release Candiate, which is a basically the near release version of Windows 7. I downloaded it from Microsoft and installed in on my desktop. The result? I loved it. It ran better on my desktop than Windows XP, and it’s just a fine OS. A lot of the graphical functions like aero peek actually make the computer easier to use. I am huge, huge Mac fan even though I haven’t owned one in years, I will actually say I prefer windows 7 to Mac OS X it’s that good. I also have a netbook. An Asus Eee PC 1000HE. It shipped with XP, and I installed Windows 7 Ultimate on it and it runs like a charm. This is the final version of windows I got it from Microsoft in a promotion and I got it early. I highly recommend netbooks but get one one with a 11 or 12 inch screen. The biggest annoyance I have with mine is the 10.2 in 1024×600 screen. Wait till windows 7 comes out and then order an HP mini 311. It comes with windows 7 and the same integrated graphics that more powerful laptops such as macbooks come with. Wait till october 22nd and order a HP mini 311. You’ll love it.
Frank Quist
Acer Aspire One D250 netbook here, currently running Ubuntu. I’ve ran Windows 7 on this one, and it was more than sweet. I’m a power user and I don’t care at all for limiting the amount of applications and browser tabs I run. Didn’t get me into trouble at all on this netbook.
I regularly run into the two or three dozen tabs, and 7-8 running apps (including Office) plus a smattering of background processes, and had no performance problems except when coming out of hibernate or suspend. I’m definitely not a Windows fan (linux is my base system) but
Win7 is the best Non-Mac OS I’ve ever ran. And I get compliments on the netbook all the time!
If you get an Acer, just don’t get the 751h or whatever they call it one, that has a higher resolution and some more battery life, but lower performance. Also, if you have large fingers, avoid the Acer netbooks too. Its keyboards are smaller than a real one.
Oh, and if you use a netbook, get Chrome for a browser, ditch Firefox. It’s blazing.
Frank Quist
I might add, if you’d go for linux, Office 2007 actually seems to run on WINE on newer Ubuntu and Wine versions (the dev version not the 1.0.0 one). No LaTeX editors that’re not shitty as hell on linux, though.
Tim F.
@jhh: Thanks for the tip about the Canadian keyboard. It might help quite a bit!
Tom Betz
I took the plunge this weekend and installed 64-bit Windows 7 Professional RTM on a refurb Pavilion with an AMD Phenom processor, and so far, my only problem is obscure application incompatibility. Having gone so far as to even have tried using the potentially-excellent Windows XP Mode to set it up, and now devoting an Admistrative user to running it and it alone, I’ve come to the conclusion that the execrable-anyway TiVo Desktop just can’t be configured to run stably, period, exclamation point.
But then again, I’ve also had that problem on XP Pro and Vista PCs.
7 is much less “noisy” than Vista, prompting me for permission to do stuff I’ve already asked it to do much less when I’m logged in as a Standard User.
As the PC is also new to me, I can’t be certain whether my problem with the LG-for-HP GH10L DVD-CD/RW drive going away occasionally, even though I have installed all HP’s system/firmware updates, is a problem with the drive itself or with the 32-bit app I’m using to write to it, CD BurnerXP.
Chuck
I like my operating system therefore I am better than everyone else who does not.
Meh. I run ubuntu because I can’t get a decent command shell on windows, that’s about it. Netbooks, I’ll be interested in when they break the $200 mark.
jnfr
I took the plunge just this week and ordered an Aspire with XP. All the software I want to run is in XP anyway, and I have no immediate plans to switch. After lugging my old Dell Inspiron around in airports last month and nearly breaking my back to do so, I’m really looking forward to something small and light that can move around the house with me easily. And they’re incredibly cheap! I was looking through my email to figure out when I’d bought that old Dell, and saw that I’d paid nearly $2000 for it in 2001.
I also have a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet that I got to replace my old Palm Pilot, but it’s such a small screen that it’s hard for my old eyes to web browse on it. Beautiful little machine though, I really do like it and it’s incredibly functional. Very pocketable, but I expect the netbook to get more use when I’m at home.
Vince CA
I’m running a new Acer laptop 4810T (Acer are the folks who bought Gateway) with Ubuntu Jaunty and it’s nothing but smooth sailing. It comes prepackaged with OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox. It runs fast and cool, too! And command shells are heaven. I can’t live without them. Even my Windoze box I’ve installed Cygwin.
I avoid Windoze when I can because I can’t tolerate the overhead, and I hate those little icons in the bottom right that always pop up and interrupt my work. Whenever in Vista i disable the UAC, it complains to no end that my machine is unsafe. Argh. I’d get a Mac, but between their price (ouch!) and their lack of a middle button (or two-button paste), I can’t just justify it.
EL
@The Raven:
I wanted light and small, and bought an ASUS 900. I love the portability, but it doesn’t have full Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. I can view but not edit Powerpoint, and the text program doesn’t always translate well to Word when emailed.
I would love a faster 9 inch netbook. And if Apple comes out with one, I’ll probably buy it. Not because of the logo as some have claimed, but because the products are usually better. I’ve used Mac at home and PCs at work for years, and I know which I prefer.
EL
@Chuck:
The Chinese have a few versions for $100 or less. Not sure of the functionality, though.
The Raven
@Maude: I agree completely.
In the long run, I think Google has the right of it: use their online apps & most of the support becomes Somebody Else’s Problem. For most casual users that’s more than enough computing power. Google Apps also have excellent sharing capabilities. It will be interesting to see how well the Android Netbook fares. So I don’t think it matters what operating system is on the netbook–the size of the screen matters more. Now if Mindvision would just stop sitting on that wonderful wearable display technology…
Paris
“Win 2K Pro with the kernel loaded into RAM on startup…”
After unglazing my eyes, I have to wonder how this is easier than Linux. Ubuntu has a great custom netbook interface and tons of software is available from the standard repositories.
Tom Betz
@jnfr — I didn’t say I bought the Windows 7 Pro, just that I took the plunge and installed it.
I’m climbing the learning curve for Windows 7 because my employer gets it (and anything else it needs) from Microsoft for free, so I need to prepare to support it. At the moment, nothing at work is 64-bit, so I get to climb the curve on my own time, with a license from the office.
Will
I’ve never really understood all the carping about Vista. It works great on new hardware. Old hardware, yeah, it’s gonna suck. So, um, maybe it’s time for an upgrade?
Steeplejack
@mclaren:
Where I live, essentially every business still uses Win 2K.
Okay, that’s where you lost me. I was following the thread, keeping an open mind, but that rips it. I am a software developer with current experience ranging from large-scale Web database deployment to troubleshooting friends’ PCs, and I can’t remember the last time I saw any computer running Win 2K. But maybe you’re writing from the militia compound in Idaho. Can you see B.O.B.’s pizza oven from where you are?
jnfr
@Tom Betz:
I’ll be interested in hearing your thoughts re: WIndows 7 in a later thread. I am usually late to take upgrades myself, when I’m happy with the capabilities I have.
delk
@Vince CA
The new touchpads on the Mac’s are really slick multi-touch. It took me awhile, as a dedicated Mac user to get used to it instead of plugging in a third party mouse or command clicking.
Ravi J
I’ve been using Win7 ever since MS rolled out Release Candidate, and have to admit that, inspite of being a Linux user, I’m not going to go back to XP or Vista. I’ve also never purchased software in my life, but looks like Win7 would be the first.
It’s way faster than Vista and XP. Vista was a disaster, like ME. W7 is also very stable, especially a lot of it executes in .NET environment. Advantage of it is that you’ll see very few BSOD.
ImJohnGalt
Count me as another Windows 7 user here. A friend told me about Microsoft’s MAPS program for small businesses, ISV’s, and VARs, and I now have a kitted out test lab with Windows Server 2008 R2, 10 Win 7 licenses and Sharepoint, all for less than $500.00. Check it out if you’re a small business owner.
Highly recommend the O/S, which is finally motivating me to upgrade all of our office machines from XP.
T. Scheisskopf
Printers on Linux? Well, I run Mandriva Linux here and they just…work. Windows? Well, not so much. There is this thing called “the registry” and other things called “drivers” that wreak blue holy hell on the process all too often. I would like to cut the hamstring tendons of the people who came up with that registry thingy. With a Taco Bell Spork. I really would.
Now, Broadcom wireless chipsets on linux are entirely too interesting and diverting. On the other hand, just get a wireless adapter with the Atheros chipset and it just…works. That said, Broadcom is now directly supporting linux, after years of having their heads embedded in a particularly dark and smelly part of their anatomy, and things are getting better.
All in all, the “drivers” argument concerning Linux is simply a trope.
This Windows 7 upgrade process(I have mine ordered through that terminal geek discount program) sounds entirely too interesting. I hope I can just do a clean install. And then find all the drivers I need, and that the drivers work, and then…
JessicaD
@soonergrunt:
Thank you for your support of Windows 7 and thank you for evaluating Windows 7 RC! Have you pre-ordered your copy of Win 7 yet? If you are planning on purchasing Windows 7 when it is released in just 4 days it may be helpful to know you don’t have to wait to reserve your copy of Win 7! You can pre-order your copy of Windows 7 Home Premium or Windows 7 Professional today. For more information, see the Windows 7 Pre-Order offer page here: http://tinyurl.com/nldc8p
Also, if you are currently a student you may qualify for the $30 upgrade to Windows 7. For more information, please go here: http://tinyurl.com/kprhkp
Jessica
Microsoft Windows Client Team
CalD
I usually won’t go near anyone’s new OS release from until it’s been in the field at least 6 months. I have a copy of Snow Leopard sitting on the shelf next to my mac waiting for it to hit 10.6.3 or so before I crack the shrink wrap. I definitely wouldn’t recommend that for a work machine just yet, after the test machine we loaded it on ended up needing it’s mobo replaced as a result.
On the Windows side, SP1 is usually my minimum buy-in point. I might make an exception in the case of Windows 7 though, since it’s really just a relaunch of Windows Vista and Vista has been out long enough now that it’s safe to go near. Vista itself is actually a pretty decent OS at this point too if you turn off UAC.
Linux is another viable option for many users at this point and is considerably lighter than Windows XP, which would seemingly make it a natural for ultralight machines. Common commercial software titles are still rarely ported to Linux but Ubuntu comes preloaded with nearly everything a casual computer user will ever really need. I’ve been using OpenOffice exclusively on all my machines for a couple of years now and I rarely miss anything MS Office can do that OpenOffice doesn’t — and then we’d be talking things that a lot of people might find a little exotic, like Fourier transforms.
If you stick with Windows though, XP has reached the age where you’re going to start being punished more and more for continuing to use it. Installing IE 8 on an XP box can already break stuff, device drivers are going to start becoming harder to find, software vendors will stop supporting it in new releases pretty soon, that sort of thing. I’d go with Vista or Windows 7 myself.