Any news on Windows 7 Netbook Edition?

Like how much ram it's gonna take and cost because it's slim down version of Windows 7 oh and of course release date.

I really like to try the beta and I can but my XP is so perfectly setup and I don't want to go ruining that for testers delight.

 

The ram ussage should be below 200MB when idling since windows 7 ultimate only uses about 350mb of ram. Netbook edition is pretty much useless if you know how to customize windows.

 

TechReport and several other industry sites have discussed the Win7 edtions for the past week. The mainstream market will really only see two editions: Home Premium and Business/Professional. The Starter edition is limited and is only sold in "developing countries". Ultimate won't be hyped on by MS (not much need with a good gaming majority hyping it for them). Enterprise edition of course is just Business/Professional with the addition of volume licensing, so it won't appeal to most consumers.

As much as I would like to see a customized "Netbook Edition", it would not be realistic since the Beta proves Windows 7's memory management is even better than Vista's (though it seems not by a whole lot much). Aero already scales nicely as long as you meet the minimum requirements:
- 1 GHz CPU (single-core and higher)
- 1 GB of RAM
- 128 MB video graphics memory
- DX9 capable graphics chipset (needed for Aero)
- VGA display or better (800 x 600 at least)
- Mouse and keyboard (of course)

Everything else is obvious and not worth mentioning.

 

I know a Netbook Edition of Windows 7 has been confirmed, I just hope it idles @ 300MB with Aero.

Hopefully it's not striped of the fancy stuff like Vista Home Basic which was missing Aero.

 

Windows 7 Ultimate is running great on my one with 1.5GB of RAM so im not overly worried about a netbook edition. Are the ones with only 512mb struggling?

 

You'll achieve 300MB idle with AERO on if you turn off voice recognition and tablet features with Windows 7 Ultimate.

 

Why would you want the OS to idle at 300mb (assuming 1gb of ram total)? Seems a rather arbitrary number to me. Personally, I would prefer that superfetch used up anything not used by apps...

 

Why people want their OS to idle at 300mb? It's because most of the comptuer users are newbies. They think lower ram consumption equal highier performance.

 

I'm not a newbie by any means... and there's a good reason for an OS using up very little memory.... It's to free up ram for APPLICATIONS. Using up most RAM for the OS is rubbish, unless you just want to use your AAO to play around the Win7 OS eye candy. Most of us "non" newbies actually do use applications that need RAM, lots of it is better. And having free RAM means less time swapping out the OS(or better yet not swapping) to the HD or SSD. So there you go, I'd like to see Win7 Home to use up 200mb nothing more. My tweaked XP Home SP3 uses up only 170+mb after boot, leaving me with heaps of RAM for applications. Cheers.

 

Most "non" newbies know that ram can dump their information really really really quick. The program cache (from prefetch which is responsible for most of the ram ussage) will not be paged to the HDD. When you need the ram space, the OS will simply dump those caches in 1/1000000 of a second and you won't even notice. Most "non" newbies will know that most of the time, prefetch (which uses most of the ram) is beneficial and will increase the "responsiveness" of the operating system and programs. Less ram usasge doesn't always translates to better performance.

My tweaked Windows XP Pro used for testing purposes uses 80~MB of ram after boot with fully featured GUI. The performance isn't exactly highier compared to "non-modified" XP. I admit the some of the services in WinXP is pretty annoying and shouldn't even be enabled by default. E.g. Messenger service. It's only good for pulling pranks on newbies. :lol:

 

I use Photoshop CS3 almost all the time on my desktop workstations and having superfetch ON slows down my computer alot when I'm working. Having that disk activity during photo editing is just a major pain. So I turn that off. I have prefetch/superfetch off in Win7 right now and it uses about 490mb.... I guess it's NOT the reason for the RAM usage huh. It's the OS. In my AAO SSD I switched off swap file as well to minimize SSD lag, so less memory used is really needed. Or else I'll run out of memory pretty quickly.

 

Prefetch only speeds up the 1st time you launch an application. You will only notice speed decrease when prefetch is pulling data from hdd. After that, you should get the same if not better performance.

Of course, in your SSD based AAO, you should turn off prefetch. Prefetch is optimized for computer with hdd and free or wasted ram.