Marketing Mush

I felt like I was wading through mush reading the Engineering Windows 7 blog. I've waited until now to read all of the accumulated postings. Little to no details except what they are "focusing" on while they do whatever they are doing to bring Windows 7 to market. The blogs read more like techie versions of marketing focus-group reports. "Mojave" for the technically inclined maybe.

I was a little dismayed to see that they think the best way to use Windows (any version back to and including XP) is to have the system come up from "sleep" mode. Yes that makes it boot faster more often, but it also means you have to leave the system powered while doing that. Yes its at a much lower power setting BUT it still requires running current into the system. I would like them come up with a method to have the system come back up from a cold dead stop in 5 seconds or less. Its going to require a combination of hardware and software but it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft dictated terms to the hardware vendors. Windows 95 "compatible" CRT monitors comes immediately to mind.

If Radio Shack could do it more than 15 years ago with the CMOS TRS80 model 2, why can't it be done now with the vastly superior laptop and netbook technology of today?

I was also dismayed that most of the discussion seemed to be centered on Vista and what they wanted to do with it. Their focus in the later blogs seemed to hinge on justifications for what was in Vista and how they were going to "fix" the settings in Win7. hmmm. They make it sound more like Vista SP2 or Vista2 or maybe they ought to call it The Mojave Vista.

However, taking the blogs at face value, I'm glad that they seem to be interested in making the slow-as-molasses processes in Vista run faster in Win7. Whoopee. Installing hardware drivers in "parallel" on boot-up is something that is easily done in Linux. Just change a setting in Debian and it boots nearly twice as fast as it used to. Currently DebbieToo (a Celeron) and SugarBear (a P3) both boot up faster than Windows XP SP3 on my P4.

I've been reading a couple of books about embedded Linux. It looks like there are a number of other things I can do to speed up boot time and application run times for Debian or other Linux versions. I also will be able to customize the operating system image to only include what I want in it and not what the Redmond Gorilla wants in it. I doubt that I'll have that sort of flexibility to speed up or customize Windows 7, or whatever the marketing hacks decide to call it!