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RE: Windows XP to compete with Win 7 in netbook market

chromeronin Updated - 7th Mar 2009

The sort of "Netbook" you need for Windows 7 to be happy
is still 1GB RAM, preferably 2, and a spinning platter
harddrive, as the cheaper SSD drives are neither big
enough or fast enough on write performance to be of any
use to a windows based OS. Even XP will stutter and run
crappy on a 7GB SSD.
To me this just makes it a small laptop, not a netbook.
The netbook is lightweight and has little grunt becasue it
should leverage the "Net" and offload the heavy lifting and
bulk storage to a server or main desktop.
You do not need to run MS Office 2007 on your netbook,
you just need to RDP to your desktop machine or get onto
your corporate citrix farm.
Windows 7 is stil too screen realestate hungry to work on a
small 7-9 inch display, so really needs a full 900 or more
pixels in height.
Linux for me can still be made smaller in footprint, less
swappy to reduce writes to disk, can be installed with fewer
services eating CPU cycles and RAM, and all of the linux
GUI shells can be easily customised to use small screens
better. Also tunneling X11 is a free way to get apps
running from your home desktop to display on your local
screen. The best thing about the netooks hainvg to be fast enough to
run XP and Win7, it these make fantastic Linux machines, even if they
only just make the grade for Windows.