Windows 7 to target the Netbook Market

Netbooks are becoming an increasingly large market that Windows Vista had not been able to tap in, largely due to the fact that the netbook market did not exist during its development stage, and also because the OS is extremely bogged. Microsoft has other reasons, claiming generally low netbook stats before the market matured, and little space on Solid Sate Drives. As for the future, Microsoft is looking to take over the netbook market with Windows 7.

Here was Sinofsky’s defense as to why Vista failed with netbooks:

SS: Well here’s my view of it. So first, I’m not going to get into defining a netbook, let’s just say many of these new, low-end PCs are selling with Vista on them. The model I got, that I was running today is available with Vista on it. The one I got all my friends as gifts, because you know, they’re like gifts now. I put Vista Ultimate on all of them, I just upgraded Vista to Vista Ultimate.
The key thing that really drove the XP installation where the very first ones of these netbooks tried to have only flash drives. The reality is that, for better or worse, Vista’s disk footprint wasn’t going to fit on 8GB of flash. And the reason for that is not anything to do with performance, or bloat or anything. We do a lot of really customer focused things, like we have a gigabyte and a half of printer drivers. So you might not want them, but boy they’re really useful when you need them.

Steven Sinofssky demonstrated Windows 7 at PDC on his Lenovo Ideapad S10 netbook equipped with an Atom N270 processor and 1GB 1.5GB of RAM. He claimed that the laptop still had half its memory after startup.

Numbers - Higher is better

Several sites have attempted installing Windows 7 on their netbooks. This screenshot from eeePC Blog shows how netbooks with Vista and XP faired against a the HP 2133 Mini-Note Netbook with Windows 7. Windows 7 seems to perform better than Vista but not XP.

Laptopmag also wrote up a review on their experience with Windows 7 on an ASUS EEE PC100 running on a 1.6GhZ Atom processor and 1GB of RAM. Compared to the 40-second boot time on XP, it takes 58 seconds to boot up in Windows 7. Testing showed smooth performance and proved that Sinofsky was right on his claim that half of memory would still be free – only 485 MB was used.

With netbooks becoming an increasingly profitable market, there is no doubt the big M is working hard to change people’s minds and convert them back from Linux. Apcmag even goes as far as predicting a netbook version of Windows 7 – it’s possible.

Related posts:

1. Windows 7 Netbook Edition Confirmed
2. Why Windows 7 will win the netbook war
3. Microsoft plans to add “several” netbook editions of Windows 7