Why you won't want Windows 7 Starter on your netbook
Will anyone want to use Windows 7 Starter edition? Nathan Taylor explains why he thinks this is the version you might want to avoid.
I’ve been reading with interest about Microsoft’s plans to introduce a special edition of Windows 7 for NetBooks.
Called Windows 7 Starter, the edition doesn’t include the Aero Glass theme, only comes in 32-bit, won’t have Media Center or touch screen support and – here’s the kicker – will only run three applications at once.
Is Microsoft kidding? Three applications at once? Is anybody going to actually buy this piece of crippleware? I can understand removing Media Center, and even perhaps Aero Glass as well as some of the heavier features that consumers never use, but this makes no sense to me.
It essentially limits you to a browser, email application and one productivity application. Want to open up Excel and Word? You're going to have to shut something down.
The removal of touch-screen support is also a bad idea, since it’s likely that NetBooks are going to be the platform in which touch screen technology really takes off.
Touch screens are expensive, but the small screen size on netbooks makes them feasible at consumer prices, so it doesn’t make sense to limit the capacity of the OS to support it.
Given these limitations, Microsoft seems to be essentially forcing NetBook manufacturers to purchase Home Basic if they want to run Windows 7 on their products, since nobody in their right mind is going to be interested in Starter.
Just as likely, the OEMs may look to one of various Linux-based operating systems as an alternative, just as Asus did with the original Eee PC.
Moblin, Winki, Cloud OS and other OSes optimised for NetBooks are coming down the pike (Wired Magazine actually has an excellent overview of them here), and if Microsoft wants to compete, it’s going to have to do better than an artificially crippled version of basic Windows.
Other Blog Entries written by Nathan Taylor:
Thoughts on this article? Add a comment below.
Be the first to comment on this article.