What happened to Microsoft?

[Mini Motors]

I don't want to be disagreeable, but to call something low spec, there has to be something better to compare to. I haven't done that much shopping around, but I've never seen a netbook without an Atom processor. I've seen laptops with Atoms, and I would certainly consider them low spec. And my Sony, at almost $900.00, is certainly not low spec. Plus the fact that with Vista, it was painful to use. It took almost 10 minutes to boot. With 7, it's like a regular computer. Not the speed of a 3+GHz machine, but totally booted in less than 3 minutes.

And you don't have to take just my word about it. Like most things, I found a forum devoted to small computing devices, Pocketables.net. A netbook is about the largest thing they cover.

 

[Jetblast]

I don't want to be disagreeable, but to call something low spec, there has to be something better to compare to. I haven't done that much shopping around, but I've never seen a netbook without an Atom processor. I've seen laptops with Atoms, and I would certainly consider them low spec. And my Sony, at almost $900.00, is certainly not low spec. Plus the fact that with Vista, it was painful to use. It took almost 10 minutes to boot. With 7, it's like a regular computer. Not the speed of a 3+GHz machine, but totally booted in less than 3 minutes.

And you don't have to take just my word about it. Like most things, I found a forum devoted to small computing devices, Pocketables.net. A netbook is about the largest thing they cover.

There's something else going on there. I don't know how my laptop specs out compared to yours, but my cheapie five year-old laptop with an AMD Turion 64 1.6GHz processor run like a champ with Vista. I just started it up and it took one minute and thirty eight seconds to boot and be useable.

 

[twall]

I'm wondering if its a bus speed issue. My netbook @1.66 gigs also takes about 7 - 8 min to boot XP. I have a 1gig stick of RAM coming for it, I'll see if that helps. It's only PC2-5300 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and 667MHz is pretty slow, but that's what's in it, and that's the replacement.

I know when the RAM gets maxed out (like during boot) Windows always does that 'virtual memory' swap-space poop, and the HD is a LOT slower than RAM!

 

[Mini Motors]

To be fair, boot up time does take longer when you have more stuff starting. My netbook, for example, has the wireless/Bluetooth/GPS utility, and probably a couple others.. But the improvement I experienced is with the same set of utilities. And Windows does have it's own set of underlying utilities that you can't even see, much less change. But my guess is that 7 has less of these than Vista.

More RAM should help your netbook, Todd. But you shouldn't be having that much trouble w/XP. Keep us posted.

Stan

 

[Slater]

I don't want to be disagreeable, but to call something low spec, there has to be something better to compare to. I haven't done that much shopping around, but I've never seen a netbook without an Atom processor. I've seen laptops with Atoms, and I would certainly consider them low spec. And my Sony, at almost $900.00, is certainly not low spec. Plus the fact that with Vista, it was painful to use. It took almost 10 minutes to boot. With 7, it's like a regular computer. Not the speed of a 3+GHz machine, but totally booted in less than 3 minutes.

And you don't have to take just my word about it. Like most things, I found a forum devoted to small computing devices, Pocketables.net. A netbook is about the largest thing they cover.

To be fair, boot up time does take longer when you have more stuff starting. My netbook, for example, has the wireless/Bluetooth/GPS utility, and probably a couple others.. But the improvement I experienced is with the same set of utilities. And Windows does have it's own set of underlying utilities that you can't even see, much less change. But my guess is that 7 has less of these than Vista.

More RAM should help your netbook, Todd. But you shouldn't be having that much trouble w/XP. Keep us posted.

Stan

On the topic of Atoms being low spec:
I'm not sure how to try to explain this any better, but look at it this way. The notion of "netbook" is about as broad of a term as you can get and it is just a marketing term. Originally they were around 5-7". Now nobody makes a 7" netbook, they call them MID's.
A netbook is small, lightweight, and CHEAP! If you have a 10" portable to start out with, it will be defined by its price. If it is $1k then it is a subcompact, not a netbook (defined by the manufacturer because they do NOT want to be seen as all the others in the market and they need to justify their price, which marketing a $1k machine as a netbook, immediately devalues it and no consumer will touch it. See Sony Vaio P.) If it is $300, then it is a netbook and that will be how it is marketed. They are not limited to Atom processors (see Via C7, AMD Fusion, ARM Cortex, i3-i7 current gen Sandy Bridge) as you seem to believe but that IS what they are most known for and mainly due to the marketing pointed out above. There is no clear line. So there is no way to truly compare it to anything except EVERYTHING in the portable market (besides phones.) If you want to define a range of screen sizes to compare to, say 8-12", then sure, I will find you plenty of portables that will blow the current D510 Atom processor out of the water (see M11x or x120e), many with Sandy bridge i3-i7 processors or the AMD Fusion platform. Also saying that my Sony that cost $900 is not low spec is pretty vague. Is it 5 years old or brand new? The TECH INDUSTRY not just me, will tell you that the Atom processors are low spec especially with their paired GPU, they serve their designed purpose to an extent. Remember, its not just about Ghz or FSB.

On the topic of Vista:
I already said that Vista is a resource hog, I am not denying that, but a failure? Really? Clean install of Vista will give you about 56-66 running processes. Clean install of Windows 7 will be 36-44. Big problem is manufacturers (Dell, HP, etc.) run all their crap as well so you never get a clean install unless you do it yourself (and no, uninstalling everything that came with it is not a clean install :laughing Running processes don't really say much except its a quick way to see a numerical difference on some of the stuff loading with Vista adding to its requirements. I'll say it again, Vista was NOT a bad OS, in fact I would argue it was a very good OS. I would say GREAT OS if it ran better on a wider range of hardware, but it was often paired with low spec hardware i.e. Intel Atom and Microsoft definitely took cues from Vista and realized they needed to free up resources. Be happy that Vista was a "failure" in your eyes, because much of the optimization in W7 occurred because of the realization that legacy hardware needed to be supported. Vista booted in 42 seconds on my old computer, without a SSD.

@twall
More RAM will help, but 7-8minutes is pathetic, especially xp and no matter what hardware you are running it on. A SSD will help your read times and could help dramatically, but fairly pricey.
When your in windows, go to "Start" --> Run --> type msconfig --> Go to Startup tab and deselect EVERYTHING except your AV if you have it and anything else that are a MUST for startup. This should help reduce some of what is trying to load.
Also if you go to System Properties --> Advanced tab --> Settings under 'Performance' --> Advanced tab --> Change under 'Virtual memory --> Actually Step 2 on this Page should help. Set your paging file to the max recommended based on your RAM amount and if you have enough space on your HDD.

 

[Jetblast]

I'm wondering if its a bus speed issue. My netbook @1.66 gigs also takes about 7 - 8 min to boot XP. I have a 1gig stick of RAM coming for it, I'll see if that helps. It's only PC2-5300 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and 667MHz is pretty slow, but that's what's in it, and that's the replacement.

I know when the RAM gets maxed out (like during boot) Windows always does that 'virtual memory' swap-space poop, and the HD is a LOT slower than RAM!

My crappy Averatech does have 1 GB of the same RAM type, so that might help. I'm not a stripped-down boot guy who starts processes manually after the fact, I have wireless and a few other luxuries starting with the boot process. The only things I can think of that makes my shite box run well on Vista is being a fanatic about using CCleaner and Auslogics Defrag daily, excising bloatware programs as they appears, ditching Vista's Aero appearance scheme, and the usual stuff you find when you Google "make Vista faster". I'm no computer expert, I'm just impatient.

7-8 minutes to boot XP speaks well to your character, twall. Over here, that last four minutes would be happening while I was throwing it across the room repeatedly during breaks from breaking wind into its cooling intake ports.

 

[twall]

@Slater,

I used PCTools toolkit (free version) to strip down the startup procedure right after I posted my boot times, and it helped. It's down to four minutes ready to use boot.

@jetblast,

I consider it being useable to be fully booted. It will get to the desktop in about 1 minute, and the rest of the time is spent while the disk activity light is on solid (not blinking) and nothing can be accomplished until it's done finding it's arse with a candle.......It's extra frustrating to see the background, the icons, the taskbar, and the mouse pointer works, but you can't do a thing for another 3 minutes......:mur:

I know, guys, it's opening stuff I don't need - I stripped my startup list when I had Win 98, and it was such a horrible pain, I would rather let it do its thing with more RAM, and get it done faster, than strip line by line stuff out of the startup....I'll end up manually doing that anyhow.

Funny enough, while it's running, it doesn't use much RAM at all - which is odd if there are a bunch of programs running in the background. Once it's done its' horrible opening sequence, most of my resources are available...usually in the 90% range. It's just a travel computer, like when we're going to go to Starbucks or something where there's WiFi.....otherwise, it's rarely booted at all. If it were still my daily computer, it would really fry me - so I'm not as saintlike as you think! :laughing: I'd like to use it more though.

It was fine until my G/F got her mitts on it for a month. She is big into online flash games. It was not really that sluggish when I had it - it was actually pretty snappy - so much so that I didn't immediately realize how fast my new laptop was. But, when I got it back, it was a miserable mess.

 

[twall]

Just to ask again, why can't I get the Microsoft.NET update to install on my Win 7 machine? It never has. It always tries on shutdown, and always fails. I doubt it's my firewall on my phone (or whatever security ity has on it) because the same update installed just fine on XP.

I'd like to get it installed. I thought it might be Mcaffee stopping it, but that's gone, and I am using MSE. That's my only security now, and it's set up the same as on my XP machine. Why won't this damned thing install?

 

[Mini Motors]

I would suggest running update manually, but before you hit install, try installing "optional" updates first. There might be something there that is required by M/S .net.

 

[twall]

Turns out, Microsoft.NET is a developer tool, and apparantly I don't have it. When I downloaded it manually, it said the update was not applicable. There might be a piece of it somewhere in the web browser to make it think it's installed, triggering an update - or do all updates just get downloaded whether you have the underlying program or not?

Unfortunately, that rotten update was in front of the service pack update. When it failed (like it always does) it aborts the service pack update. What a headache. I deselected the .NET update, and it is now downloading the service pack. We'll see - that has never installed, either.

I don't want to download that .NET program, just so the stupid updater has something there to update. I'll never use it. Is there a way to purge the updater of downloaded updates, and tell it I don't want the rotten thing?

As nice as Windows 7 is, it still seems to be MS...