According to Microsoft's original plans, Windows XP -- first announced in February 2001 and shipped in October that year -- was to have been put out to pasture by now. The company's product roadmap had called for direct OEM and retail sales of XP to end by June 30 of this year. (Windows XP Embedded devices could still be sold, of course, and small "system builders" can assemble PCs with XP until Jan. 31, 2009.)


Microsoft's Windows 7 resembles Vista but runs better on netbooks, Microsoft says
Source: eWEEK.com
(Click for eWEEK.com's special Windows 7 coverage)
But then netbooks came onto the scene, and sales started to boom. These low-cost portable computers are mostly based on 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processors, with the processing power of a three- or four-year-old mainstream PC. As Microsoft soon had to concede, they don't run Windows Vista well. So in order to keep alternatives such as Linux at bay, the company gave Windows XP a stay of execution for netbooks.

Last April, the software giant announced that Windows XP Home, renamed Windows XP ULCPC (ultra low cost PC), could be sold on netbooks until Jun. 30, 2010. It also worked to slim down the operating system so it can fit in as little as 2GB of flash storage, for low-end netbooks such as the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation's XO.

Now, though published numbers vary, Asus -- which first shipped its pioneering Eee netbook as a Linux device -- has said more than 60 percent of netbook sales include XP. Particularly in the U.S., many netbook manufacturers no longer even offer Linux as a operating system choice.

Mission accomplished for Microsoft? No -- because Windows XP ULCPC reportedly sells to manufacturers for significantly less than Windows Vista, and, for that matter, less than they would previously have paid for Windows XP. Reporting earnings for the first quarter of its financial year last week, Microsoft said company revenues have been "impacted by netbooks."

And revenues aside, being forced to ship seven-year-old technology in such a visible market sector has to be galling for Microsoft. So, at the company's PDC (professional developers conference) this week, Steven Sinofsky (right), svp for Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live groups, reportedly brandished a Lenovo Ideapad S10 netbook with just 1GB of RAM, running Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista.

Windows 7 is designed to be compatible with the same hardware, applications and device drivers as Windows Vista, Sinofsky was quoted as saying by our sister publication eWEEK.com. But, he added, the operating system has been slimmed down and now runs well on netbooks, using as little as 512KB of RAM.

In a post-keynote interview with the Ars Technica website, Sinofsky is quoted as saying that netbooks can even support Windows 7's advanced "Aero" user interface, inherited from Windows Vista. In contrast to Windows Vista, which shipped with features such as "a gigabyte and a half of printer drivers," Windows 7 will be leaner, and will produce users and OEMs with easy ways to remove features they don't need, he reportedly added.

Microsoft also handed out "pre-beta" Windows 7 disks to journalists, who subsequently tested them on netbooks. Laptop magazine's Joanna Stern, for example, reports that the Asus Eee PC 1000H "handles the new operating system pretty well," and writes that Sinofsky's characterization of Windows 7's memory consumption was "right on the money."

Meanwhile, Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun.com tried the pre-beta OS on an MSI Wind and writes that it "looks very much like a leaner and meaner Windows Vista variant." Reporting that "installation was seamless," he reports that a fresh installation of the operating system took approximately 11GB of hard disk storage.

Microsoft hasn't released minimum system configurations for Windows 7. But, should some netbooks have SSDs (solid state drives) too small for the new OS, vendors can always ship them with Microsoft's slim, "componentized" Windows Embedded Standard 2009 instead.

Further information

Some reports have suggested that Windows 7 could ship as early as October 2009. But Sinofsky is quoted by eWEEK as saying that January 2010 is a more likely time for shipment. Either way, Microsoft won't need to extend Windows XP ULCPC's stated lease on life any further.

To read Laptop's netbook test of the Windows 7 pre-beta, see here. To read jkOnTheRun's article, go here. To read Ars Technica's interview with Steven Sinofsky, go here.

For eWEEK.com's extended Windows coverage, see here.

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