There is a general concern regarding the influence of the type of edition over the total price of a netbook shipped with Windows 7. According to the Microsoft official announcement regarding the Windows 7 product SKU, a special edition dedicated to netbooks will not be available. As a consequence, the netbooks manufacturers could be forced to select the lowest cost Windows 7 edition or deliver their products equipped with different editions of the Windows 7 operating system.

The main problem is represented by the limitations of each Windows 7 edition. In the case of Windows 7 Starter edition, which has the lowest cost, only three applications are allowed to run simultaneously in the background (any anti-virus software is excluded from this rule).

For the users having the netbooks equipped with Windows 7 Starter edition, there will be not a pleasant experience to notice the fact that they are not able to run more than three applications in the same time. This situation could lead to a dramatically decrease of the sales for such netbooks.

On the other hand, the netbooks manufacturers could choose the shipping of their products with two or more Windows 7 editions, different from Windows 7 Starter. For example, HP netbooks from Mini netbook line will be shipped with at least three different editions of Windows 7.

The tests performed on netbooks with Windows 7 Beta, which is built on Windows 7 Ultimate architecture, show the fact that even in the case of modest hardware, the results regarding boot speed and applications time of response indicate an optimal overall system behavior. But the shipping of netbooks with Windows 7 ultimate will represent an increase of their costs.

Microsoft underlined that the limitations imposed in case of Windows 7 Starter Edition are meant to show the differences between the Starter and Home Premium edition and not to determine manufacturers to buy a more expensive edition of the operating system. Given these facts, in conclusion, if you want the best performance offered by Windows 7 ultimate, you will have to pay a higher price as compared with the netbooks powered by open source operating systems.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 8:05 am and is filed under Microsoft News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.