Microsoft Limits Netbooks

Tom's Hardware had an interesting news article posted September 4, 2008 entitled 'Microsoft Doubles the Capacity for Netbooks'. The title states that as of Wednesday, Microsoft upped the maximum hard drive size allowed in a netbook to 160GB.

The article goes on to discuss Microsoft's problem with wanting to drop support for WinXP but Vista not being applicable for netbooks. Microsoft is supposedly imposing hardware limitations on netbook manufacturers, including:
1 GB RAM
Slow CPUs
Limited Screen Sizes
Limits on Solid State Drive Capacities.

This article goes a long way toward explaining some of the hardware limitations currently being built into netbooks.

 

I think the hardware limitations are actually those put in by hardware manufacturer's as well. The rage is to put more into less space, and that's not always technically feasible at the time. Makes sense to put "slower" cpu's as the One can run pretty warm with a 2.5w CPU, imagine one with 10-12x the TDP! And then you have resulting battery life along with that.

What MS should be concentrating on is a full fledged OS that is app compatible with desktop os'es but without the bulge, and not telling hardware manufacturer's what to put/limit what they can into a netbook. Windows Mobile OS was a good start and should have been continued for these netbooks. As with any CPU instruction set, optimizations in software always helps to get the best performance.

The 160GB limit must be for manufacturer's and not built into the OS. I've used the One and did a straight copy-over of the factory installed OS with a 320GB drive and it was fine, so they didn't redo the OS to limit it.

 

This is a well-known licensing restriction from Microsoft. They don't want XP to steal sales from Vista, so they're only allowing it on low-end machines that can't run Vista anyway.

-- Andyvan

 

I have seen a lot of discussion in these forums about why Acer did not make it easier to upgrade memory on their netbook and only offered 1GB by using two 512MB strips. Sounds like Acer had to do it to be able to offer a netbook with WinXP.

 

Sounds more like a Manturian Candidate/ JFK Assasination Conspiracy Theory to me!
It maybe correct, but you'll never be able to prove it! LOL :lol:

 

I think it has more to do w/ paranoia about netbook sales making PC manufacturers lose money on their high performance, small form-factor laptops. Why buy a $1000+ laptop if all you want to do is surf the web... before that was your only choice. Now you have an alternative for 1/3 the price.

 

But this Acer has no problems running Vista.

 

yes your right AA1 and other netbooks CAN run Vista....but I'll bet the licence fee for MS brand new Vista is more expensive
These netbooks are designed at a price point and to hit that target the designers rummaged around for older....cheaper parts/tech/os and here we are using 5 year old technology.There is nothing in these machines which is new, it's all been around for a while...that's why it's cheap to make....job done...move on.

Now if you want Dual Core Atom 2g ram Vista...wait another 5 years or so....right now that would be expensive. I don't think MS is limiting anything...more like they found another route to make more money selling an old OS. :roll:

 

Yeah, it's fairly obvious that alongside the physical hardware limitations, these companies don't want to cannibalize their larger laptop sales (which probably don't cost that much more to produce, at least compared to the price difference).

Also, having owned a Mac and watching planned obsolescence in action, it seems like they are setting themselves up to have a steady upgrade path to keep people purchasing more of them. From these forums alone, it's easy to see that people upgrade/replace these little things far faster than a desktop or normal laptop.

 

The XP license that comes with netbooks is $12*.

Microsoft probably couldn't get away with giving away copies of Vista with netbooks for that, even if it did run well.

*I worked out the the real cost of XP to consumers is $12, based on the price difference of the A110L and A150X.

 

Except DELL's netbook has a bottom RAM access panel like a normal laptop, and so do most of the others as far as I am aware. ACER either didn't put one in because of shoddy design (couldn't figure out how to do it without compromising structural integrity), or they wanted to clearly differentiate the models. Hardware manufacturers would be much happier selling appliances (black boxes that aren't user upgradeable) instead of upgradeable PC style hardware. The situations where more than 1GB of RAM would actually make a difference in an AA1 are pretty few and far between, the Atom just isn't good enough to make you want to run anything that burns RAM.

 

I think we are actually at a very interesting point On the one hand you have programme developers giving us ever more rich feature-packed progs...which follows the hatd-ware upgrade path getting more and more powerfull.

On the otherhand we get the netbook, which as we all can see is somewhat 'behind' in the power league and as far as I know no developers are writing software for them...which kinda leaves the netbook in a sort of no mans land....there is no upgrade parh to speak of

Well these are 1st gen machines I suppose, but it remains to be seen if there will be a 2nd gen. ...

 

Why would developers need to write special software for commodity machines running commodity OSes? The only thing that really needs tuning on netbooks is the non-standard screen resolutions.

These aren't 1st gen. The very idea of a "netbook" is nearly a decade old. This generation is the equivalent of the iPod. Digital music players existed before the iPod, it was just good enough to become a cultural phenomenon and generate a lot of imitators. This is just the first generation capable of running desktop OSes and desktop apps, with a decent quality screen and okay battery life, and not cost an arm or a leg.