Again, Microsoft is restricting Windows licenses intended for use with small and inexpensive mini laptops.
The SKU strategy for Windows 7 was recently released and just like with Vista, Microsoft has unfortunately decided to release Windows 7 in several different flavors. Again, buyers will have to choose between Ultimate, Professional (similar to Vista Business/Enterprise), Home Premium, and finally the netbook-specific Starter Edition (or Home Basic in some instances).
As you may already know, Microsoft has restricted it’s licenses of Windows XP for netbooks to machines with 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, and a single-core processor (pretty much the standard configuration in todays netbooks.) To the collective dismay of all netbook fans, some of the same restrictions will carry over to Windows 7. Windows 7 Starter is the version intended for, as Microsoft calls them, “small notebook PCs” – netbooks in other words. In order to use the starter variant at reduced cost, netbook manufacturers must comply with the following hardware limitations (fetched from techarp):
The screen may not be larger than 10.2 inches
No more than 1GB of RAM is allowed
The processor must be a single core model and no faster than 2GHz
Maximum hard drive size has been set to 250GB, and if it’s a Solid State Drive, it must not be larger than 64GB.
Thankfully there are no restrictions on graphics cards, so the Nvidia ION platform is not excluded.Still, all of these limitations seem rather pointless in my opinion. The end user is free to upgrade everything but the processor anyway, so at the very least Microsoft could have left it at that.
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[...] 7 for Netbooks Hampered by Restrictions – Again Source: Mini Laptop Computer – Wednesday, 12th August 2009, 20:23 GMT Microsoft will do with Windows 7 as it did with XP – [...]