Sony VAIO P Refresh – This Summer?

Sony Insider is reporting that the 8″ Intel Atom-based Sony VAIO P series could be undergoing a refresh in coming months. Keep in mind that not all models currently available elsewhere, are available in the US – US VAIO P models are currently limited to … Read more

Samsung Netbooks/Mini-Notebooks and Windows 7

Over the past few days, Samsung has been hosting their European Forum in Vienna. TechRadar UK got a chance to speak with Kyu Uhm, head of Samsung’s Worldwide Sales and Marketing (Computing Division). Uhm had quite a bit to say about Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7, … Read more

Microsoft’s Windows 7 Netbook Challenge

Netbooks, Sub-notebooks, ultraportables, whatever you want to call them, Microsoft is trying to figure out how to maximize their revenue from potential Windows 7 sales, without causing the manufacturers to go with an alternative. This is an issue that Microsoft has been looking at for … Read more

Windows 7 – Turning Features On and Off

Windows 7 Some interesting news coming out of Windows 7 development (which is on track for a Release Candidate – RC). The “Turn Windows Features On or Off” function has been greatly expanded. It even includes the ability to turn off Internet Explorer 8.

You can now turn of quite a few things in Windows 7 – the files are literally not loaded by the Windows 7 operating system. One of the developers sees this as a big benfit for “security-conscious customers”, but I’m thinking in terms of netbooks/ultraportables/mids/etc. where the resources are much more limited than on larger laptops/notebooks.

It is mentioned that even if you turn off a feature, that the data/binaries/software still exists on the drive. The benefit is that you don’t need a DVD to enable the feature, which is important to those with smaller devices which don’t have optical drives.

However, and it’s not quite addressed by any of the developers in the article, it doesn’t appear there is a way to remove the actual features, which might free up some space. As somebody in one of the follow-up comments mentioned, storage space is becoming less and less of an issue. Solid State Drives (SSD), where storage space is at a premium, have only been increasing in size while decreasing in cost. As I mentioned yesterday, you can easily get a netbook/ultraportable with a 16GB or 32GB SSD for under $400 USD.

Back in November, we mentioned that we were seeing Windows 7 take up 20GB in a fresh install. Chances are that the space requirements would come down by the time Windows 7 is released to manufacturing, since there was probably a lot of debug code and binaries that would be removed before RTM. By the time Windows 7 is released later this year, 32GB SSDs will probably be much cheaper and more widely available as an option in these devices.

From the MSDN blog:

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10.1-inch Acer Aspire One Review – Windows 7

Earlier this week, I posted part 1 of a review of the new 10.1″ Acer Aspire One (aka the AOD150). I was going to follow it with a closer look at the physical layout of the hardware, but several people asked me how well Microsoft’s … Read more