Is your netbook ready for Windows 7?

Windows 7 is almost here. Will your netbook zing on Windows 7 or will it become a sluggish performer? After the fiasco of Vista on netbooks, are you really ready to take your netbook to Windows 7? Your netbook probably shipped with Windows XP Home. Microsoft says not to worry because Windows 7 will run perfectly fine on your netbook. You should worry. Microsoft recommends Windows 7 Starter Edition for netbooks. However, “Caution Will Robinson!” Windows 7 Starter Edition is reported to arbitrarily disable certain features that you might feel are important for your business. Given this, you might want to consider installing a somewhat less crippled edition of Windows 7 on your netbook instead. Sure, the other versions are going to cost you more. But if you really want all that Windows 7 has to offer, you may not have much of a choice. Remember also that if your netbook runs XP today, you will have to do a clean install of Windows 7. Be sure to backup all that important business data that resides on your netbook’s hard drive before you upgrade. If you have enough netbooks in your organization, this process can become quite a chore for your IT folks. Therefore, you may want to avoid the hassle and the cost of upgrading and stay with Windows XP instead—at least for a while. Perhaps you are getting ready to place an order for new netbooks for your business. How much will you wind up paying for that shiny, new Windows 7 netbook? Here Microsoft finds itself in an awkward position. Netbooks are largely about price. Sure netbooks offer other features such as small size and low weight, but cost is one of the key differentiations between netbooks, notebooks and laptops. It’s not clear to those of us who aren’t vendors what price point Microsoft has set for Windows 7 as an OEM installation on netbooks. It is fairly well known that today Microsoft charges vendors $15 a copy for Windows XP Home shipped with their new netbooks. If they charge the same amount for Windows 7, Microsoft may lose money—something that they are not inclined to do for understandable reasons. Therefore, they may elect to increase their price. However, if they charge vendors more for Windows 7, it will reduce the already slim margins that the vendors have on netbooks, or it may drive up the netbook’s price thus reducing one of their key advantages. If Microsoft keeps its Windows 7 OEM price down and the netbook vendors follow suit with the same or lower costs for their Windows 7 equipped netbooks, this could spur netbook sales. In fact, IDC has predicted that netbook sales will increase significantly this year—going from 11.6 million units sold in 2008 to 26.5 million sold by the end of this calendar year. That kind of sales growth with Windows 7 netbooks could prove to be a win for business users, for netbook vendors, and just maybe for Microsoft as well. -- Jeffrey Fritz