Now that notebooks outsell desktop PCs and low-power and low-priced netbooks are so popular, mobile performance and battery life will matter more than ever for Windows 7. “The notebook used to be just a mobile desktop,” points out Microsoft’s vice president for Windows Product Management, Mike Nash. Now, he says, notebooks need to cope with more complicated scenarios. “A machine will turn on in one place, turn off in another, go to sleep on one network, wake on another,” Nash says. Windows 7 is intended to give notebooks longer battery life, easier networking, better security, and run on much less-powerful machines than Vista—including netbooks.
At the recent Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), Microsoft showed Windows 7 running on a range of netbooks, including the Asus EEE 901 PC, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, the MSI Wind and even the VIA-powered HP 2133 Mini-Note.
Windows 7 loads fewer services when you boot. This doesn’t just get you started more quickly; it means there are fewer services actively resident in memory just because you might need them. When you do something that requires a service, Windows 7 loads the service on demand and then unloads it once it’s no longer required—thus freeing up memory.
Windows 7 fits easily onto a small hard drive—especially a solid state drive (SSD). Microsoft Lead program manager, Leon Braginski, points out that the installed “footprint” of Windows changes from day to day because it includes logs, memory dumps, caches, restore points, the pagefile and the hibernation file. He claims, “the Windows 7 disk footprint will be smaller than that of Vista and 16GB would be enough for a good user experience.” Braginski predicts that Windows 7 itself will use only 50 percent of that 16GB, with the rest available for files and applications.
On the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, which has a 14GB SSD, installing Windows 7 without turning off extra components took almost 8GB of disk space, as Braginski predicts—leaving nearly 6GB of free disk space and 45 percent of the system’s 2GB RAM still available (and giving a Performance Score of 2.3).
Whether you use a netbook or a larger notebook, Microsoft claims that Windows 7 should deliver improved battery life. Some of this is due to changes in Windows itself. Windows 7 will also be more aggressive about first dimming and then turning off the screen and spinning down the hard drive to save power; it will ignore CPU utilization and only check for user input and applications that have asked for the system to stay awake, such as for recording TV shows. or every ten percent of CPU utilization used, power usage goes up by about 1.25W and battery life goes down by about eight percent.