You have an EEE piece without the EEE lady.

I mean, I know I've just ordered an Aspire One, but that's no reason not to show us the EEE lady, now is it?

Get it sorted please, or I shall have to []cancel my subscription/[]write to my MP/[]take up yoga (select as appropriate).

Thank you.

Paris, as the next best thing...

in fool flow.

Typical "Technotards" (TM).

... in that Windows 7 looks, in that case, to be light enough and stripped of Vista's bloat to be able to run effectively on a laptot.

Unless the next line of Eees will have 4 gig of RAM and a quad-core CPU?

No doubt it'll still be crippled by DRM though.

Interesting - if Windows 7 will fit in an Eee PC with 1Gb and run at a reasonable speed on an Atom, can it really be Vista-based? At the very least it must be Vista with a lot of ectomies. Dare we hope for a successor worthy of XP's mantle?

People are swallowing the line 'Windows 7 will be better' before anyone has actually seen it.

For all we know it could suck harder than Vista.. MS don't exactly have a great track record on this, with the possible exception of the 95->2000 transition which was a real improvement.

"Shen said the Eee line will gain Windows 7 "in the second half of next year""

If:

1) Microsoft's roadmap is accurate, which I very much doubt given past performances;

2) It's up to the job. Stating you'll change the BoM without testing with whatever you're changing to and before it's even released is rather stupid; stating you'll change the BoM from something proven and stable to a dot zero release is sodding madness;

3) They don't rip enough planned "enhancements" out of 7 to make it another damp squib;

4) Customers are willing to pay the MS tax on SCCs;

5) Customers actually WANT Windows 7.

Most amusing. Now the CEO's smunderlings are going to have to make his prophecy come true. Poor bastards, I almost feel sorry for them. Almost, were it not such good comedy ;o)

"Oh Christ on a bike! He's off again, making more impossible work for us. Someone shut him up, please? Anyone?"

Proceed, because I really do love a good laugh on a Wednesday morning...

I fail to see how anybody can perceive that MS will make Windows 7 quicker than Vista, I'd be amazed even if that OS runs on netbooks.

Look at M$ history of Windows releases, each and every progressive release has increased the size of the OS by varying degrees. As a result, has also been accompanied by a need for more modern hardware and increased specifications, to support all the extra services and features.

Windows 7 now looks like it'll have full voice support and multi-touch, and everybody will expect all the extra Vista gubbins to go with it- Aero interface, Windows Presentation Foundation, UAC, Hyper-V and VHD support, etc etc. This stuff doesn't come CPU/memory usage free.

Even if they could, it relies on the fact that W7 will be flawless out of the box, just look at the long running issue with slow file copies/deletions etc on Vista, pre SP1. And now we've got a shedload of patches on Vista already and SP2 is on the way already.

I bet anybody here a grand that W7 will be bigger, and will not run well on these small low powered netbooks, esp with todays specs, even with an Intel Atom chip.

...That is of course unless they release a different version specifically for netbooks, with a hell of a lot of the bloat ripped out.

and confirms what we all suspected....windows 7 will be here next year....let the hype start afresh...sorry....mines the mac, don't like coats

I LOVE my EEEPC-701. Simple, runs Linux - as if I give a hoot - , does what it says on the tin. Internet access, emails, Skype and the occasional document. That'll do me.

If you buy a 'fridge, and it says on the box, "Keeps food cool", that's what I expect it to do. And it does. Like the eee - does exactly what's promised.

I don't expect it to iron my shirts, wake me with fresh coffee in the morning, cook my food and give me a damn decent blowjob on a Friday night. I got a girlfriend for those. She can't keep food cold (well, except for her famed icy stare). OK, bit frigid sometimes ;-)

WTF would anyone want XP/Vista/W7 on a tool that fits in a coat pocket, goes everywhere I do and does >95% of what we *really* use a PC for??

I've a *real* laptop at home for downloading pr0n/playing games, whatever.

Mine's the one with the Asus bird's photo in the pocket.

The key in Mark's comment was "without a router" - in other words, using the PoS USB DSL "modem" that most of the pikier ISPs foist on you.

USB drivers, of course, are needed. Which come on the crapware-bloated "install CD".

How many people, though, are going to want to use this kind of netbook tied to the wall by a USB dongle and a phone cable? I suspect you could count 'em on the fingers of one foot. Wireless routers or 3G datacards will be the order of the day.

"Easy Mode that will run on Windows"

That I have to see!

As for Win7 (which we have already been told is based on Vista), I look forward to seeing the Linux and Windows hardware side by side. The Windows one should be obvious from the freestanding external battery, exhaust fans and water-cooling tower necessary to run the array of parallel processors and DDR3 RAM...

XP with an Aero interface? Perfect.

"People are swallowing the line 'Windows 7 will be better' before anyone has actually seen it."

But they *did* see Windows ME. You know, that thing MS released between win98 and XP, which was supposed to be the "home user" upgrade as win2000 was "business only". Except ME sucked hard, people preferred win2k so much that MS finally gave w2k DirectX support (they stated at the beginning that they would *never* do that) and hurried up XP's release.

Given how many Vista failings seem to be similar to the ME failures, it might be that everyone's betting on something like this happening all over again. Even MS now admits that WinME was a "stop-gap" project between Win98 and XP.

My EEE 1000 was powering off every now and then ( battery fully charged ).

Wiped that awfull xandros thing, put ubuntu and guess what: all works very well since (2 months now). I think suse or redhat would do it as well.

The Xandros thing looked like an improvised thing, the update support useless (hanging) ...

Why spending for a lame result instead putting up something working along major distribs, like http://www.array.org/ubuntu/index.html?

And as the lame Easy Mode is the default for naïve owners, an easy switch to advanced or whatever they're willing to call a normal desktop would be appreciated.

I already made the switch