Posts Tagged ‘OperatingSystems’

Windows 7 bested by XP in netbook battery life tests

Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on November 12th, 2009

The venerable 2001 classic of an OS, Windows XP, strikes again. The scribes over at Laptop have put together a rather damning battery life comparison between old greybeard and the fresh Windows 7, which finds that on average netbooks get 47 minutes less battery life with the upgraded software. In the case of the ASUS 1008HA, that deficit was a meaty 57 minutes, or 16.7%. Liliputing and jkOnTheRun have run their own tests which invariably reached the same conclusion. Adding these data to an earlier comparison with Snow Leopard, where Windows 7 was again markedly worse than its competitor, leads us to the conclusion that perhaps Microsoft’s 7th heaven hasn’t quite been optimized for the mobile mavens out there… yet.

Read – Stick with XP? Windows 7 Battery Life Worse on Netbooks
Read – Windows 7 + netbooks = lower battery life?
Read – Netbook Battery Tests: Windows XP vs Windows 7

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Windows 7 bested by XP in netbook battery life tests originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows 7 versus Snow Leopard on a MacBook Pro: big cat’s faster, 7 is better for games

Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on October 16th, 2009

CNET have taken the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Snow Leopard for a spin around a 2008 MacBook Pro, and produced a decent first peek at comparative performance. Of course, there are significant provisos to get through first -- it's only one machine, running on Apple's drivers, testing mostly Apple applications, and the two systems default to different versions of QuickTime -- but we can still glean some indication of where the two heavyweights are relative to one another. Snow Leopard appeared consistently quicker in time-based tests, with faster bootups, shutdowns and MP3 encoding, but Windows 7 showed its muscle in producing better frame rates in games and a significant advantage in Cinebench rendering. Battery life was found to be distinctly better under Snow Leopard, but we'd put that down to the underlying hardware being optmized for OS X. Hit the read link for the full testing procedures and more of those old school bar charts -- it should get you well prepped for the forthcoming flood of similar head-to-heads once WIndows 7 officially ships next week.

[Via Apple Insider]

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Windows 7 versus Snow Leopard on a MacBook Pro: big cat's faster, 7 is better for games originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Entelligence: Stains on the sleeve of my operating system

Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on August 13th, 2009

Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he'll explore where our industry is and where it's going -- on both micro and macro levels -- with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.
I originally started this column on my take on what an Apple tablet might be (I literally dreamed about it and started to write it down when I woke up). I was really into it, which explains why I didn't save it as I wrote. I think you can see where this is going.

Like a cartoon character who notices that he's no longer standing on solid ground and suddenly begins to fall, I reached over to save, but was too late. My trusty XP install suddenly blue screened. Muttering just a few choice words, I rebooted, only to blue screen again. No problem, there's always "safe mode." Too bad safe mode blue screened as well. With little hope of getting anything recovered, I gave up, fired up my Mac and started from scratch. It's not the first time this has happened to me, where for some reason or another I've lost work on my computer. I suspect it's happened to a few of you out there too.

But this latest bad experience changed my thought process from Apple tablets to what's wrong with the whole PC landscape and today's operating systems.

Continue reading Entelligence: Stains on the sleeve of my operating system

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Entelligence: Stains on the sleeve of my operating system originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft announces pricing for Windows 7 family pack, upgrading

Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on July 31st, 2009

Micosoft's announced some Windows 7 pricing today, starting with a "family pack" option, which will allow users to upgrade three PCs to the Home Premium edition of the operating system for $149. The upgrade from XP or Vista to Home Premium for individual users, as previously announced, is $119. The company's also announced the Microsoft Anytime Upgrade option, which will allow users to move from one version of Windows 7 to another for a discounted price. Moving from Windows 7 Starter to Home Premium will run you $79.99, while the move from Home Premium to Professional will set you back $89.99. Finally, the move from Windows 7 Professional to Ultimate will cost $139.99, and Microsoft says that the upgrades can be done in about 10 minutes. The company did not, however, specify what the move from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 Uber-Super Awesome would run, but we'll keep an eye out for you, and let you know when we do.

[Via CNET]

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Microsoft announces pricing for Windows 7 family pack, upgrading originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Switched On: The last smartphone OS

Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on July 21st, 2009

Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.


Palm's webOS certainly faces strong competition as it vies for attention from manufacturers, carriers, developers and consumers. But Palm was able to knock out at least one ailing offering by making webOS the replacement for the old Palm OS. For others it may not be so easy. In fact, with the barriers to entry now so high and the commitment to existing operating systems so great, webOS may be the last major smartphone operating system launched for the foreseeable future.

With webOS taking the baton from Palm OS, the number of major smartphone operatinng systems has stayed fixed at six. Three of them -- Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and Android -- are intended to be used by handset makers from multiple manufacturers, whereas iPhone OS, BlackBerry OS and webOS are used only on the handsets offered by their developer. Of course, even these "purebred" operating systems owe much to older platform technologies, with Android and webOS being built atop a Linux kernel, iPhone OS having its distant roots in NetBSD, and BlackBerry and Android building on Java. The race to attract software to these platforms has ignited an arms race of development funds to both prime the supply pump and the promotion of app stores to lead the horses to he touch-sensitive virtual koi ponds..

Developing and maintaining a smartphone operating system is a serious and expensive undertaking that can consume a company. Producing the original iPhone caused Apple to miss the self-imposed ship date of Leopard, and third-party app support did not come until much later. Whatever Microsoft is planning in a major overhaul for Windows Mobile 7 has taken long enough to warrant the release of the interim 6.5 release that still leaves the company far behind the state of the art. WebOS development clearly took up a significant portion of the $425 million investment from Elevation Partners in Palm. And finishing a 1.0 release is just the beginning.

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Switched On: The last smartphone OS originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google names Chrome OS compatriots, Dell noticeably absent

Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on July 9th, 2009

Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments -- according to the latest Chrome OS update from Google, you're looking at the company's initial ragtag team of co-conspirators for its entry into the operating system business. With Adobe's involvement, we can assume Flash support is a given, and the others unsurprisingly run the gamut of netbook and smartbook players. We can't help but notice a couple of conspicuous absences on that list, including Intel and Dell. With Intel, you don't need to partner to work on its chips, but we gotta imagine it'd helps by offering more support, and as for Dell, we don't know about that one, but there's still plenty of time for the Big G to enlist more companies in the lead up to its second half 2010 debut.

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Google names Chrome OS compatriots, Dell noticeably absent originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Switched On: With Google, this is not your father’s OS war

Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on July 8th, 2009

Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.


Google's incursions into software -- particularly in strategic markets for Microsoft, are like an Earth-bound asteroid. Observers see it coming for a long time, and fear its impact will be devastating when it finally arrives. So far, though, Google's major software forays have been anything but cataclysmic, and Microsoft hasn't even had to send Bruce Willis into space to stop them.

On one hand -- as I discussed in a recent Switched On column that argued why Android was not the right choice for netbooks -- the mobile operating system continues to have a lot of potential to reshape the smartphone OS competitive landscape. On the other hand, while Chrome is a fine browser, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla all have their counterparts, and certainly Firefox and Safari at least give Google's browser a run for its money in terms of speed, privacy and user interface. Chrome's impact has been blunted because the PC is already an open platform.

Enter Chrome OS, which will be available on ARM and Intel processors. For the high-volume Intel PC market, Chrome OS will have to take on Windows, but Chrome OS is very different than other Windows competitors such as the Mac OS, Ubuntu or the OS/2 of yore, in that Google does not seem focused on creating platform-exclusive applications. In some ways, Chrome is more of a competitor to Silverlight than to Windows, as Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-platform application foundation. Of course, Windows is Microsoft's home field, and Chrome OS will be Google's.

Continue reading Switched On: With Google, this is not your father's OS war

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Switched On: With Google, this is not your father's OS war originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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