Friday, 2010-06-11 08:14 MDT

No More XP Netbooks

El Reg reminds us that Microsoft will stop allowing netbook manufacturers to load XP onto netbooks on October 22.

The same article tells us that Microsoft sells XP at $15 a pop and Windows 7 at $50. Let's see, I sell this netbook for $200 so it can retail at $400. So my cost of an operating system will go from 7.5% to 25% of my selling price. Yeah, right. Linux, anyone? Of course, Microsoft could drop the price for Windows 7. It's not like Microsoft has any marginal costs. But that's thinking entrepreneurally, not exactly a great Microsoft tradition. We will see.

Oh, and some of the comments on the Register article actually proved useful! It turns out that you can move a window up above the top of the screen with either ALT-mouse1 or ALT-F7. That will come in handy for those setup dialogs that don't fit on some netbook displays. But another commenter is correct: that should not be necessary.


Posted by Charles Curley | Permanent link | File under: windows, linux