That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows.

Gigaom has an article about a speech Michael Dell gave yesterday.

He had very positive things to say about Windows 7 – which officially debuts next Thursday the 22nd. I concur with that. I’ve been the test case for Windows 7 at Harrison Pensa, and have found it faster and more stable. It also has features that can make you more productive. Enough so that I often find it frustrating when using my home computer with Vista.

He doesn’t like netbooks, even though Dell makes popular models – citing their small screens and slow performance. Anecdotally I’ve heard comments from people who have them who say the same thing. Even an IT manager I know who had positive things to say about his netbook half jokingly offered to sell me his recently, saying he wanted a bigger and better one. I’ve been tempted to buy one a few times, but could never get over their limitations.

This reinforces my thoughts that November / December this year may be a good time to buy a notebook computer. On top of Windows 7 and probable aggressive pricing resulting from the economy and Christmas, notebooks with the new CULV chips are arriving. CULV chips promise long battery life, and notebooks that are a step above netbooks for not a lot more money.

Take a look at this Wired article.   

That article is a few weeks old, but was referred to in this post from yesterday about Apple’s upcoming announcements.

I’ve thought for years that the touch screen tablet form factor was a winner – the problem is that the price has always been too high, and the performance never that great. The netbook phenomenon has shown that people will respond to “good enough” if the price is right. And smartphones – as great as they are ( I really like my Sony Ericsson X1) – don’t quite cut it as a computer because the screens are just too small to replace a laptop. The Amazon Kindle is intriguing – but the black & white screen, its limited use as a book reader and tethering to a phone network, not to mention the fact that it is not available in Canada – all factor against it.

I have been using Windows 7 at work for a week (which of course has touch screen capability built in) and noticed that the changes to the taskbar at the bottom are clearly designed to be touch screen friendly. And it is much faster than Vista and has features that enhance productivity.

I’ve been toying with getting a netbook for use for various members of my family (myself to read the online version of the London Free Press instead of the dead tree version, my wife to take to volunteer meetings, my son to take to class) – but with Windows 7 upcoming for netbooks, the new tablet rumours from both the Apple and Wintel camps, and the new CULV chips – it’s hard to know what to buy, or how long to wait to buy!

So here’s what I want. A touchscreen tablet running Windows 7 similar in size to a netbook. It needs some kind of keyboard for data entry – but perhaps a screen based one is good enough. Graphics performance sufficient to play video cleanly. At least 2 gig ram. Modest hard drive. Several hour battery life. DVD drive would be nice – but perhaps creates too much of a price/size/weight penalty. And priced under $300 (well, OK – maybe $400) Can.

And can I have that now please?  Or at least by the October 22 Windows 7 launch?

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows:

In a recent speech Bill Veghte – senior vice president, Windows business, for Microsoft – advised that if a business is now in the testing phase to upgrade from XP to Vista, they should stop and go direct to Windows 7.

The Windows 7 release candidate is now available for testing purposes, and Windows 7 is expected to be available this fall.

Conventional wisdom for operating systems in the enterprise is that we should wait until the first service pack is released to deploy, to give more time for initial bugs to be worked out. Early reviews and commentary on Windows 7 are positive and suggest it is not necessary to wait.

See the text of his speech, and an article in Computerworld.