Sources very close to Intel's mobile group have confirmed that Microsoft has agreed to keep Windows XP alive at least until 2010 and probably beyond.

Intel has already reached an agreement with Microsoft to keep Windows XP alive until 2010 and beyond, as Vista allegedly is not match made in heaven for Netbooks. Vista is too performance greedy, and since Atom is great on low power but has many normal features cut down, Vista doesn’t like it particularly well.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?op...08&It emid=38

I just wonder why they don't install windows vista basic on nettops. It's so stripped down that it's lack of features matches the targets of the nettops: browsing web and checking mail.
On the other hand it's not a bad deal that microsoft keeps it's best OS in years alive for a little bit longer.

Vista requires more horsepower, better VGA, more memory, and overall is slower than XP, especially on underpowered machines

Windows 7 has faster startup times and slightly less resource hungry, so it falls in between vista & xp

Vista Basic is still a bloated Vista, runs way to slow. They wouldn't want Vista-anything on a netbook unless their goal was to piss off customers and have high product return rates.

Vista isn't that resource hungry if you disable Aero. Surprises me they weren't clever enough to make a Windows Vista Nettop edition ^^

Aero uses the GPU anyway... most of the problem is CPU load. Disabling Aero just means the CPU is used to render the GUI instead of the GPU. Either way it is to much of a load for a sub-Pentium M performing CPU with limited memory + memory bandwidth. Not to mention the very slow disk system.

Just load Vista onto a underclocked Pentium M laptop if you want any kind of idea how bad it is. Vista ran slow even on Core 2 Duo laptops.

for laptops using GPU does consume more battery
currently typing this one a Packard Bell DOT netbook, running Windows 7, when running on batteries it auto-disables aero, when plugged in aero comes back. OS is reponsive and fast, boot time is same as XP, exactly the same, timed it
memory usage is ~500mb without anything running, so even with 1Gb memory it's fast, XP uses a lot less, to be honest, but how much multitasking are you going to do with a Atom CPU?

now I don't know how they did it, but W7 beta is as fast as XP on this Atom netbook...

How fast is enabling/disabling aero on W7 ? I know it takes some time in Vista, but I haven't had the chance to test it on Windows 7.

going from ALL on to ALL off approx 3 seconds here

Not bad .
I'd be glad if I finished my exams so I can play a bit more with W7 ^^