How does it run on an Intel atom because I'm thinking off building an atom pc tower for my general purpose needs,Microsoft says that Windows 7 is suppose to run smooth on an intel atom and 1gb of ram...can anyone confirm this? Thanks.
One of Windows 7's major design considerations was to ensure it ran properly at or beyond the performance level of XP on primitive hardware like a Netbook, Atom etc...
Vista is not modular enough to be compliant with these types of platforms. And Microsoft readily admits this. In fact they have kept XP licensing alive for this very reason.
W7 will be a great OS on these types of devices though. The ability Microsoft has now of creating very lightweight editions of Windows is very high. The MinWin project was not so much an engineering one but more of a research project. MinWin was about identifying inter/intra dependencies in the Windows source code. Ideally this is something that should have been tracked all along but it wasn't. But they've done it now. The result is that as of Server 2008 and Windows 7 they have been able to have a much much clearer view into what they can and can't modularise. In Server 2008 they were just scratching the surface of what the MinWin knowledge could do for them - and they came up with the "Server Core" feature. Which lets you install a Server 2008 machine with no GUI. Just a console and the ability to run a Domain Controller, IIS etc. But Windows 7 will be taking the MinWin knowledge much further. Things like IE, or at least the user part, will very likely to be removable in W7. The rendering engine and ancillaries behind the scenes will probably be tied to the Explorer Shell component however because of a explicit dependency there.
Wait and see. This is going to be the best release of Windows yet. Even better than Vista. It's really going to polish up all the technological advancements that Vista brought us and move the user experience bar a whole lot higher. Microsoft are wanting to get the UX bar up to the level where Mac OSX is but without sacrificing their staple backward compatibilities or extensive support for third party hardware, software and software extensions to the OS.