Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I'd sort of been wanting a netbook for a while. These dinky little toys will leave some disappointed who are looking for a cheap general purpose laptop. Understanding the design focus is on portability and battery life is key. After shopping around, I finally took the plunge and got an Acer Aspire. It had a new-ish processor (the Atom N450), a 6-cell battery, 1 GB RAM (expandable to 2 GB by swapping the chip) and a 160 GB hard drive. As with many netbooks, it came equipped with Windows 7 Starter Edition , a stripped down version for the modestly powered machines. 1 GB occasionally leaves it gasping for air. I'd made up my mind to dual boot to Linux before I'd even decided on a machine. Enter Wubi . Wubi (Windows UBuntu Installer) lets you install Ubuntu Linux using a Windows-based installer. No repartitioning, no finding an external CD/DVD drive, no blowing away Windows. Download the installer in Windows, run it, choose the edition you want to install and sit back...

According to OSNews ( your source for all the latest operating system news ) Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions will come with what Microsoft is calling XP Mode, which promises to give you absolute compatibility with Windows XP for any applications that don't play nice with Windows 7. This will be accomplished by making available a fully integrated and licensed copy of Windows XP SP3 in a VirtualPC-based environment. Currently, VirtualPC is a free download from Microsoft -- what's new here is the inclusion of a legal copy of XP. This sounds like an interesting approach to the thorny issue Microsoft faces every time they introduce some major changes to underlying operating system architecture -- how to support the old stuff out there without grunging up the new OS? One concern I'd have about this approach is this: how much overhead will running XP in a virtualized environment generate? I've played with running XP this way and face it, your poor c...