Microsoft’s brand new anti-virus application just went live and are available for download. I am downloading as I am typing this, and will post my review of this application shortly. If Microsoft has pulled this one off (which I assume they have, based on initial feedback from other reviewers and bloggers) they have changed the security application software landscape significantly. Offering a free alternative AV application from the OS vendor itself will make life (read: business) a lot harder for the likes of Symantec and others. For the average user I think it will be much easier to just download and use the free Microsoft product than buying a license from another provider. Time will show, but I think everything just changed.

You can find my review here later this week.

Brandon LeBlanc has updated the Windows Blog with additional information on Windows 7 in Europe. Basically it breaks down to this;

• Family Pack is now available it these additional countries; the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden
• Family Pack is a limited offer (!)
• Windows 7 E will not be delivered in Europe due to the proposal that Microsoft has made to the EU of presenting a ballot screen where the customer decides which browser he wants to use
• People that have preordered upgrade versions of Windows 7 E to special promotional upgrade prices, will still get the full Windows 7 version

Read the full post here.

Additional information: Norwegian tech-site digi.no has gotten comments from Microsoft Norway that confirms that Norway will not have the Family Pack offer, since it is too small a market (!?)

My comments:

First of all – how come the Family Pack offer is a limited offer? Will you run out of digital licenses? What is this bs? I understand that it is all about the bottom line, but come on Microsoft. A Family Pack is something that should be a standard item in your product line – it is called taking care of loyal customers, instead of screwing them over for some easy bucks.

Then, to follow up on the first item; How come this Family Pack is not already available everywhere? Is it so hard to produce license keys that your activation system accepts being used 3 times, no matter which language version you are installing. This is just plain stupid, and once more about screwing your loyal customers over for some easy bucks. Why should it be more relevant for a Dutch or Swedish home to install a legal copy of Windows 7 on the household computers than it would be for a Norwegian or Danish one? Your excuse that the markets are too small does not hold up, just a sorry excuse.

Disappointed, really disappointed. I thought you were improving, but no.

Fix it Microsoft. It is still not too late!

There has been many stories going around the internet on how well Windows 7 manages on older and inferior hardware compared to what Windows Vista did. Having an old laptop lying unused in my shed, I decided to test this out myself. I went to the shed, picked up my old dusty Toshiba Satellite 1200 S121 and returned to my office. I plugged in the machine, popped the Windows 7 Ultimate x86 DVD and booted from it.

This is the story of how that went down, but first some facts;

Windows 7 hardware requirements

So, as you can see the Toshiba is lacking when it comes to RAM and video card. Both could be show-stoppers, but hey, since I am not using the machine anyway, lets give it a go.

Installing

After choosing Custom Install and reformatting my drive the installation started. And here I noted the first difference compared to my previous installations on my other laptops and desktops; It took a lot longer to install Windows 7 on this one. A total of a little more than an hour as opposed to the 18 minutes it took on my HP laptop.

I was really curious to see if this would work, and if there were serious problems around after the install had finished and I was greeted with the desktop for the first time. As always, one of the first things I do after installing an OS is to check out the Device Manager for any potential problems.

As the screenshot above shows there were no surprises. I already knew that there did not exist any WDDM 1.0 drivers for the onboard Intel 830MG video card, so the fact that it showed up with an exclamation mark was expected. So this was  a good start.

The next obvious thing was of course to head over to Windows Update to get whatever was available for me.

I got some updated drivers, amongst them drivers for the soundcard that only now I noticed did not work properly.

The next thing was to download an anti-virus for the laptop, and I chose to use the trial version of Trend Micro Internet Security Beta for Windows 7. Will see how that one works out.

How does it work?

Basic System information on the Toshiba Satellite 1200 S121

The Windows Experience Index comes out with the result of 1.0 due to only using generic VGA drivers. Not that any available WDDM drivers would have raised it much given that the processor and RAM only get 1.8. It is obviously not going to run any demanding games or applications well.

Starting applications takes some time, and I would not multitask on this one! But that said, once an application is running it works just fine. (as long as the app in question is not too demanding on the hardware – this post is written in Live Writer on the Toshiba, and without any problems whatsoever).

As you also can see from the screenshots above, I installed Ultimate on it, which really is a waste, given the limited available hardware resources. I did install it, since I already had downloaded and burned the x86 ISO to a DVD, and did not feel the need to waste bandwidth on another download. So I thought it was time to trim off some of the fat, and remove unnecessary features in order to speed it up a little.

Prior to the trimming, with WordPad, Live Writer and the System Information Tool running the Windows Task Manager showed me that the system was using approximately 400 MB of the available 503 MB. I did not think trimming away features would improve this much, but decided to give it a try anyway;

I ended up with turning off Windows DVD Maker (having no DVD burner), Tablet PC Components and Windows Fax and Scan. To what effect? Nothing positive… RAM usage went up and available hard disk space was reduced… So much for trimming the fat!

Conclusion

Windows 7 is less demanding on hardware than Windows Vista was. I tried installing Vista on this very same machine, and it was utterly unusable, whereas the Windows 7 install works. The machine can be used for internet surfing, basic word-processing and similar tasks, but not for more heavy applications. The official Windows 7 hardware requirements looks to be a good guideline when determining whether to upgrade or not, as this system would have done much better with double the amount of RAM as well as a newer video card.

The machine will probably be used by my 9-year old daughter for internet surfing (mostly Facebook and Facebook-games) as well as the writing the occasional document, for which she can use WordPad. For more demanding tasks there is always the desktop PC that my kids normally use…

All in all an interesting experiment, and although Windows 7 works on this machine, it cannot perform miracles. The hardware in question is 7 years old, and the mere fact that an OS of this day and age actually do run adequately is most impressive.

Anyone else around that has tried something similar? What are your experiences?