Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

There's been copious amounts of speculation on this subject, but it looks like we finally have the answer: it seems most netbooks are going to ship with Windows 7 Starter, not Windows 7 Basic, and the impact (at least in Canada) is a $50 price point jump. Case in point: Future Shop, one of the big-box electronics chains in Canada (owned by Best Buy), is touting their Windows 7 line-up of netbooks. Among them are products from HP, Samsung, and Toshiba. Looking at the HP Mini 110, and comparing them spec to spec, the Windows XP version sells for $299 CAD and it's identical in every way to the Windows 7 version, which will sell for $349 CAD. We've discussed this on the site before, and the hope was that even if the overall price of netbooks went up a bit, there'd be more than just the OS update in there. Perhaps a bump from 1 GB up to 2 GB, or a dual-core Atom processor? No such luck.

So the question becomes, is the license for Windows 7 Starter really $50 CAD more than Windows XP? Highly doubtful - a $50 license fee is in the realm of what HP would pay for Windows 7 Home Premium desktop computer, and we know that Windows 7 Starter isn't going to be the cheap. So is this a case of the netbooks OEMs looking for ways to bump up the price of netbooks to eek out some more profit? It's certainly possible - netbooks have razor-thin margins, and I'm sure HP, Dell, and others would do anything they could to make them more profitable...and a new operating system changes the value proposition for consumers, giving them an opportunity to do so. Read more...

"Microsoft Corp said on Tuesday its new Windows 7 operating system will be generally available on October 22, well ahead of its original schedule and in time for the holiday shopping season. The new operating system, which will replace the unpopular Vista, was originally planned for roll-out at the beginning of next year, but Microsoft confirmed last month that it would hit the market in time for the year's busiest buying period."

And there you have it folks, the day has been announced: October 22nd will be when Windows 7 is sitting on retail shelves. The RTM of Windows 7 is going to be around the end of July - giving Microsoft almost two months to polish up the OS and squash the most serious bugs. No news yet on the pricing of Windows 7 or, and this is important to me, the way Microsoft will price upgrade bundles for homes with multiple Windows Vista computers. I hope they come up with something smart, because this matters more now than it did in the XP to Vista transition.