- It takes 7Gb of drive space to install.
I'm pretty sure that they've installed the Ultimate edition, which has everying including the kitchen sink. I would be more interested in seeing how a more reasonable SKU for a netbook (like one of the Home editions) performs. It may take up less HD space as well as have fewer services running.
Besides, I have no idea what criteria Windows uses to determine what my "likely" programs are, but if it's even remotely like the criteria it uses to display "Often Used" and "Rarely Used" in the Add/Remove Programs applet, I have zero faith in it whatsoever.
Here's good evidence that you don't know you're talking about. Win7 (and even Vista for that matter) doesn't display any data about how often it thinks you use a program.
Right, which I find annoying. As soon as I have my desktop up I want to open my usual host of applications, and I'm stuck waiting forever for them because the system is thrashing about trying to load a bunch of other crap Windows thinks I might possibly want to load at some unspecified point in the future.
Perhaps you should try installing Win7 and seeing what happens before drawing your conclusions. Based on your previous comment, you haven't even tried.
Finally, I'd like to say that features like the bat signal should be included in Windows 7, but disabled by default.
The problem there is that if it's in the box, it has to be tested. Any time there are UI changes, it has to be tested again just to make sure a change in another area didn't break that feature. That can get expensive. If it's not something they think many users will use (and by many, I mean it needs to be in the millions considering the size of the install base), they'll yank it so they can concentrate their efforts on other features that more people use often.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth