Archive for category Netbook
Adobe Flash to be accelerated on netbooks
Nvidia and Broadcom promise
Since Flash obviously isn’t easy on the CPU which of course reflects on netbooks’ battery life, Nvidia and Broadcom announced full hardware Flash acceleration by upgrading Adobe’s plugin resulting in smooth playback of HD flash video and lower CPU usage.
Unfortunately, these improvements will initially run only on Nvidia’s Tegra solutions or Atom netbooks with Broadcom’s Crystal HD video acceleration add-on. This means that it’ll take a while before we see this in action and even longer before it becomes a mainstream feature.
We’re likely to see some other Flash acceleration announcements as well, but until we see this feature in action we can’t say more.
More here.
Software giant does uturn on notebooks
Posted by The Right Guy in Netbook, Software, Windows on April 7th, 2009
The present Microsoft didn’t expect. Software giant Microsoft seems to be having a bit of a marketing problem with the rise of netbooks.
This week a press release from the Mighty Soft appeared on our desks claiming that it was wonderful that its Windows product had been installed on 96 per cent of all netbooks. While this is great for Microsoft, one can’t help remembering how the software giant had to be dragged kicking and screaming to allow it.
The problem was that the operating system that Microsoft wanted to forget was its highly successful Windows XP was the only one that would run on the low spec gear. The resource hungry Vista would not run on a netbook even if you asked nicely.
If ever there was something that showed up the weaknesses of Vista it was the fact that Microsoft could not exploit a growing market in low spec computers. It is a mistake it has not made on Windows 7 which appears to run very well on netbooks.
Redmond then had a problem, it either remained petulant and left the netbook market for the Linux operating system, or it swallowed its pride and allowed XP to have a second life. Fortunately common sense was heard over marketing. However, one wonders why Microsoft did not tinker with the interface and invent something new.
Windows Netbook, which could have been XP, with a slightly different GUI would have helped to kill off the world’s dependence on XP and opened the door to what ever Windows 7 goodness Redmond planned. As it is it looks like Netbooks caught Microsoft on the hop and it was unable to capitalise on this huge gift the IT industry gave it.