You’ll often hear ultra mobile PC owners moaning that Vista is a huge, fat, disk, cpu and memory hog. Its true! On UMPCs of the Ghz class its an absolute killer and came at completely the wrong time for the ultra mobile PC market. What we need is a way to cut Vista right down to the bone and then rebuild it as is needed. If it was me I’d leave out handwriting support, voice control support, indexing, pre-fetching, a huge stack of drivers, sidebar, pen flicks and aero. I’m sure there’s a ton of other stuff that could be ripped out to reduce the 8+GB footprint and 50+ process number too.
In two years this could be possible because Microsoft have it planned for 2009 / 2010 according to a report at Windows For Devices. Kevin Dallas, general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Embedded business group has gone public on it. In addition, there will be further enhancements for XP in SP3 which is due next year.
The problem is that the current XPe license prevents it being used for consumer PC builds. That could be a major stumbling block although i see no reason why Microsoft can’t release Vista – Origami Edition with all the optimizations and refinements needed, layered with a fresh toping of Origami Experience. In fact, here’s an idea, why don’t they sell it for $40 and offer it to Linux-based MID owners? Sounds like a cheap way to exploit a new market if you ask me!
A quick background on XPe: Its a componentised version of XP for x86 systems that can be put together to the developers wishes. After build it can act just like a normal version of XP with the ability to add and remove software and run it from a normal hard drive. Its not to be confused with Windows CE which is a different beast altogether.
