on saturday i was using my olpc at a gaming session. i take notes that in a year or twos time will be the only record of characters and place names as the story progresses. with wifi off and in bw mode and using it 10-15 minutes per hour leaving it on the remainder reading text of the screen. at the end of a 7 hour session it was reporting 42% battery left. i was gobsmacked. till now i had to use mobile phones for keeping notes but i prefer the larger olpc keyboard so now i have a device that is power independent for long periods of time. having standard vi editor is better than even the best editor on mobile phone.

on saturday i was using my olpc at a gaming session. i take notes that in a year or twos time will be the only record of characters and place names as the story progresses. with wifi off and in bw mode and using it 10-15 minutes per hour leaving it on the remainder reading text of the screen. at the end of a 7 hour session it was reporting 42% battery left. i was gobsmacked. till now i had to use mobile phones for keeping notes but i prefer the larger olpc keyboard so now i have a device that is power independent for long periods of time. having standard vi editor is better than even the best editor on mobile phone.

Au contraire. Linux ACPI is on par with Windows XP, perhaps better if you count the extensive configurability with the various apps (kpowersave, gnome-power-management).

Battery life under Vista is worse than XP or Linux.

What you might be talking about is, some vendors put out BIOS with uncommented, broken DSDT tables which work with Windows but not Linux. But that's getting rarer and certainly no netbook that I'm aware of has this problem. Also this issue was somewhat mitigated as of I think kernel 2.6.23 and later.

As for the Open Source advantage…yeah, that's the whole point. It's even easier when ALL of your apps are open source. And so is the operating system.

apple penetration is pretty high (and getting higher). i've gotten most of my family/friends of ms and onto apple. my brother wants a macbook but he really needs a netbook for portability. i gave him one of mine but the 3g modem refused despite my best efforts to work with anything but windows. so he's stuck at the side of the road cursing windows when he has to send email.

me, i get netbooks windows only for legacy software (these days that's mostly itunes for updating firmware on ipods). linux is usually the prime os on mine. finally got an olpc and used it for 7 hours yesterday with no mains power at a gaming session taking notes. brilliant! little bugger was reporting that there was still 42% battery life left when i was finished.

can't wait to see the arm netbooks. no windows on those babies! hopefully a much better battery life. that may help swing people to linux. when i was at a software convention last week it was funny to see people chosing there seating arrangements as close to power outlets to feed their hungry laptops. when they can see a small amount of people going all day without resorting to external power then that may help convince them of the benefits.

up to now linux on a laptop has been second best as many specific hardware features of laptops are poorly supported. some laptops get better battery life under windows as linux power management was fairly weak. when that changes people will see the advantage.

when i get the inevitable 'i can't find word' i offer them open office. almost all are put of by the price of word v free open office. and open office is getting much better. have had a few people trying open office as they hate office 2007s new ribbon.

The question will become what will happen in the future. If MS goes with the current plan for Win 7 I think they will screw the pooch. I don't mind my current Sammy having XP because Win XP works…and the machine was cheap. But if MS doesn't make Win 7 cheap and won't do it without hobbling, then FEWER people will choose Win 7 on their next Netbook.

The ball is in Microsofts' court and if they play a game the consumers don't like they will pay for it with loss of share. MS really needs to drop the price of Win 7 Home Basic so that it is dirt cheap and a better value. Their one goal 'should be' to make it so affordable that people won't even think about it.

The average consumer is becoming more tech savvy, not less, what fooled people in the past won't be sure to work again. I think the hardest part for MS is figuring out how 'in the know' people are, and the same could be said for Apple. In 1960/1970 most Americans bought American cars, but that changed when consumers got car savvy. I think in the next few years you will see even seemingly non-tech people do what the current industry thinks is impossible…people will buy their first Non-Apple or Non-MS computer.