I was shopping at walmart in the USA recently and noticed that they are selling a couple ~$350 netbooks with Windows 7 Starter Edition. This is a change for microsoft. Previously, they only allowed windows starter editions to be sold in low income emerging markets like mexico, south america, africa, etc.
i think you got it wrong. they can sell netbooks with it preinstalled but they won't sell the dvd stand alone
The win7 netbooks are a new item at walmart. A couple weeks ago, the netbooks all came with windows xp instead.
No, there was XP Starter edition which was sold only in "emerging markets": But Windows 7 Starter does not have 3 apps at a time limitation and it is used like a cheap alternative to Linux in netbooks. Now Windows 7 Home Basic is a new version for emerging markets.
Low income? Who is the stupid M$ guy that mades this stupid classification? In Brazil they are selling Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate at abusive prices the Stater Edition comes only with that stupid OEM machines. See the prices (only the software): Home Basic - U$200 Home Premium - U$250 Professional - U$370 Ultimate - U$400 And, even so, everybody purchase. Low income, ah, ah, ah...
It is a good question. Why so much concern with an OS that nobody uses? The starter is shipped with a very limited kind of machines.
Yep, homebasic can also be activated with loaders, removewat... and it's just starter with a few more features... Just the ones for wich hacks are made to make it possible on starter Homebasic works just as well on older computers and comes in the same languages as starter and all editions.
those win7 starter netbooks should have a slic 2.1 in the bios. so you could install windows 7 ultimate for free if you had: -the appropriate installation media -the appropriate slp key -the appropriate security certificate for your slic table but installing a new operating system is a big task. you loose all your installed applications. plus you might have to hunt around for the appropriate drivers for your hardware.
Guess what was one of my first actions on that new netbook? <g> Just for clean installations; otherwise Anytime Upgrade is your friend - enter new SLP key, wait ~10 minutes, done. That's easy, we've got a very nice sticky for that. This is the same for all editions, so it is pre-installed. Either use it (Anytime Upgrade), extract is with SLIC toolkit or search for it here. Anytime Upgrade does the trick. But getting rid of a all that pre-installed crap is worth the hassle of a fresh installation. Most hardware should be auto-detected by Windows 7 anyways.
using the windows anytime upgrade feature with an slp key might work at the moment. but it's unknown how much longer microsoft is going to consider computers upgraded with this method to be "genuine". doing a clean install of the operating system with an slp key greatly reduces the chances of your system being blacklisted as non-genuine if microsoft decides to crack down on the anytime upgrade slp key hack. it's relatively easy to reinstall an operating system when a computer is new. when a computer is a couple years old with dozens of applications installed, reinstalling an operating system will become much more time consuming.
Windows 7 Starter Edition is for OEM machines such as netbooks built by the big OEMs such as Dell etc, there will not be a retail version of it nor is there an OEM disc based package for the smaller system builders as there has been for previous releases.