Oh Microsoft, that’s sooo nice of you to allow netbook manufacturers who want to offer XP as an operating system to now use hard drives in excess of 80 gigabytes. Remember how you weren’t invited to the netbook party in the first place? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you decided to show up and I’m glad you’re pushing XP instead of Vista onto these relatively low-powered machines, but making up arbitrary rules like “no hard drives larger than 80 gigabytes” is for squares, man. Yes, you’re big and powerful and rich, but we’re all friends at the netbook party, so grab a drink and let’s play some beer pong. It’s you and me against Linux and an 8GB solid state drive.
To be fair, Intel’s doing the same thing and it’s apparently in the name of protecting market share. Netbooks have to be under a certain size, speed, and price so as not to encroach on actual big-boy notebook territory. But as DigiTimes points out, “changing hard drive densities will not be a major driver of demand, in contrast to a major boost in processing power.”
As reported yesterday, MSI is readying a Wind model in the UK with a 120GB drive.