The fact is, Vista is just not designed to work well on the vast majority of ultraportable computers, and XP flies in comparison. Instead of taking XP to end of life, Microsoft needs to consider XP as a core mobile platform going forward while keeping Windows Mobile reserved for phone-based devices that are pocketable or smaller.

That’s the verdict on how Microsoft should be gearing their OS strategy for mobile and ‘ultra-mobile’ devices, from Michael Gartenberg – in this Computerworld article.   I haven’t used a UMPC device as yet, though I’d love to give an Asus Eee a try soon – but there sure seems to be a lot of this same feeling around of late.  The feeling that Vista is just not geared for running on smaller devices – and that dosn’t seem surprising to me given that even on the desktop, Vista is often considered ‘bloated’.

Gartenberg talks about his experience using a 3rd party tool – NLite – to (severely) trim down Windows XP so that it fits onto an Asus Eee and still leaves him enough space to get a cut-down version of Office 2003 and a few games installed with half the Eee’s 4GB to spare.  And he’s quite happy with his stripped-down version:

What I have is a tiny, easy-to-carry XP machine that weighs a mere 2 lb. and has everything I need when I’m on the road and nothing more. The machine boots in less than 20 seconds and shuts down in 10 (no need to hibernate or suspend). In short, it’s a cheap yet powerful mobile device that has full PC functionality.

The upshot of his experience is the recommendations at the beginning of this post – the call for an ‘XP Lite’ as Kevin Tofel at jkOnTheRun calls it.

Again, I’ve not played with any UMPC devices yet, but the XP Lite argument just makes a lot of sense to me.  In fact, it seems like an area where if Microsoft doesn’t do something along those lines, they’re going to make it very easy for Linux to grab a whole bunch of market share.

What do you all think?  What would you like to be running on your UMPC?

Via: jkOnTheRun

Tags: Windows XP, Vista, Asus, Eee PC, XP Lite, best OS for UMPCs