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Computerworld - Tackling customer complaints that the Windows Vista operating system is sluggish and power-hungry, Microsoft Corp. today promised that Vista's successor, Windows 7, will use less memory and power than its predecessor, and will start up and shut down more quickly, among other improvements.

Windows 7 will also recognize connected devices more quickly and accurately than Vista does, and it will run nimbly on low-cost netbook PCs, said senior executives during a keynote speech kicking off Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC).

Despite being built on the same code base as Vista, Windows 7 should be able to boot up several seconds faster than Vista does because it loads device drivers in parallel rather than one by one, and it cuts the number of services that are started when the PC is turned on, said senior vice president for Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System division, Jon DeVaan.

Windows 7 will use less memory than Vista as more application windows are opened up by "letting the video card do its job so we don't have to manage" the windows, DeVaan said.

Vista also "didn't do a good job of letting the CPU get to idle and stay idle," DeVaan said. Windows 7 has improvements in the kernel so that the CPU runs at a lower frequency and stays idle longer. The net result is that Windows 7 will offer an improvement in battery life of up to 11% over Vista, he said.

Reminiscent of the tone of last week's keynote at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, DeVaan sounded an apologetic tone in his presentation to the thousands of attendees, who are mostly engineers at or other employees of Windows PC and device manufacturers.

"When we shipped Vista, we immediately started getting quite a lot of feedback from customers, bloggers and yes, even some TV commercials, about reliability and performance improvements in Vista. Their concerns were quite real," DeVaan said.

To fix this, Microsoft plans to "give you reliable pre-release builds, so that you can do the dirty work and also have the confidence that when we say we will ship Windows 7 on a certain date, you'll believe us," DeVaan said. That should "make Windows 7's first day a lot smoother from an ecosystem standpoint."

Microsoft plans to broadly release a feature-complete beta of Windows 7 early next year, according to Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Windows and Windows Live engineering.

Sinofsky and Mike Angiulo, general manager of the Windows PC planning and PC ecosystem team, demonstrated an Asus Eee netbook that ran Windows 7 even though it had just 1GB of RAM and a 16GB solid-state drive for storage.