Windows 'Eiger' to support legacy hardware

I found many interesting news today at ActiveWin. The one that blows my mind was about codename Eiger, a new 'lean' Windows XP version that is in the works.

This is exactly the answer to my previous post in which I explained why I felt Microsoft needed to pay more attention to legacy hardware.

Here is an excerpt from the Microsoft-Watch article:

"We have a set of customers running old PCs and old operating systems even as old as Windows 95," said Barry Goffe, a Windows group product manager. "These customers are primarily concerned about security, though some also are concerned about improving the manageability and TCO (total cost of ownership) of these systems."

Eiger will bring these users up to par with the level of security provided by XP Service Pack 2, Goffe said. It won't include the XP help and support content, wireless networking support and certain operating services found in XP, however.

Eiger will run on legacy systems with as little as 64MB of RAM, a Pentium-class processor and 500 MB hard drive. Eiger is designed to replace Windows 95, Windows 98 and NT 4 Workstation running on these systems.

Sounds great so far. But then it says:

"Eiger is not a general-purpose operating system. It can't run games, office-productivity software or line-of-business applications," he said. "We'll tell users that these kinds of things won't run well in this environment."

Hmmm... Hey, guess what you are missing? Either Microsoft also builds a 'lean' version of Office, or those users will run someone else software on 'Eiger'.