Thank you, Bill Gates!

The magic smoke escaped from the charging circuit of my trusty EEE PC netbook. I'm not as upset about that as you might think, since I had been looking for an excuse to replace it for a while. However, since I needed a replacement *right away*, I decided to take a look at what the local Staples had.

They had two models: an ASUS One and an HP Mini 210.

The two machines are quite comparable, but a little web research turned up the major advantage to the Mini 210: you can get into the thing to upgrade the memory and the hard disk without so much as a screwdriver. To upgrade the ASUS, you have to take the whole bloody thing apart.

The Mini 210 comes with 1GB of RAM, so the memory upgrade was going to happen right away; taking the 2GB from the formerly trusty EEE PC also allowed me to recover some of the cost sunk into upgrading it (I fear I'll never recover the cost of Windows XP).

The Mini 210 runs Windows 7 Starter Edition. I didn't know what was special about Starter Edition, but I figured if it was Windows 7 it had to be good.

And things were going well until I decided that I didn't really like the light blue background with a Windows logo in the middle of it.

It turns out that the primary features mission from Windows 7 Starter Edition are:

• The ability to play DVDs.
  
• The ability to change the desktop wallpaper.
  

The first one makes sense. A netbook isn't likely to have a DVD drive, so if someone wants to play DVDs they'll have to pony up for an external drive. As long as they're buying a drive, they may as well pony up for an operating system upgrade as well.

But the second confused for me a while.

Until I realized the whole point of Windows 7 Starter Edition is a sales tool for upgrades. Most people that are buying netbooks will have some reason for upgrading the OS. The technophile will just have to be able to play DVDs.

But what about grandma, who just wants to send e-mail and surf genealogy web sites? How do you convince her to upgrade?

This is where the second limitation comes in: the one thing grandma is going to want is a picture of her grandkids on the desktop.

By removing the ability to change the desktop, Microsoft has converted grandma from a casual user to an operating system upgrade customer.

But, I figured it couldn't be that hard to hack a new desktop background in. All I had to do was find the right file and copy over it, right? Which I did.

But when I rebooted, I didn't have my image as the desktop. I had a simple black background. Why?

It turns out that Windows 7 Starter Edition has a hash code of the supplied background image hardcoded into it somewhere. At boot time, it checks the image and, if it doesn't have the right hash value, the operating system deletes the registry entry that specifies which image should be used as the background.

Why would they do this? Easy. What's grandma going to do when she can't figure out how to put a picture of her grandkids on the desktop? She'll hand the machine over to one of the technically minded grandkids and say "fix it". The technically minded grandkid will do the obvious things (find the file and overwrite it or try to change the registry entries by hand) and, being stymied, say "Grandma, just upgrade; I'm already late for my raid."

As for me?

Well, what I really wanted was a plain black background in the first place, so I'm golden.

Thank you, Bill Gates!