Thank you for continuing to update this. I’ve recently turned a fellow writer on to Scrivener; within half an hour she texted me to say that she loved it and would write with it from now on.
Quick question: I take it that with the new beta, it won’t expire on the 12th as the popup notice tells me every time I start? Because that’d be a short 1.4 beta phase 
Many thanks,
-Steve
Similarly, as an audio producer, I used Mac for protools - because it ran better on it. I choose my tools (because we are just talking about fancy screwdrivers, here) without emotion and that was the point the offending sentence was making. I still hold that anyone who is running XP on a full size notebook (not netbook) or desktop has no right to be insisting that it continue to be supported. I don’t know much about netbooks, so possibly it is necessary for them - happy to stipulate I was wrong on that because that’s what rational people are able to do.
I’m going to bow out gracefully here because this is supposed to be about Scrivener, not a defence of fanboi logic.
Considering Microsoft is still committed to providing support for XP (with SP3) until 2014, I’d say that gives XP users a decent reason to expect at least some level of support from their favorite applications. At any rate, it’s L&L’s call to make on whether they want to address support for the XP user base. Sounds like they’re making the right decision for their target audience.
Leaving with a cheap shot (“fanboi logic”) is merely stomping off in a huff while trying to get the last word, not being reasonable and peaceful.
AmberV, have you ever tried turning off the Windows 7 transparency features and just going to the classic themes? The limited times that I’ve looked at Windows 7 on netbooks, I’ve found that single step to greatly improve both performance and battery life.
Yeah, my first step whenever installing Windows on a new location is to turn on classic themes, mostly out of aesthetic choice than anything else, but it does help with performance. Of course, on this particular netbook, the only reason I have it is for Windows support, so I’ve left it at Windows 7 Starter to have a baseline system that the average non-technical person who picks up a cheap netbook at BestBuy will have.
The funny thing is that it is not obvious how to optimise the w7 Starter OS for netbooks (which it was presumably designed for). The control panels for theme selection have all been disabled from the front-end UI, you have to search for them in the start menu. Type in “theme” in the search bar, and it should provide an interface for customising the basic window theme, which will let you use a solid background colour instead of an image—that can help too. Changing the pointer to be simple without a shadow, and turning of ClearType are other things you can do—a lot of these need to be done in XP as well. There are probably other background indexing tasks and things you could tweak—but then you start breaking into reducing the usefulness of the OS rather than the appearance of it. Also, examining properties on Computer, and in the Advanced tab, set Performance settings to “Best performance” which will disable all of the menu fading and other superfluous animations.
It will all look and feel a bit “Windows 2k”, but at least you don’t have to sit there and wait for Explorer windows to load, menus to appear, and other basic functions which should be instantaneous on a computer released in 2010—netbook or no.