First Look At Windows 7 On an Entry-Level Netbook

davidmwilliams sends in his IT Wire review of how Windows 7RC1 performs on an Acer Aspire One netbook. Summing up: it runs, it won't win any speed competitions, you won't want to play Crysis on it, and it's pretty OK for light-duty, everyday tasks. In related news, several readers have noted that Windows 7 RC1 is now available; one anonymous reader notes "This time, Microsoft was smart not to limit the time that it's available or the number of keys. It will be up for download until July, so there's lots of time to grab a copy."

Comments

Worth a try

[cusco]

Let's see how long until I can force it to crash, and then I can complain about it!

Must be some sort of Windows Guru

[bazorg]

"Once I had loaded Microsoft Office 2007 the 1GB of RAM became insufficient and the computer started page faulting."

hehehehehehe

"However, at all times it was a stable experience, just increasingly slower as I attempted to do more simultaneously."

Re:Must be some sort of Windows Guru

[hey!]

you don't know what a page fault is, do you?

It's an electoral liability in the House of Representatives.

Windows 7 is for latte sippers. VISTA!

[David Gerard]

Could everyone please sign up to the Save Vista campaign. Like Hummer like Chrysler, like Edsel, Vista shows the might of full-sized American industrial production. Itâ(TM)s a monument to everything that makes us great. We can't let it be trashed for misguided corporate attempts to suck up to latte sippers.

Say No To Seven! VISTA VISTA VISTA! All the way!

Compare to Ubuntu

[jonaskoelker]

I don't know if 1GB of RAM should be too little for an OS and MS Word.

I'm on ubuntu, using 871 MB of RAM atm, with firefox using a whopping 16% of my total 2 GB (= 327 MB).

My systems runs ok, but I guess it'll get a lost faster if I kill fi

Excellent

[hey!]

Windows 7 assigned the Acer Aspire One a rating of 2.1 (out of 7.9, up from Vistaâ(TM)s limit of 5.9.)

Excellent! The top speed of Windows 7 is 7.9 rather than 5.9. That a 34% increase.

Re:At the risk of being redundant

[dmmiller2k]

My vintage 2000 500MHz P-III, fully maxed out with 384MB of RAM ran Win98 for years, was later upgraded to Win98SE, then upgraded again to XP-Pro SP3, recently.

(I know, I know, you should ALWAYS install new and NEVER upgrade, but I have licensed software on it for which I no longer have install media or keys, and heck, it worked.)

Anyway it runs Firefox and Office 2003 just fine, if slowly.

When my kids misbehave, they have to use it instead of the regular machine to do their homework for an appropriate period of time.

When they REALLY misbehave, I disable MS Office (by changing the ACL on the install directory) and force them to run OpenOffice (with Java enabled) on it.

Works great. They RARELY misbehave anymore.