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

Whoa

[ledow]

Hold on, WTH:

- It takes 450-odd Mb of RAM to just sit at a clean, freshly installed desktop. I'm still running networks of machines that run on XP with 512Mb and suffer no appreciable performance loss (admittedly well-managed in terms of applications, but we run Office too).
- When you install Office 2007, it swaps like mad with 1Gb of RAM.
- It takes 7Gb of drive space to install.

That is *not* a comfortable operating system for a netbook, it really isn't. My XP laptop is about as powerful as that netbook (although mine is dual-core and has a much nicer graphics card) and yet it'll take all of the above amounts of RAM, for a basic Office install - but I have a ton of other crap installed and running (my current Opera session is taking 70Mb of RAM, for instance). So what you have is *not* a netbook but a run-of-the-mill laptop. However, if I was to try to run this on, say, an Asus EEEPC it's likely to fall flat on its face before you even start (4Gb flash, oops, bang). Where XP would be quite happy, I'd like to add (or at worst, a nLite CD would work). And that's before you even START actually using the damn thing to get work done.

Just off the top of my head, booting a Slackware CD, pressing "yes" to everything, etc. will get you into a full X-Windows environment with several window managers, thousands of apps, all in under 5Gb storage (most of that being silly stuff like gcc, KDE I18n, and TeX) and able to run in a few hundred Meg RAM. With OpenOffice, yeah you might get a bit of swapping went you first load but the point of netbooks etc. is the nice suspend options, and it sounds like it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad.

I know this is all based on a "blog-o-expert", but hell... it's obviously not suited to the task. Just like XP isn't really suited to the task. But it sounds like it does an even worse job. Yeah, with some tweaking you can probably get rid of a lot of crap but you're never going to be able to pare it down as far as XP, or any version of Linux.

So in the age of netbooks, where people are getting them thrown at them with their mobile phone contracts, MS's idea is to release (and thus force upon people) a new OS that doesn't really handle them at all unless you voluntarily soup them up and kill their performance/battery life. Good plan. I was seriously half expecting a special "7 mobile" edition at some point that would merge the CE and NT-based product lines for netbooks, seeing how that's the buzzword at the moment. In the absense of that, another growing OS is hardly a surprise. I'm actually pleasantly surprised that it wasn't a LOT worse than this. Vista upgrades were a really, really big deal and killed many an upgrade plan stone dead. This isn't in those realms, but it's hardly good news.

Re:But what about the sidebar?

[Gothmolly]

How many times per hour do you need to convert currency, or check what today's date is? If that's your business, then you're using the wrong tool. If it's NOT your business, then the widgets are just masturbation.

This is how things compare to me...

[CFBMoo1]

Lets see...

* Spend $50-60 on a 2 gig ram chip.
* Spend $200+ on Windows 7 (Netbook Version)
* Spend $40-60 on antivirus.
* Spend $200 on Office
* Limited to three applications.

After buying a Netbook PC.

OR

* Spend $50-60 on a 2 gig ram chip.
* Download and install Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04.
* Stick with Open Office and still handle most Office documents.
* Unlimited applications.

After buying a Netbook PC.

Hmmm... tough choice there.