Netbook vs Windows 7

Windows 7 is a bit more than a few months away; more realistically will be just in time for the Holiday Season. Windows 7 seems to have gotten great reviews by users who have tested pre-release versions of the OS on their netbooks. That being said, Windows 7 will work just fine on most netbooks.

More good news- Microsoft announced last Friday that Windows 7 Starter Edition will allow for unlimited applications running simultaneously, as opposed to previous versions which were limited to 3 applications at a time. More on that here: http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/default.aspx

Cheers,
Jeff
Windows Outreach Team

runs fine, no noticeable lag in performance when running Aero but the processing is definitely up there, might be better to go the Basic theme

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate RC1 on my Asus Eee PC 1000H (N270 Intel Atom cpu, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD). It runs better than XP. It's significantly different from XP, so choose whichever you prefer. You can also get netbooks with some flavor of Linux. If that's good for you, choose that. They all work very well as long as you don't need OS_specific apps, e.g., MS Office requires Windows because no other OS has an app that can save MS Office 2003/2007 formatting. The open source word processors can deal with earlier versions of MS Word without too much trouble, though.

When I taught school, I used my Eee PCs (I'm on my 3rd; I upgraded for screen size and the large HDD) every day and loved them. However, now that I'm editing technical papers full-time, I'm not terribly happy with the Atom CPU: too slow, sometimes even for simple tasks, and the screen resolution (1024 x 600) just doesn't make it.

I'm going to switch to a larger lightweight notebook, one with a 12- or 13.3-inch screen and minimum 1024 x 800 resolution. That will also get me a cpu that runs at least twice as fast as the Atom N270.

I may just spring for the most powerful 12- or 13.3-inch notebook I can buy, however, because the power and speed are suddenly much more important to me than the differences in price and weight. I just can't work well enough with a 10-inch screen, 1024 x 600, and an Atom N270.

It feels snappier than XP..Ready boost actually works with Win 7 so app opening is snappy. It is convenient to use on Acer because left SD slot swallows the card completely so nothing is sticking out. I bit the bullet and opened up my macine to upgrade the memory to 1.5GB(the max unfortunately) and there was a noticeable improvement in performance.
This is a terrific unit as long as you use it for what it was designed for..email, word processing, powerpoint show and web browsing and the like. Don't expect any heavy lifting from this lightweight gem.(pun intended)

I replaced the 1gb mem module with a 2 gb and replaced 4gb ssd hd with a quick 16gb ssd hd, it took longer to install Win7 RC 32 bit than I thought it would (about 3 hours) but after it rebooted it's lightning fast. I also have an acer aspire 5735-4774 that I maxed the ram 4gb and replaced the hd with same size but larger buffer 16mb and faster 7200rpm. Most people are shocked how fast both computers operate but what you'll see on the netbook is if you multi-task excessively it'll slow down, it's still much faster than when it had Win XP home but it does have the limitation if you're trying to move a file and watch flash video at the same time. These problems may be solved when Via launches the nano dual-core, it will force Intel to release the Atom dual-core (I have this too for a home desktop, very nice and fast for day to day activities.