The other day I finally did something I’ve been wanted to do since I heard the awesome announcement at PDC: Windows 7 can run on a Netbook. This was terrific news and something I was really hoping to hear. Windows XP to me is a dead operating system, for all its glory its time to move on, yet I worried with the rise of Netbooks if this was possible without a “light” version of our newer Windows releases. With Windows 7, my wish came true.
Build
The build that I am installing is the one which I believe got handed out at PDC (rev. 6801). I didn't go to PDC so it was obtained from the official Microsoft network share for full time employees.
The Install
The install itself was fairly painless, in about one hours time I was able to:
- Boot my Mini from a USB harddisk
- Delete the existing partition
- Begin the install
- And finally, be booted in Windows 7!
Windows 7 had enough drivers to boot the device without an attached network connection, so this is good news as well.
Once Booted
Once I finally logged into Windows 7 I noticed right away a perceived performance increase! Yes this was super excited enough to use two exclamation points in this one sentence!
Clicking around randomly and right-clicking on items seemed much faster. Booting was quick to begin with and opening applications like the included chess game and IE 8 Beta was very smooth. I have to say while happy with my Dell 9 before in terms of performance, this really does optimize the experience.
Great job Windows team!
Memory Use
After playing around launching various applications I decided to close down everything and check the memory footprint. With nothing running I was now at around 650megs of memory use, from my total 2gigs.
Rebooting the machine and checking again revealed that from the start it got close to 600megs, but still very friendly, leaving most of my memory to applications.
Drivers
Unfortunately though I did notice in device manager a bunch of missing drivers and unknown devices. While enough to boot I don't seem to have enough out-of-the-box to have all my devices working.
Wireless Driver – Works of Dell’s site
I downloaded the latest wireless driver from Dell’s support website and was able to connect to my wireless network. This will give me a chance to see later this week if I can use Windows update to fix my driver issues. More on this later.
Ethernet Driver – Dead in the water
The biggest concern right now is that the wired Ethernet adapter while installed does not seem to start (error code 10? hmm). I just hope a newer version of the driver is released soon or Windows 7 fixes the issue somehow, it would be horrible not to have a wired connection.
Conclusion
While its not perfect my overall experience is very positive and I simply cannot wait to see this operating system go RTM! I will continue to post on my experience as this story evolves, so stay tuned.