It’s fair to say that many folks are cautiously optimistic regarding the prospects of Windows 7. One reason why, I believe, is its improved ability to run on netbooks. (Vista is sorta unruly on netbooks, as you might imagine.) Laptop mag did the heavy lifting and installed the Windows 7 beta (which is easy to find on the usual BitTorrent sites, by the way) on the Asus Eee PC 1000H.
Surprise, surprise: Windows 7 works quite well on the little guy.
With only a 1.6GHz Atom processor and 1GB of RAM, the Eee PC 1000H was able to boot into Windows in just under one minute—58 seconds, to be exact.
All-around performance seems to be good, too: only about half of the netbook’s RAM was eaten by the operating system. Running fancy applications like Skype and GIMP—calling GIMP fancy must be some sort of sin—also worked well. They even managed to play 720p video with only a few bumps and bruises.
Not too bad, then. And just think: we’re still at least one year away from Windows 7’s release, which is plenty of time to optimize the operating system’s code.
Microsoft, we’re secretly rooting for you. Don’t screw it up. Again.
