I have been running a Asus Eeepc 1000H netbook for about 12 months now, in fact I have pretty much ran my whole business using the little netbook. It has been ultra reliable and has never let me down, which considering the amount of abuse that it has received is huge testament to Asus. Anyway I have noticed recently that as is typical with Windows the system has started to slow down and startup was at best painfully slow, so I was left with the choice of either reinstalling Windows XP or give something else a try. I considered installing Linux but it just causes to many issues and to be honest I do not have the time or inclination to spend hours installing software and drivers to get the system working as I want it. Windows Vista was discounted immediately as I did not feel that it would run that well on the Eeepc hardware. So I opted to give Windows 7 a go. I have heard some positive reports of Windows 7 running on netbook hardware, so I thought I would give it a go.
Installation
The install was a breeze and the process I took was as follows:
- Create a bootable USB drive. I used an 8GB Crucial Gizmo drive and used the process here to create the bootable drive. Note if you do not have a Vista system you can still create a bootable USB system from XP, just google it and you will find plenty of resources to help you out.
- I copied the Windows 7 source files to the USB Stick
- Set the netbook to boot from the USB drive
I followed the install screens and voila the machine was up and running within about 35-40 minutes.
So I had a working Eeepc running Windows 7 albeit with some hardware that needed the correct drivers. This can be a complete pain in the backside, scrabbling around looking for the correct drivers. Thankfully, the team at Softonic has a link to a zip file containing all the necessary drivers that you will need. The file can be accessed from this link.
I installed all the relevant drivers and everything worked perfectly.
First Impressions
My first impressions of Windows 7 were “looks like Vista only quicker” It clearly has many similarities to Vista, but it seems to run so much better even on the netbook which I was really quite surprised about. I found it easy enough to navigate. My biggest concern was about the apps and how they would run on the machine. I do not run a huge variety of apps on my machines as I do most of my work using online services, having said that I do depend on a few local applications. I installed all the key applications and spent several hours using them to check that all was well, and surprisingly enough they all worked flawlessly. For brevity here is the list of apps that I installed:
- MS Office 2007 (Yeah you would expect that one to work!!!)
- Roboform
- Firefox
- Vodafone Mobile broadband dongle
- Dropbox
Not a huge list, but they were the key apps I needed to work.
A week in
The netbook has been running for just over a week now, and it has been used everyday and I have been pleasantly surprised about how well the system has performed. I have had no lock ups or crashes and all the apps have worked with no issues. I must confess that I have never got too involved in the great operating system debates, as long as they do their job, I am generally happy. Having said that, I have been very impressed with this latest release of Windows and the fact that it runs so well on netbook hardware is a significant selling point and provides netbook users with another option should they wish to move away from Windows XP in the future.
All in all, a very pleasant experience and my netbook seems to have a new lease of life. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating and time will tell on how well the system will perform, but so far so good.
If you want to find out a bit more about Windows 7 then please check out the promo video from Microsoft below
Thanks to “Tweaking Vishal” for the information on creating the USB boot disk. If you want more information on tweaking and tuning Windows then head on over to the site at http://www.askvg.com
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