I had been intrigued for a while about the possibilities of running Windows 7 on a netbook so I decided to install it onto an Acer Aspire One which I bought for one of my children a while back and which is gathering dust now after my son got an iPhone for his mail and facebook chat.
I got Windows 7 Starter from MSDN and put it onto an 8 gigabyte USB key using the instructions found on Kevin's weblog (http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=345) These instructions are clear and concise and worked first time.
I plugged the newly loaded USB key into the Acer and reset the machine, pressing F12 at boot so that I could select the correct boot device.
Surprisingly, the install didn't complain about the fact that the disk drive or SDD on the acer is only 8 gigabytes. Nor did it have any objection to the size of the RAM which is the pathetis standard 512 megabytes. My son used the machine with the standard Linux install for a few months and had Firefox installed for browsing. With Linux there seemed to be no problems but, I will be honest I wondered if Windows 7 would choke on the machine.
The install continued flawlessly for about an hour whereupon the machine rebooted and the Windows 7 desktop appeared. I must admit to being flabbergasted. My pal at work, Michel Perfetti, a fellow MVP has recently bought a 64 meg SDD and 2 GB memory before he even considered installing 7 on his EEEPC so I think I might just wave this little gem in his face on Monday.
You can see here, the performance score which is a resounding 1.0 but only because the Aero desktop performance is not good. 3D performance is 3 and the hard disk rate is 5.3
I am totally impressed with the ability of Windows 7 to install and function so well on such a tiny footprint. Well done Microsoft!
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