Windows 7 on an entry level netbook: first look

By David M Williams
Monday, 04 May 2009 16:47

Technology

You've read all about Windows 7RC, but how does it really perform in practice? I wanted to know too so I loaded it on a modern Acer Aspire One netbook.

The Acer Aspire One isn’t cutting edge by any means, but nor is it aimed at the young, sporting an 8.9” screen and a keyboard suitable for fat fingered adults like myself.

It has an Intel Atom N270 processor running at 1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard disk drive.

Video is powered by an onboard Mobile Intel 945 express chipset running at 1024x600 resolution. This chip is not DirectX 10 compliant, but that’s no deal-breaker. You won’t be running Crysis on this machine!

I made a fresh Windows 7 installation instead of opting to upgrade the existing Windows XP, but started clean. The installation was successful without errors or problems arising and without any missing hardware drivers afterwards.

I timed a boot from power on to the login prompt being displayed, which came in at just over 48 seconds. That’s fairly respectable.

Windows 7 assigned the Acer Aspire One a rating of 2.1 (out of 7.9, up from Vista’s limit of 5.9.) Of these, the Aero graphics performance was the weakest factor, rating 2.1. The processor only fared slightly better with a rating of 2.2. The 3D and gaming graphics performance rated 3.0, RAM 4.4 and hard disk data transfer rate 5.4.

Upon logging in, and without any other programs installed or running, 7.73GB of the hard drive was used already. On a roomy 160GB hard drive that’s not a problem but if your netbook uses a solid state hard disk then space may be more of a premium.

The task manager’s performance tab showed 33 processes running and 465MB of RAM – or about 45% – in use while sitting idle. While nearly half the RAM being consumed without actually doing anything useful may be concerning it’s not actually a big deal. Microsoft claim that Windows 7 (and Vista too, but its success is arguable) pre-loads parts of programs it expects you to use.

This means that if you do use these programs they will start up faster. It also means the amount of free RAM is less than you would expect.

How does it perform in actual use?