Windows 7 on an entry level netbook: first look

David M Williams
Monday, 04 May 2009 17:47

Business IT - Technology

The sorts of things you’d expect people to do with their netbooks are fairly regular tasks: surfing the web, playing music and videos, playing games, checking e-mail, word processing and other things along these lines.

Firing up Internet Explorer and loading its default MSN home page takes RAM use up to 52%. Launching Windows Media Centre causes it to skyrockets up to 75%, or 762MB.

Similarly, while installing Adobe Flash Player the CPU rises to 70%. Playing music in Windows Media Player causes the CPU to fluctuate between 16% and 25%, almost like it is visualising the music, bouncing up and down as the music hits its deep and high notes. Meanwhile, playing a video makes the processor flail wildly between 52% and 80%.

I loaded PassMark’s PerformanceTest 7.0 benchmarking software which evaluated the Acer Aspire One, under Windows 7.0, at 204.2. As with the Windows rating, the hard drive was the star performer and the video card was the weak spot, rendering complex 3D graphics at an uninspiring 2.3 frames per second.

To give a comparison, the current top rated computer on PassMark has a rating of 5588.62, but that machine is a monster with four CPU cores.

You wouldn’t use this netbook to play 3D games, but you would use it to manage your files and media and e-mail. The Windows 7 experience was surprisingly pleasant for the most part, but while the machine was doing one task (like playing a movie) any attempts to start something else took noticeably longer.

Once I had loaded Microsoft Office 2007 the 1GB of RAM became insufficient and the computer started page faulting. However, at all times it was a stable experience, just increasingly slower as I attempted to do more simultaneously.

The screen size was a little too short for my liking; even something trivial like FreeCell went slightly off the screen. I’d advocate auto-hiding the Windows taskbar along the bottom of the screen or moving it to either the left- or right-hand borders instead.

So there you have it. Windows 7 worked, but I can’t help but feel it wanted a bit more RAM and processor space to spread its wings.