[doggie-15]

I would just like to know: What is the LEAST powerful system you have gotten Windows 7 to run on? I have seen several people running Windows 7 on a Lenovo S10e netbook with aero enabled. (1.6 GHz intel atom w/integrated video card and 1.00 GB RAM).

Real question now: Is Windows 7 more netbook-friendly than vista, and should I upgrade from windows XP to windows 7 on my netbook? (P.S. Can the Intel Atom run a 64-bit OS?)

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The Atom is available in 64-bit so it depends which particular model has found its way into your netbook.

The specifications of a machine is arbitrary to Windows 7, because the older the machine the less likely it is that there is driver support for it. It's designed for modern-day hardware, and yes it's more netbook friendly than Vista ever was. As to whether you should upgrade it, well, does XP run happily and do everything you want?

[Neil Jones]

The Atom is available in 64-bit so it depends which particular model has found its way into your netbook.

The specifications of a machine is arbitrary to Windows 7, because the older the machine the less likely it is that there is driver support for it. It's designed for modern-day hardware, and yes it's more netbook friendly than Vista ever was. As to whether you should upgrade it, well, does XP run happily and do everything you want?

[diabillic]

http://www.microsoft...quirements.aspx

[SpywareDr]

I recently setup a little Acer Aspire R3610 (nettop) running the standard 1.6GHz Intel Atom 330 CPU, but upgraded to 4 GB of RAM and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, Installed Windows XP mode (using 512MB of the RAM), attached a USB CD/DVD burner, hooked up a 23" Acer monitor to the VGA port and then a second 20" Dell monitor via an "encore" USB-to-DVI/VGA adapter.

While playing a "Last Airbender" 1080p trailer full-screen in Windows Media Player in XP mode on the 19" monitor, I also had Windows 7's Windows Media Player playing the old Windows 98 "Good Times" video on the 23" monitor. Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, and Outlook 2007 were also loaded up on the Windows 7/23" monitor side, all at the same time. There were no skips, jumps, pauses, etc. in either of the videos.

Pretty amazing little machine ... considering it's based on an Atom.

[doggie-15]

that is the amount of RAM you put in there which makes the majority of the performance there. The rest is the processor

[SpywareDr]

I did have it up and running, with 256MB XP mode, on the original 2GB of RAM and was pleasantly surprised. Didn't do any real testing though until the new RAM, USB-VGA/DVI adapter and Office 2007 were installed.

[diabillic]

I recently setup a little Acer Aspire R3610 (nettop) running the standard 1.6GHz Intel Atom 330 CPU, but upgraded to 4 GB of RAM and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, Installed Windows XP mode (using 512MB of the RAM), attached a USB CD/DVD burner, hooked up a 23" Acer monitor to the VGA port and then a second 20" Dell monitor via an "encore" USB-to-DVI/VGA adapter.

While playing a "Last Airbender" 1080p trailer full-screen in Windows Media Player in XP mode on the 19" monitor, I also had Windows 7's Windows Media Player playing the old Windows 98 "Good Times" video on the 23" monitor. Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, and Outlook 2007 were also loaded up on the Windows 7/23" monitor side, all at the same time. There were no skips, jumps, pauses, etc. in either of the videos.

Pretty amazing little machine ... considering it's based on an Atom.

The Atom processor sucks quite frankly. It's the Nvidia ION platform that is truly the great piece of hardware and handles the HD video with no problem.

[dsenette]

The Atom processor sucks quite frankly.

depends on what you're using it for.

sure if you're trying to do some crazy gaming with an atom and onboard graphics, you're going to have issues. but if you're using it for websurfing, youtube video playing, etc... then it's a perfectly acceptable processor. when the context of the conversation is mentioning netbooks and nettops, then expecting massive processing power is simply ludicrous, since that's not what either device was designed for

[diabillic]

Even for just web surfing, online videos, etc it's still just so slow and laggy. I played around with a Revo setting up an HTPC for a friend. It came with XP preloaded and just trying to browse the web constantly locked up. I guess mileage will vary though.

[dsenette]

i've not had that experience. i've got a fit-PC2i nettop at the house right now that's running 7 on a 2gb atom with 2ghz of ram and a pretty minimal onboard intel graphics card and i haven't had a single issue that i can attributed to the processor. it runs aero just fine, i can stream video etc... i've not had any lag or lockup issues yet (that aren't related to my ridiculously slow internet connection)

i've also got several HPmini netbooks that have 1.5 or 1.6 atoms (not sure off hand) and the slowest thing on them is the VZnavigator app from verizon that takes about 6 minutes to turn the wwan radio on (but that's their poor implimentation), actual surfing etc is fine. we use them primarily for RDP over our VPN and i've again noticed nothing with regards to the processor that's bad, or at least unexpectedly bad

again, i'm not going to be playing games or trying to calculate pi to 1 billion places on these things.

Edited by dsenette, 14 June 2010 - 12:31 PM.

[doggie-15]

The Atom processor sucks quite frankly.

depends on what you're using it for.

sure if you're trying to do some crazy gaming with an atom and onboard graphics, you're going to have issues. but if you're using it for websurfing, youtube video playing, etc... then it's a perfectly acceptable processor. when the context of the conversation is mentioning netbooks and nettops, then expecting massive processing power is simply ludicrous, since that's not what either device was designed for

That is very true. My Lenovo S10e was not, in any way, built for serious gaming. It struggles to maintain a playable framerate on the absolute lowest graphics settings and resolution. And the screen is just way too small, if you want to go cross-eyed from staring at a small screen, you may as well turbo-charge you iPod touch and run games such as UT04 on that

[Wol]

FWIW I bought an Acer Aspire One a year ago just for travel: the 1.6GHz Atom and 1 Gb RAM. It runs Seven Home Premium slowly but OK for my usage, and video from the HD is fine.

[SpywareDr]

The Atom processor sucks quite frankly.

Do you really need a Bugatti Veyron to run to the grocery store?

SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
June 13, 2010 | Dean Takahashi
http://venturebeat.c...erver-industry/

SeaMicro ... has created a server with 512 Intel Atom chips that gets supercomputer performance but uses 75 percent less power and space than current servers.

More: http://news.google.c...m...&q=seamicro

Edited by SpywareDr, 15 June 2010 - 04:18 AM.

[diabillic]

The browser still shouldn't take 2 minutes to launch out of the box. I am more impressed with the ION platform, I couldn't believe how well it handled 1080P video streaming over the network.

[doggie-15]

The browser still shouldn't take 2 minutes to launch out of the box...

If your browser launches that slowly out of the box, you should consider using a different one. And just out of curiosity: what browser are you using that takes 2 minutes to launch anyway?