If You Wait Long Enough, the Truth Is Revealed

It is amazing how many people are closet fanboys, not even aware of their status, merely because of their excitement over something new. I refer to the case of Windows 7 versus Windows XP. So many people writing on the internet today would have you believe that Windows XP is like that octogenarian down the street, cute but not able to accomplish much work. This is ostensibly because it has been around for eight years, as if the bits with which it is written are actually rotting.

If you read the opinions of the authors over at ZDNet, especially Ed Bott, you might, with no direct knowledge yourself, tend to believe his ramblings concerning the speed and quality of Windows 7, and its total domination of poor, old Windows XP, so past its prime that we should only remember it fondly, but never actually use it, to get any real work done.

Mr. Bott has many times, in just the last few months, spoken of the amazing behavior of Windows 7, its amazing power, its wonderful interface, and then, its speed and fitness for purpose. Mr. Bott is not alone, for there are many others, taken in by the new kid on the block, and possibly by the colorful way in which it gets things done.

Yet all along, in my own travels along the road to Windows 7, I have found that a metered approach, without hyperbole works best. I first decided that I really did not like the interface, but that aside, tried it, on adequate hardware, for after all, we are counseled, by those in exalted positions, that Windows 7 will work with hardware that supports Windows XP, if the drivers work. That is said to be the genius of Microsoft – they have delivered something new, and not removed any speed gains given us by better hardware.

In my own, rather solid but unscientific testing, I have found that Windows 7 delivers adequate performance, faster than Vista, but not as fast as Windows XP.

Just this morning, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, also of ZDNet, basically validates my long held position, with out much trouble, and without apology or obfuscation. (I’m thinking that Mr. Bott just might sell a few less books about Windows 7 after this.)

I’ve been running Windows 7 on a Samsung NC10 netbook for some months. With the Windows 7 Release Candidate now leaked, it’s time for a verdict on whether Microsoft’s latest OS is suited to these tiny portable PCs.

The Samsung NC10 is a fairly typical netbook. It’s equipped with a 1.6GHz Atom processor, an Intel GMA950 graphics chip, a 1024 x 768 screen, and it comes in a choice of hard disk sizes - 80/100/120GB. Battery life is also in the 4.5 to 7.5 region, depending on how hard it is being used.

It’s hard to come out with a final definitive verdict about Windows 7 on a netbook because many of the netbook’s features rely on specific drivers. For the purposes of this piece I will ignore any driver-related issues.

Installation

Installing Windows 7 on a netbook is pretty straight-forward as long as you either have access to a USB optical drive, or are able to put the installation files onto a USB flash drive.

The whole install process took a little over 30 minutes and the installation consumed some 7.5GB of drive space.

Features such as WiFi were easy to set up. I did have to load a few non-Windows 7 drivers onto the machine to get some of the trackpad and battery features working right.

Performance

The performance of Windows 7 on the NC10 is, on the whole, pretty good. It scored a 2.2 on the Windows Experience Index rating, Bootup times felt a little longer than what I’d come to expect with Windows XP. Under XP the system would cold start in about 40 seconds, but with Windows 7 this increased to about 70 seconds.

Another issue that I found was that with Windows 7 and IE8 I was not able to open as many browser tabs before the system started to feel sluggish compared to Windows XP with IE7 running. It didn’t seem to matter if the system was running in low power mode or not, so the issue didn’t seem to be down to CPU power.

The problem seemed to come down to the fact that the NC10 only had 1GB of RAM. So the answer to the problem was to whip out the 1GB DDR2 PC5300 SODIMM module and replace it with a 2GB module (there’s only one slot in the NC10). Cost of this upgrade is somewhere in the region of $25.

Problem solved.

Verdict

Windows 7 works on netbooks, but if you push the system the same way as you push a desktop system then you might need to add more RAM. On top of that, remember that Windows 7 takes some 7.5GB of disk space, so you need to factor this into your thinking, especially if you have a netbook with a small SSD fitted.

My advice would be not to bother upgrading an existing netbook unless you really feel you want a particular Windows 7 feature. wait for Windows 7 netbooks to arrive on the scene as some of these will hopefully come with 2GB of RAM fitted.

Note here that I am not slamming Windows 7. I am, however, extremely tired of those who, whether innocently, due to enthusiasm, or motivated by something else, incorrectly report the performance of something, or slam something established, in hopes of pushing something new upon the public.

Twice in the article Adrian explains that Windows 7 will not come up to par with Windows XP – once when booting up, and once when opening tabs with a browser. Then he tells how the deficiency can be mitigated, but the point I make is that head to head, XP is faster, and more frugal with memory. Therefore one can take the blatherings of Mr. Bott when he talks about how insanely well Windows 7 runs in 512 MB  of memory, with an extremely large grain of salt.

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