I’d been wondering about picking up a netbook of some kind to test Windows 7 performance on a really low-end PC. Here’s an interesting take on this from Dmitry Lyalin, who works at Microsoft:
The other day I finally did something I’ve been wanted to do since I heard the awesome announcement at PDC: Windows 7 can run on a Netbook. This was terrific news and something I was really hoping to hear. Windows XP to me is a dead operating system, for all its glory its time to move on, yet I worried with the rise of Netbooks if this was possible without a “light” version of our newer Windows releases. With Windows 7, my wish came true.
After playing around launching various applications I decided to close down everything and check the memory footprint. With nothing running I was now at around 650megs of memory use.
While its not perfect my overall experience is very positive and I simply cannot wait to see this operating system go RTM! I will continue to post on my experience as this story evolves, so stay tuned.
I was looking at the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook, but I’ll have to do some comparison shopping first, I guess. I like the idea of having 2 GB of RAM as an option (I think the IdeaPad only goes to 1 GB) but I also want to test this thing on a real world netbook. I guess by 2010, 2 GB will be the minimum, as it is now on real PCs. (Unless you buy a Mac desktop, iMac, or notebook, of course.)
Related: Vista on an Eee PC?