I became a Mac user the first day Microsoft sent me a copy of Vista Ultimate… and while I admit that I could have stayed with XP, I welcomed the OS change (to OSX) and still can’t understand how Microsoft screwed up things THAT bad with Vista…


Seriously, if you don’t have a minimum of 2GB DDR3 RAM, a Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz, 7200rpm HDDs and a decent last gen video card, the Vista experience still sucks hard… So let’s imagine all these notebooks on the market with Core Solo, Celeron, Core Duo CPUs… or even better ATOM… like a Willcom D4 or other Netbook from Japan…

But then last December after a little trip to Seattle, the MS Windows Team (hi Chris), try to connivence us that 7 would be the right thing even for a Netbook… once more I was unimpressed and argued that 7 was just a simple SP (Service Pack) rather than a real OS…

Then Windows 7 came… and I figured the best thing to do was to test Windows 7 on the worst device ever… an average Japanese Netbook (usually sold with Windows XP Home) and not my HTPC monster configuration.

Our test device was a Sotec (Onkyo) C101K3W, powered with an Atom N270 CPU (1.60GHz), 1GB of RAM, intel 945GSE Express and 120GB of HDD, the Hello Kitty Limited Edition… pretty simple… and I’m not ashamed to admit that I own a Hello Kitty PC…

Once the installation of 7 was finished (quickly), I was surprised to discover that only the unusual WiFi drivers were missing, all other components for my C1 hasd been installed… Most surprising too was that my Windows 7 installation was activated with Aero…

Running pretty fast and smoothly I was became intrigued. My Hello Kitty Netbook, with 1GB of RAM and a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, seemed to run faster than my ASUS R1F Tablet PC with 2GB of RAM a Core Duo 1.6GHz and a 7200rpm SATA HDD…

Let’s try something crazy, let’s install Photoshop CS3 along side Bridge and let’s try to open a 4.3MB　JPEG picture shot with a CANON 5D (4368×2912)… Now let’s download from NAS via WiFi over 1.80GB of these pictures (over 400) and try to open them all up in Bridge while playing a video (HD Video converted into SD to work on an Archos PMP), surf tthe Web, playi with AERO, and try editing some of these 4.3MB JPEG files… Yep all of this fancy stuff that any decent PC running XP or VISTA would usually do without a glitch and scares away the average Netbook…

How did it go? AMAZINGLY WELL! As you can see in the footage below, Adobe Bridge opened all the pictures that loaded for the first time in a blast … Editing one of the pictures on Photoshop CS3 also went well… With all this stuff open I could even use AERO… One drawback was the ATOM CPU still struggled with HD and Flash HD streaming video… Other than that… everything went like a charm!

Don’t believe me? Check the video below!

Music from Coppe Sweetrice.com

Bottom line, I encourage ANYONE to try 7 on their PC. In most cases everything will install smoothy, I run 7 on my tablet PC everyday… 7 is a kick ass OS with NOTHING in common with Vista when it comes to speed and performance… 
(There are other nifty things about 7 too.)

Installed on a powerful PC you may not see much of difference, but on low spec notebooks, it’s simply AMAZING…

However please remember this is a Beta OS, and there are some bugs. My HTPC crashed several times and I even had a BSOD… I found out this problem was due to a driver issue (NVidia), also not all ATOM powered PCs give that much of satisfaction, you will see Monday what I’m talking about…

Lord I’m impatient to see the final result, but if Vista disgusted… 7 is now winning my heart…