Quite a while back I received a Eee PC from my work from Asus. out of the box it came with a decent homegrown variety 0f Linux optimized for the Eee platform.
However, after a while I grew a bit dissatisfied by the interface. Especially the fact the GUI looked more like that of a smart phone than a mini laptop started to annoy me. I ended up putting an Eee variety of Ubuntu on it, which seemed to perform well.
Unfortunately the Gnome GUI was eating a lot of resources. Me wanting to play with Compiz didn’t help, either. In a failed attempted to remove Compiz I irreversibly destroyed the GUI interface. It resulted in my Eee PC not being used for almost half a year.
Recently though I’ve been hearing a lot of miracle stories on Eee PCs and Windows 7. We all know that Windows in general doesn´t have the reputation of being a resource friendly OS, but all will agree that Windows 7 is the best thing that has come out of Redmond since XP… or maybe even Win95.
Even though Windows 7 is more efficient than Vista (which is very resource happy) I doubted that a little Intel Atom powered machine with 1GB of memory and a (pretty weak) solid state drive would deal well with a full-fledged OS like 7, let alone the aches of getting it to work on slightly ‘off’ hardware
Boy, was I wrong.
The installation of Windows 7 Ultimate was surprisingly easy; pretty much similar to a normal desktop installation. The only item that required special attention were the ACPI drivers, which I needed to install manually afterwards.
Applications seem to run fine on it, too. Having installed various pieces of software (ranging from Chrome, to Live messenger and Skype, to Office) I can safely say that the installation part is the only real pain (due to the disk IO).
As far as the GUI is concerned, I didn’t even need to go to the basic UI. Aero runs just fine on this little screen. Running multiple applications seems to work fine, too, although every now and again you will notice that the system slows down a little, but not too much.
After the install there’s still some tuning to do.
One of the biggest bottleneck of this Eee PC is the (surprisingly slow) Solid State Drive. As a result, everything that results in disk IO tends to slow down the entire system. It is therefor highly recommended to disable indexing services (such as Windows Search) because it will start to bog down the system.
Another subject of debate is the page file. Some people suggest turning it off but it does hamper the ability to operate above the 1GB mark. Personally, I’ve not changed any settings and have not found it a real issue to have the page file. Luckily, Windows seems to only touch it whenever there’s the risk of running out of memory, so unless you start running a lot of applications at one time you shouldn’t have to worry.
In conclusion I can only say that I have a new found respect for Windows 7. I thought it would not be able to deal with a low resource environment like this Eee PC but I was wrong. It works and performs admirably.