Earlier in the year, we acquired an Acer Aspire One netbook which ran on the Linpus Lite cut down version of Linux. At first, I thought the idea of trying out some Linux would be interesting, but actually I’ve found it very frustrating.
I knew that the netbook had plenty of potential, but having been a Windows user for the best part of 20 years, I found the Linux setup very frustrating to use. Then I read a few posts from people who had put the Windows 7 Release Candidate onto the Aspire One and were saying good things about it. As the RC is free, I couldn’t see any reason not to try it, I could always go back to the Linux if it didn’t work out.
I used the BlogsDNA guide to create a bootable USB stick (using my Windows XP desktop) with the Windows 7 installation on it. This worked fine apart from two things:
- under point 4 – the download link didn’t work, so I googled the software and downloaded it that way
- under point 5 – the end should be ‘/active=1′, rather than the number of your usb drive
Once the USB stick was set up, I made sure there wasn’t any data I needed on the netbook, popped the USB stick in and restarted. Pressing F12 on startup, I could select to boot from the USB stick, and then off it went into a usual Windows installation. When it came to the choice of which drive to install onto, I couldn’t select the drive as it was an unknown type. I therefore, deleted the partitions and started from scratch allowing the installer to choose it’s partitions (it creates a small one for system information) and soon enough, I had a Windows desktop in front of me – what a relief!!
Being on Windows, once I was through the initial setup procedures, job one was to get some anti-virus software on. Kaspersky has a release candidate of it’s Windows 7 software, so I thought that was the ideal partner, and again, under the Beta licence, it’s free for six months. Can’t beat a good free operating system!!
With the machine ready to go, I started to have a play with it. I’d heard that I might need to find drivers to get everything on the machine working with Windows 7, but straight away everything from the Wifi to the inbuilt webcam was working ‘out of the box’. The netbook immediately felt of much higher quality without the clunky feel of the original linpus OS, it reminded me of going from a cheap old hatchback into a BMW – everything just feels of a higher quality.
Another benefit – I use the netbook connected to my 42″ HDTV quite often to watch streaming tv such as BBC’s Iplayer. Under Linux, despite messing about with various settings suggested online, I could never get it to operate above 1024×768 which was a shame on a 1080p tv. As soon as I plugged it in under Windows 7, I could select 1920×1080, and was soon looking at one of the included Windows 7 ‘London’ wallpapers at a fantastic HD view of Tower Bridge. Who would believe this little netbook could manage this!
I’m well impressed with Window 7 on this machine – it’s crashed once so far, I think I may have given it too much to do at once, and I’m thinking about upgrading the RAM from 0.5Gb to 1.5Gb – it’s cheap enough, but a bit complicated in terms of taking the unit apart – I’ll see how I get on before I decide.
If you are struggling with a weird Linux distro, give this a go!
UPDATE: There is now an easier way to install your Windows 7 via USB – see the rather handy Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool
UPDATE 2: After struggling away with 512Mb RAM, I finally upgraded the RAM and found a much better Windows experience – see further here: http://mrben1.co.uk/2009/11/the-importance-of-ram
I always prefer to use Kasperky over Avast or McAfee. Kaspersky is much better in detecting new viruses and it does not consume too much resources on your dektop PC.,:;