Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Wednesday 19 November 2008, 11:31 AM
Windows 7 on the Apricot netbook
Anyway, the last thing I wrote about the Apricot netbook was that it was no longer available with SUSE Linux, with the "manufacturers" plumping for Windows XP instead. Fair enough, as I've said before. But what other operating system could go on the somewhat underpowered Apricot? Vista? Hell no - even on the much more desirable HP 2133 Mini Note netbook, Vista is way too much of a resource hog.
So how about Windows 7? We happen to have the alpha version in our office - so alpha that it still uses Vista's background - and have heard much about how 7's supposed to be more lightweight than Vista. Hence, it seemed like a jolly fun experiment to put the next generation of Microsoft's operating system on what barely qualifies as a first-gen netbook.
Here we go with the installation process...
Well, so far so good. At least it starts up...
Here you see the licence terms bit. Actually, this got quite funny later on, because it needs internet connectivity to validate the installation, but Windows 7 is so alpha that it doesn't yet have the drivers to support this. So it kept bugging me... anyway, on with the show...
Hit a bit of a snag here - it greyed out the "format" button, leaving me with no option but to...
... simply erase the partitions. Right, sorted.
And there we go. The unpacking-etc stage took around 20 minutes, so not too bad there. By this point, my curiosity was turning into amazement.
I really thought the process would fall over on the video performance issue, but whaddyaknow...
Shazam! Up and running, and with reasonable speed, too. I haven't tried sticking Vista on the Apricot PicoBook Pro - I'm fairly confident it would be a disaster - but Windows 7 actually seems to work on the bloody thing!
Who would have thought it? I'm not sure what lesson to take from this, but it's probably a mix of the Apricot netbook being able to handle more than I anticipated, and Windows 7's resource requirements being lower than I anticipated.
Either way, it was a fun experiment to carry out. Now, since I am rather keen on that web connectivity stuff, I'm going to just stick XP on the netbook and be done with it...
PreviousComments on this post
Does this mean that an old petnium 4 note book could handle windows7? That would be a revelation. The ones I come across with 2.4ghz and above are very nippy still. Oh and whilst I'm at it, one of my laptops is a 2.4ghz P4 and it's fully up to date with office 07 IE8, FF3.04, chrome, safari correl draw,i phone video converter (for the sony) and it still flies along.
Maybe Microsoft learned an expensive lesson? Loading up the OS with high maintenance "features/bugs" doesn't pay.
P4's were supposed to be able to run Vista. The Aero features required the high dollar video cards. However even Vista Business ran slow on a P4 when compared to XP Pro.
Yes I'm glad to see that at least the Win7 Alpha will run on a low price CPU but we'll have to see what happens when the Beta or the RCs come out. My fear is that the networking components missing from the Alpha will bring in a lot of other bloat when they get added to the OS.
I can remember the first time I installed Windows XP on my then top of the range P1.2 laptop. I thouht it flew. It loaded in a very quick time. But, of course, there were no programmes installed and no protection. Naturally, when fully loaded, it slowed down a bit and I installed additional memory.
Over the years, it has got progessively slower and slower and I have added more memory (the maximum) to little effect.
The two elements which must have contributed to this slow down have to be all the patches and service packs to Windows and the increasing demand imposed on the system by the increasingly sophisticated protection necessary for a safe Internet experience. I say this because the programmes I run haven't changed much over the years, and I do maintain a clean computer.
Presumably when Windows 7 IS feature complete and running protection it will place a heavier demand on the hardware and slow down, before even any programmes are installed.
However, hopefully, it's a step in thr right direction.
