Have had the Acer One for a while now, and I’ve tried to get along with Linpus Linux (no good, kept crashing it) and then gave up and installed Windows XP (Surprisingly easy to do with an XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive).
Anyway, having done all that I’ve found myself caught up in the Windows 7 hysteria and was very keen to see how it performs. Having downloaded the 2.44gb 32bit beta ISO from Microsoft’s website, I now have a fully functioning Windows 7 Netbook.
Not had a great amount of time with it yet, but below are my first impressions.
Performance
Functions as quickly, if not slightly quicker than Windows XP did. No real issues with programs freezing or slowing to a painful level. It is true to say that clearly the Netbook would struggle with certain applications, that said, unless you’re stupid, you would never buy one of these devices with the goal of conducting system intensive tasks. Windows 7 certainly performs far better than Vista would have done, so that’s one in the back of the net for Microsoft.
Reliability
So far everything on the Netbook that worked with XP works now, I’ve been able to download all my normal programs, add my network D120 printer and get a free version of the Kaspersky 8 beta AV software.
The only slight issue I have had thus far has been when installing Trusteer Rapport. To be fair their site does mark the software as being Vista and XP only but, the memory dump that took place afterwards (and every reboot then on) was a little more extreme than I would expect.
Fortunately Win7 had created a restore point close enough to my current position to be able to resolve the issue without losing any real work.
So all in all very impressed with how it functions. Have taken on board some of Paul Thurrot’s advice and have amended Messenger to sit outside of the task menu ala Vista and some further tweaks to change how the task menu appears.
Further updates may follow, possibly.