Windows 7 RC on Acer Aspire One
I recently picked up an Acer Aspire One netbook to see if Windows 7 really runs as well on a miniputer as everyone says it does. Walmart had the 1G/160G configuration on sale for $250 so I thought I'd give it a shot. I have avoided the Acer netbook in the past because it is somewhat difficult to upgrade the RAM (you have to take the thing down to the point where you can remove the mainboard from the case to get access to the memory slot) but for this test I felt I could live with the 1 Gig of RAM.
After downloading the RC from Microsoft and getting my trial key I plugged in an external USB DVD drive to the Acer and started the install. Many minutes later I had a working copy of Windows 7 running on the miniputer. Everything seemed to be working fine but I still had 4 entries in the device manager that didn't have drivers installed. A quick visit to my old friend Google turned up this Vista driver for the card reader. The touchpad worked but it didn't have all the nice extras so I snagged this driver from the Synaptics web site.
The good news is that Windows 7 seems to run just fine on the Aspire One. Aero works fine and it seems fairly snappy even with only 1 Gig of RAM. I installed Notes 8.5, Office 2007, Mesh and some of the other Windows Live apps and I still have plenty of space left thanks to the fact that my configuration was equipped with the 160 Gig drive instead of a tiny 4 or 8 Gig SSD. The Windows 7 RC is available for free from Microsoft until "at least July" and it doesn't expire until June 2010 (although it will become annoying and start shutting down every 2 hours beginning March 1, 2010) so feel free to give it a try. It's no OS X but it's a damn sight better than the stinky piece of Redmond crap that is Windows Vista.
After downloading the RC from Microsoft and getting my trial key I plugged in an external USB DVD drive to the Acer and started the install. Many minutes later I had a working copy of Windows 7 running on the miniputer. Everything seemed to be working fine but I still had 4 entries in the device manager that didn't have drivers installed. A quick visit to my old friend Google turned up this Vista driver for the card reader. The touchpad worked but it didn't have all the nice extras so I snagged this driver from the Synaptics web site.
The good news is that Windows 7 seems to run just fine on the Aspire One. Aero works fine and it seems fairly snappy even with only 1 Gig of RAM. I installed Notes 8.5, Office 2007, Mesh and some of the other Windows Live apps and I still have plenty of space left thanks to the fact that my configuration was equipped with the 160 Gig drive instead of a tiny 4 or 8 Gig SSD. The Windows 7 RC is available for free from Microsoft until "at least July" and it doesn't expire until June 2010 (although it will become annoying and start shutting down every 2 hours beginning March 1, 2010) so feel free to give it a try. It's no OS X but it's a damn sight better than the stinky piece of Redmond crap that is Windows Vista.
posted by Matt at 9:33 AM
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