The cleaned-up system tray also helps in this regard. When you set the icon size to “small”, it actually takes up a little less pixels vertically than the Vista tskbar, and it obviously has a lot more room horizontally to store running applications and launchers because of the lack of text labels. Windows 7’s new taskbar actually works remarkably well for screen-estate constrained devices. Aero ran fine on Vista, and runs just as well on Windows 7. I didn’t have to turn anything off for Vista to run fine, so I already knew that Windos 7 wouldn’t pose any problems when it comes to performance. In any case, this means that even Windows Vista ran without any problems on my Aspire One.
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The result is a drive that is cushioned securely in rubber, which is a comforting thought for such a portable device. I cut a bed for the drive out of sheets of thin rubber, and secured the drive with patches of double-sided tape. I had to cut a lot of plastic struts away inside the casing, but the drive fit.
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Not only did I upgrade the RAM from 512MB ot 1.5GB, I also tore out the dreadfully slow SSD, and replaced it with a 1.8″ 30GB iPod hard drive (those are the cheapest drives that come with the necessary ZIF connector). So, how does Windows 7 run on my netbook? My Aspire One is not a stock model, as I made some heavy modifications to it. Tedious, but if you’re reading OSNews, this shouldn’t pose any problems. Make sure that as soon as the installation routine starts rebooting, that you do not re-launch the installation routine. On the Aspire One, this means hitting F12 during boot, invoking the boot menu, and selecting the USB drive as the boot device. Once the copy process is complete, you can boot from the USB drive straight into the Windows 7 installation routine as if was a regular bootable DVD. You can do this via drag/drop in Explorer. Copy the contents of the Windows 7 DVD/.iso image onto the USB drive. Once you’re in the boot directory, execute the following command:īootsect /nt60 # For some weird reason, the prompt I still had running after ceating/formatting the partition on the USB drive no longer had administrative privileges, so I had to load another. iso image using your tool of choice), and navigate to the /boot directory using a command prompt with administrative privileges. To do this, put the Windows 7 DVD in your drive (or mount the.
The next step is to prepare the bootsector of the USB drive so that it is capable of catapulting the Windows 7 installation routine. Select partition 1 įormat fs=NTFS Īssign Select disk # Ĭlean Ĭreate partition primary Then, load up a command prompt with administrative privileges (right click, “Run as administrator…”), and enter the following commands to properly format the USB drive: Get yourself a nice USB drive, at least 4GB in size (2GB is too small, and I’m not sure if 3GB drives exist), and plug it in your computer.
It’s hard to screw this up, but it’s still tedious work, and shouldn’t really be necessary in this day and age. Well, they didn’t, so you’ll still have to resort to some tedious work before you can actually start the installation. Installing Windows on a machine without a CD/DVD drive has always been a bit tricky, and you’d think that “geared towards netbooks” would imply that Microsoft made this process a little easier. Read on for installation instructions if you don’t own an external DVD drive, and a few very short first impressions. Since Microsoft claims that Windows 7 is geared towards netbooks, I decided to give the beta a go on my trusty Acer Aspire One. However, the big thing in hardware right now is not the desktop, but the netbook segment. When we reviewed the Windows 7 beta, we did so on a standard desktop machine.