Dell

The Dell Inspiron Mini 10 is already one of the most customizable netbooks on the market. It comes with options including a built in TV tuner, GPS receiver, and HD 1366 x 768 pixel display. Now Dell is offering customers the choice of configuring the netbook with 2GB of RAM.

Of course, it doesn’t qualify for a low cost Windows XP license once you slap more than 1GB of RAM in there, so you’ll have to configure the netbook with Windows Vista Home Basic. Or you could just buy a model with 1GB of RAM and Windows XP and upgrade it yourself. Update: Apparently that’s not an option with the Dell Mini 10, since the RAM is soldered to the motherboard.

The base price fo the Vista/2GB version is $429, so you could probably save a few bucks by doing a home upgrade anyway.

Hopefully Dell will also offer an option to configure the  Mini 10 with 2GB of RAM and Ubuntu Linux in the future, which should help keep the price down. For now, the Vista/2GB model is only available in the US.

via Direct2Dell

Last week we found out that Acer is planning to build a netbook with a 10.2 inch display. Right now you can only pick up an Acer Aspire One with an 8.9 inch screen, but that hasn’t stopped the Aspire One from becoming one of the most successful netbooks around. Now TG Daily reports there will be something else different  about these next generation netbooks from Acer: They’ll run Windows Vista instead of Linux or Windows XP.

The new model will reportedly be part of a new N-series netbook line. And they’ll support hard drive capacities up to 320GB, which could help explain the price jump. TG Daily says the N-series mini-laptops will start at $500, which is as much as $200 higher than some existing Acer Aspire One models.

via Eee PC News

When Laptop Magazine reviewed the Dell Inspiron Mini 12 a few weeks ago, the magazine concluded that the hardware was decent, but that the system performance was substandard thanks in large part to Windows Vista operating system that Dell slapped on the cheap subnotebook (I’m going to refrain from calling a 12 inch notebook a netbook).

It’s worth noting that the Dell Inspiron Mini 12 also uses a different version of the Intel Atom processor than the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, but it turns out that many of the problems can be associated with the OS, not the CPU. How do we know? Because when the folks at Laptop Magazine wiped Windows Vista and replaced it with Windows XP, the notebook ran better.

Laptop Magazine reports that the computer boots faster and that programs seem more responsive. Multitasking performance was also better.

Installing Windows XP is a little tricky since Dell doesn’t actually sell the Dell Inspiron Mini 12 with Windows XP yet, and therefore hasn’t posted any drivers to its website. Still, if you load Windows XP using a USB disc drive or by trying to load the installer onto a USB flash disk, you can get most of the drivers working by using the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 drivers.

As expected, Windows 7 seems to run fairly well on a netbook. Sure, we’ve already seen the boot screen on an MSI Wind. But Laptop Magazine’s Joanna Stern took a pre-beta build of the next generation Windows operating system and slapped it on an Eee PC 1000H and spent a whole day playing with it. And nothing exploded. So that’s good.

Here are hte highligths:

• Bootup tok 58 seconds, which is about 20 seconds longer than it takes to boot Windows XP on an Eee PC 1000H. But it’s not horrible.
• Most, but not all of the Windows XP drivers for the Eee PC worked out of the box with Windows 7
• Windows 7 didn’t seem to have a problem multitasking using programs like Skype, Firefox, and GIMP

With no programs running, the operating system consumed about 485MB of RAM. I’m looking at my Eee PC 1000H with Windows XP right now, and with no programs running the operating system is using about 286MB of RAM. But the difference might not be as great as you think. If Windows 7 is anything like Windows Vista (and from what I can tell, it is), it will typically report that it’s using more RAM than XP but it will free up RAM for applications that need it more efficiently. Or at least that’s the theory.

So there you go. You can run Windows 7 on a netbook. But that’s not particularly surprising, since you can also run Windows Vista on a netbook. The real question is whether Windows 7 offers an overall better user experience than Windows XP. We’ll probably have to wait a while longer to get a good answer to that question.

After giving my MSI Wind a good workout with Windows XP for a month, I started to get listless. It was running beautifully, but I just couldn’t help wondering how it would handle a fancy, new OS like Vista.

Now, I’m no dope. Step one in my process was swapping out my original 80GB drive for a 160GB that I’d salvaged from a dead Dell XPS system. I mostly didn’t want the hassle of doing a full-blown factory reinstall on my Wind just because I later got bored with Vista and wanted XP back. I’d already cracked the cover once to max out the memory, so I figured I was now ready for the update.

I opted for Vista Home Premium – Ultimate seemed a bit over the top, and Basic, well, it just isn’t as pretty. A format and bit of waiting, and I was ready to test things out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Running OS X Leopard on an MSI Wind is old hat. But triple booting OS X, Windows XP and Vista? That’s something I hadn’t seen before. So here’s a video from seamonkey showing all three operating systems living side by side:

It’s worth keeping in mind that this is an upgraded unit with a 250GB hard drive and a voided warranty. The version of Windows XP has also been nLited, which means some programs or processes may have been stripped away, resulting in faster boot times.

But overall all three operating systems load surprisingly quickly and seem to work pretty well with 1GB of RAM and an Intel Atom CPU. OS X doesn’t recognize the WLAN card, but you can buy a USB WiFi adaptor that should work. Seamonkey recommends the ASUS WL-167g.

Windows Vista gets a lot of flack for its heavy hardware requirements. But it turns out you can run Windows Vista Home Premium reasonably well on some underpowered hardware. The video above shows the operating system running on an Eee PC 900 with a 900MHz Celeron processor, 1GB of RAM, and 20GB of solid state memory.

The computer certainly takes longer to boot up and shutdown than it would if it were running Windows XP or Linux. But it runs most of the programs you’d want it to run, including Windows Media Player, Microsoft Office, and web browsers. It’s not exactly a speed demon, but Windows Vista is certainly a bit prettier than XP, includes a built in widget engine, and supports USB TV tuners and media center extenders.

Solid state disks are kind of the next big thing, right? They have no moving parts, like hard drives, and are both more durable and offer potentially faster read and write speeds than hard drives. Sure, they’re far more expensive at the moment, but prices are coming down. And as Asus, Acer, and others have shown, if you’re marketing a laptop as cheap, ultraportable, and durable, you can get away with using low capacity flash disks.

But what if you want the best of both worlds: a fast, durable solid state disk with a high storage capacity? Then it looks like you’d better stick with Windows XP or Linux for your operating system. CNet reports that SanDisk officials are saying that Vista isn’t optimized for solid state disks — and the current generation of solid state disks aren’t optimized for Vista.

SanDisk is working on higher capacity, faster solid state disks. But because Microsoft has effectively told PC makers to stop installing Windows XP (with an exception for low end laptops like the Asus Eee PC the MSI Wind), SanDisk expects that most next generation computers will be running Windows Vista. And Vista doesn’t perform well with SSDs, so SanDisk has to design workarounds to cater to Vista’s demands instead of vice versa. For that reason, SanDisk is behind schedule in developing 128GB and 256GB solid state disks.

[via Small-Laptops]

We already knew that it was possible to install Windows Vista on an MSI Wind. But why would anyone choose to load an operating system that takes up significantly more system resources on a tiny laptop with a relatively low powered CPU? Because you might just get more battery life and a more responsive PC, that’s why.

While Trusted Reviews found a MSI Wind running Vista to be a bit on the sluggish side, Notebook Review discovered that the notebook can handle Windows Vista quite well.

The trick is to find working LAN, WLAN, card reader, and Intel GMA 950 drivers. For the most part, it looks like the XP drivers MSI supplies will work. You also have to disable Vista features like Windows Update, System Restore, UAC, and scheduled hard drive defragmenting tasks in order to get a speed boost. But the upshot is that the reviewer found that the Wind scored higher on every benchmark when running Windows Vista than it had when running Windows XP.

The battery also lasted 2.5 hours instead of the 2 hours he was getting with Windows XP. This doesn’t surprise me. Windows Vista has significantly better power management than Windows XP, and the power settings are far more customizable. With CPU-intensive features disabled, I’d be surprised of the battery didn’t last longer under Vista.

So what do you think? Should MSI offer the option to order a Wind notebook running Windows Vista? Or should the brave few souls who want to install the OS just do it themselves?

[via Electric Pig]