Eleventy-two

I recently did a review of my new NC10 netbook, and though it’s a lovely device I would prefer to run something a bit more up to date on it than XP.  With the 1 Gig or ram it comes with and the modest CPU Vista was out of the question, but I have geared good things about people getting the Windows 7 beta running on this class of device, so I thought it would be worth giving it a go.

Preparation

The NC10 comes set up with three partitions, the first is a hidden area where the recovery software is installed, followed by a NTFS partition which Windows XP is installed on and a second NTFS partition which is used to store backups with Samsung’s backup software.  To make room for Windows 7 I resized the backup partition with a live USB Linux distro called GParted.  Because I was installing Windows 7 onto a new device I wasn’t worried about taking a backup, but you should take a backup before doing this normally.

One thing of note is that I made the partition almost the same size and the data on it, and now I am continually getting popups in Windows saying the drive is very full, so it’s prob worth leaving about 25% extra free space in the backup partition when you shrink it.

Installation

The NC10 like other devices in it’s class does not have a CD drive and I don’t own a USB CD drive, so I had to go with installing it off of a USB stick.  This was much easier than I expected thanks to a great walk through I found over at dotnetwizard.net.  I have heard people saying how much quicker Windows 7 installs that Vista, but it didn’t feel that fast to me.

Problems

I could not get Windows7 on the NC10 to connect to my wifi connection, but this seems to be a problem with our wifi as aposed to the NC10 as it works everywhere else.  The Ethernet on the other hand did not work as there are no Windows 7 drivers for this device on Windows Update.  The Windows Vista driver from Marvell’s worked fine however.

The other main issue is the reduced battery life, under Windows XP doing casual web browsing etc. I can get almost 6 hours before I need to charge, under Windows 7 it is closer to 4.

Windows 7 on the NC10

The good bits.

The new Areo effects work well, and only stutter under very high load.  In-fact other than slightly higher memory usage running Windows 7 doesn’t feel any worse than running Windows XP, and this can easily be remedied by upgrading the memory from 1Gb to 2Gb.

Finally

I think I am going to continue using Windows 7 on the NC10, unless I know I am goign to have a very long day away from the charger.  I would like to thank Ade Miller for his excelent blog post which really helped me in setting up Windows 7 on my NC10.