Recently, Wi-fiplanet.com featured a netbook smackdown between XP, Win 7 and Ubuntu. The following is an excerpt. Full article after the link.

As someone who primarily uses Windows (although I do have systems running both Mac and Linux too) I like Windows 7, like it a lot. To begin with, 7 is a pleasure to install.

The time gap between popping the DVD in the drive and being at the desktop actually working is around 20 minutes, and small things such as not making the Windows Experience Index test mandatory during the first run (something which can take quite a bit of time on slower systems) represent a huge improvement over Vista.

I’d expected Windows 7 to be a dog on a netbook. After all, the bloated system requirements of Vista make it a no-go right from the start. To my surprise it wasn’t, and I’d installed the Ultimate “all-bells-and-whistles” rather than the more frugal Starter or Premium editions.

In fact, once again the performance was better than that of the original OS. Other than from a cost point of view, I can see no reason to run the cut-down Starter edition of Windows 7 on netbooks. That lowly 1.6GHz Atom CPU and 1GB of RAM is happy powering the OS as well as running multiple applications simultaneously.

Full article here…

I know the public beta for Windows 7 has been out for a while now and it has been getting rave reviews from the community especially those who use it on their netbooks.

For those of you, yes the 6 of you, who have not seen Windows 7 in action on a netbook, here is a video of it running and streaming online videos on a MSI Wind U100.

Kingston, world’s largest memory manufacturer, has decided to expand its HyperX line to include modules for notebooks as well. Kingston’s HyperX 2GB DDR2 SO-DIMM module is specified to operate at 533MHz with 3-3-3-8 memory latencies and Kingston does mention the fast growing netbook market as a possible target group. Netbooks are often poorly endowed on the memory front and Kingston’s new module will adjust automatically to its more aggressive timings even with a netbook platform.

Source: VRZone forum