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…