Today I bought the Acer Aspire One AOD255 netbook. This is my first netbook. It has the new Atom N550 dual core processor, 1GB of DDR3 RAM (wish it has 2GB), 250GB HDD and integrated graphics. The interesting thing is that it has dual boot options (Windows 7 starter and Android). It cost me SGD519, they throw in 3 freebies, a headphone, a cheap cooling stand with two USB powered fans and a free one year subscription of Norman anti-virus suite.
I was a bit curious about the Android installed. So I boot the default Windows 7 Starter, ran the Acer Android configuration program, then reboot to Android. Apparently either Acer has done a poor job or Android is not really meant for netbooks, I played with the Android installed for about two minutes and I can only say it is really a crap. It can connect to the wireless network but the browsing speed is rather slow. It is also very awkward to use and took me a while to figure out that ESC key is the key to close an application. So I was back to Windows 7 Starter after two minutes. So far I think none of the Instant On Linux option installed in the netbooks (or some motherboard) are worth the time to play with. But this Acer Android thingy seems to be quite bad. But maybe Acer will update the bundled Android and I will play it a bit more later.
The first thing to do under Windows is of course to remove the trial software packages (McAfee Antivirus and Norton Online Backup). Then after installing some essential software (Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Security Essential, MinGW, etc), I am in business. I chose not to use Norman since I believe Security Essential takes less resource. I mainly use Firefox but I might want to use Chrome a bit more on this netbook. MinGW installation took quite a bit of time (using mingw-get-inst GUI) but finally it was okay.
The netbook is not that fast but still can run Windows 7 adequately. I actually upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate and it still runs fine. The upgrade process is rather long. Last time it took me much less time to upgrade from Home Premium to Ultimate on the Asus K40ID notebook.
Right now I am thinking I will use this netbook mainly for internet browsing and a bit of software testing (libusb-win32, libusb-1.0 and others).
Showing posts with label Win7. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Win7. Show all posts
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Friday, August 6, 2010
Windows 7 32bit installed
Last week I installed Windows 7 32bit Ultimate on my two-year old Acer M1641 desktop, it was a smooth process. The only unrecognized device of the original PC after the Win7 installation was a mysterious "co-processor" device. After installation of the Nvidia NForce chipset driver everything on the original PC was recognized. The added old Compro X50 PCI TV/FM card was also not recognized. Luckily Compro provides the driver and necessary applications for this 5-year old product.
There was a glitch, after the installation, the grub bootloader is gone, only Vista and Win7 are shown in the Windows bootloader. So I have to recover the grub bootloader so that I can boot into various Linux versions (Ubuntu 9.10 32bit, Ubuntu 10.04 64bit and Arch Linux).
I am now using Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit for my Asus laptop. Same as the experiences there, I do not see too much differences between Vista and Win 7. Being a new installation with less "junks", it seems to be a bit faster.
Other than that, one of the major difference is the XP mode. The nice thing about XP mode is that now it supports USB. This is not a fast PC to run the virtual XP mode since it lacks the Hardware Assisted Virtualization Technology feature and the amount of RAM is not that big. Still allocating 512MB to the XP mode seems to let the virtual XP run relatively smooth. But this is just a test and I do not really need XP or miss XP.
Overall, the first impression of Win 7 is positive. But heh my first impression with Vista was also not bad even though many people have negative views on Vista.
There was a glitch, after the installation, the grub bootloader is gone, only Vista and Win7 are shown in the Windows bootloader. So I have to recover the grub bootloader so that I can boot into various Linux versions (Ubuntu 9.10 32bit, Ubuntu 10.04 64bit and Arch Linux).
I am now using Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit for my Asus laptop. Same as the experiences there, I do not see too much differences between Vista and Win 7. Being a new installation with less "junks", it seems to be a bit faster.
Other than that, one of the major difference is the XP mode. The nice thing about XP mode is that now it supports USB. This is not a fast PC to run the virtual XP mode since it lacks the Hardware Assisted Virtualization Technology feature and the amount of RAM is not that big. Still allocating 512MB to the XP mode seems to let the virtual XP run relatively smooth. But this is just a test and I do not really need XP or miss XP.
Overall, the first impression of Win 7 is positive. But heh my first impression with Vista was also not bad even though many people have negative views on Vista.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
New Asus Notebook with Windows 7 x64
Today I bought a low/medium-end notebook: Asus K40ID series, Core 2 Duo 6750 CPU (2.1GHz), Nvidia Geforce GT320M graphics card (VRAM 1GB), 14" HD LED Backlight (1366x768), 320GB HDD, 2GB RAM, 8x DVD RW, 802.11n Wifi and Bluetooth. The OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. I hope this 64bit thingy will not cause big problem for me due to the potential driver issues. The good thing about Asus is the 2 year parts and labor warranty by default.
I do not trust the quality of notebooks by any vendor. The first notebook I bought is from Dell (Inspiron 600M) early 2003 running XP Home, it broke down twice in the first year. Then it kept alive until 2008 with a problem of the on-board keyboard controller (random key coming out). I still keep it but it is useless now.
The second one I bought is Compaq Presario V3619AU from HP/Compaq in Dec 2008. It is still alive but was sent back twice for repair (after running quite well for 1.5 years) due to overheating issues. The first time they change the AMD CPU, the second time they changed the motherboard. But it still has the overheating issues from time to time. It is covered by 3 year warranty as I paid for it.
The notebook at work is a 4-year old Dell Latitude D610 running XP Pro. It is not bad, Dell's business notebook seems to be much better than the consumer ones. With 2GB RAM and XP Pro, it runs quite well, not very fast but acceptable, even after 4 years. The HDD is a bit small at 80 GB. The battery life is of course quite short now. The accessories are quite bad though as I have changed the dock once and the external keyboard once.
As for Windows 7, my first impression is that it is not much different from Vista (my Acer M6141 Desktop is running Vista Home Premium 32bit). Unlike many people, I have very few problems with Vista. It works quite well on my low-end Acer M1641 Desktop. I feel that Windows 7 with this faster Asus notebook is not at all faster than my Vista desktop.
Asus does installed some junks like the 60 day trial version of Office 2007 and the Anti Virus package and some other things, almost exactly the same thing as the Acer desktop when I bought it. So the first thing to do is to uninstall these two packages. Normally I would install the AVG Anti Virus Free version as the anti-virus, anti-spyware package. This time I choose to install Microsoft Security Essential (just to see if it consumes less memory). I consider myself a pro-user of Windows and normally I do not need to worry about Virus and Spyware. If Microsoft Security Essential proves to be inadequate, then probably I will go back to AVG Anti-Virus Free.
I do not trust the quality of notebooks by any vendor. The first notebook I bought is from Dell (Inspiron 600M) early 2003 running XP Home, it broke down twice in the first year. Then it kept alive until 2008 with a problem of the on-board keyboard controller (random key coming out). I still keep it but it is useless now.
The second one I bought is Compaq Presario V3619AU from HP/Compaq in Dec 2008. It is still alive but was sent back twice for repair (after running quite well for 1.5 years) due to overheating issues. The first time they change the AMD CPU, the second time they changed the motherboard. But it still has the overheating issues from time to time. It is covered by 3 year warranty as I paid for it.
The notebook at work is a 4-year old Dell Latitude D610 running XP Pro. It is not bad, Dell's business notebook seems to be much better than the consumer ones. With 2GB RAM and XP Pro, it runs quite well, not very fast but acceptable, even after 4 years. The HDD is a bit small at 80 GB. The battery life is of course quite short now. The accessories are quite bad though as I have changed the dock once and the external keyboard once.
As for Windows 7, my first impression is that it is not much different from Vista (my Acer M6141 Desktop is running Vista Home Premium 32bit). Unlike many people, I have very few problems with Vista. It works quite well on my low-end Acer M1641 Desktop. I feel that Windows 7 with this faster Asus notebook is not at all faster than my Vista desktop.
Asus does installed some junks like the 60 day trial version of Office 2007 and the Anti Virus package and some other things, almost exactly the same thing as the Acer desktop when I bought it. So the first thing to do is to uninstall these two packages. Normally I would install the AVG Anti Virus Free version as the anti-virus, anti-spyware package. This time I choose to install Microsoft Security Essential (just to see if it consumes less memory). I consider myself a pro-user of Windows and normally I do not need to worry about Virus and Spyware. If Microsoft Security Essential proves to be inadequate, then probably I will go back to AVG Anti-Virus Free.
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