Windows 7 Starter and Netbook

[Jeff Mottle]

A friend of mine is looking to purchase a netbook for her elementary school daughter to do school work. Just email, internet and word processing etc.

 

She is considering a netbook, but I noticed it comes with Windows 7 Starter. Having never used a netbook or windows 7 starter, I was wondering if anyone can comment on the limitations of both the hardware and that OS. Obviously a netbook has a lower spec ATOM processor (usually) and minimal graphics, but I was wondering what other limitations there might be.

 

Thanks,

Jeff

[AJLynn]

Windows 7 Starter is 32-bit only, capped at 2GB RAM and leaves out most of the fancy visual stuff - Aero, themes, I don't think you can change the desktop wallpaper. Good for netbooks because a bunch of stuff that hogs resources is gone. Netbooks themselves have weaker hardware and smaller screens, are mostly plastic (which probably isn't a big deal since they don't weigh anything) and have small keyboards, which is probably a good thing for a young user. Plus, there are under $300 options, and you know how kids love losing stuff.

 

(If the question were about netbooks for adults I'd steer you towards an 11.6" mini instead of a true netbook - Acer 1551 and 1830T are good ones. More power, more reasonable keyboard, 64-bit Windows, still reasonably priced.)

[Frosty]

Jeff, I have a netbook with Starter on it. I hated it - the windows part. The netbook itself is fabulous (Acer Aspire). I wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu Netbook remix and its now as close to perfect as it can be.

 

Plays mp3s - Rythm Box. Plays my mp4 full length movies - XBMC. Browses the web and does email via wifi - Thunderbird and Firefox. Does spreadsheets and word docs - open office. And gets 10+ hours of battery life while doing it all. On top of that its tiny and great for traveling. As a bonus, there is a ton of educational software for science, math and reading/writing available for Ubuntu with the EDU distro.

[Chad Warner]

While we're on the topic of netbooks, anyone have any luck with an Ipad PC Clone? The best one I've seen so far is this one:

http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/products/info.asp?c1=183&c2=185&id=3188

 

Curious if anyone has personal experience with any.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Originally I think starter was slated to only run 3 programs at a time to keep resources under control. I don't know if this was in the final implementation or not.

 

We have a ASUS 1201HAB at home, which runs a Atom 1.33ghz processor. It came with XP, but I made some upgrades, which included dropping in a Intel 40gb solid state, adding an extra gb of ram (2 gb total,) and putting Windows 7 Professional on it. It runs good enough for word processing, and surfing the internet, iTunes, etc...

 

I don't have any graphics programs on it so I can not speak to that, but here are the performance scores I logged with it. You can see that the slow processor is really holding it back, but it performed quite a bit better after I put the solid state in it.

 

http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/1779/46187129.png

 

This was purchased in November of last year, so I don't know what the current Atom chips clock in at.

[Jeff Mottle]

Thanks everyone!