After installing Windows 7 on my test PC, I decided to test it out on my recently purchased Acer Aspire One Netbook. In case you’re not familiar with Netbooks, they are meant to be very small and ultra portable but are also underpowered. It works fine for my needs for a laptop as all I really do on it is surf the Internet, blog, and a few other basic tasks.

I didn’t dare attempt to install Vista on it because I had heard some horror stories so I kept Windows XP installed (even though I’m a fan of Vista). With Windows 7 already running better than Vista (or so I’ve heard), I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

In order to install Windows 7, I hooked my Acer up to my Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive that gets very little use these days. It works great for use as an external optical drive and installs very quickly on it’s own even in Windows XP. I rebooted and started the install and everything went pretty smoothly. I went ahead an installed this on a separate partition so I could still boot into the Windows XP install when needed.

Below is a screenshot of the Windows Experience Index. I should note that I have the Aspire One with a 120GB hard disk drive, not the one of the models with a solid state drive so I had plenty of hard drive space for the install.

 acerscore

The first thing I noticed after the install was that my XP drivers would not work with Windows 7. I installed my Wi-Fi driver and it worked initially but after a restart, it stopped working. I quickly discovered the program compatibility method to installing drivers. If you right-click on setup.exe for whatever driver or program you’re trying to install and click on “Troubleshoot Compatibility” you should be able to install the driver successfully on Windows 7. With my drivers successfully installed, it was time to get to the good stuff.

After installing all of the necessary drivers, I just had to see how Media Center would run on this underpowered machine. To my pleasant surprise, it runs pretty well. I ran into some issues along the way, but for the most part it exceeded my expectations.

I don’t have a USB tuner yet so I wasn’t able to test out live TV but I was able to access some of my recorded TV from my other computers in the house. Once again I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting it to play standard definition content but I wasn’t expecting to be able to play any high definition content and that’s just what it was able to do. While it played the SD content perfectly, there were a few hick-ups with the HD content. Overall though, it played pretty well and it was definitely watchable.

My next task was to test out the new music wall and try to play some music. This is where it turned south. Apparently, the music wall uses a lot of resources. When I first started playing some music, I noticed a pretty instant slow-down in everything. The music was playing but the wall was very slow and not smooth at all. I went on to do something else and then came back to play some more music and once I hit play, it crashed my netbook. I had to hold down the power button to get it to do anything! Upon rebooting, I got a notification stating that I needed to run chkdsk because there was some corruption. So I rebooted and booted into my XP partition and ran chkdsk and all was well again. So, I guess you could say that the music part of Media Center didn’t go so well with my netbook.

All in all I was still pleased with the performance of Windows 7 on my underpowered netbook. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot and even though Media Center managed to crash on me, it was still quite functional. My next step is to try and get a USB tuner so I can test out the live TV functionality of Media Center. I’ll be sure to update you when that time comes so stay tuned!