Still semi-jetlagged from CES in Las Vegas, one of the very first items on our to-do list upon return was to install the now widely available Windows 7 beta on a netbook.
From off-the-record conversations with PC makers during CES, we heard that Windows 7 played well with systems powered by Intel's Atom CPU, which is something we generally can't say about Vista. It's worth noting, however, that Vista, while making for a somewhat sluggish user experience, actually performed reasonably well in benchmark testing on Sony's new Vaio Lifestyle PC mini-laptop, which combines an Atom with a more appropriate 2GB of RAM.
We quickly installed the 32-bit version of Windows 7 on a typical netbook. The installation went smoothly, and the OS seemed to run well at first glance, but our wireless card wasn't detected initially. We eventually got that sorted out, and ran our iTunes benchmark test for a quick speed comparison (our test system had an Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB 5,400rpm hard disk).
As the iTunes test is CPU-focused, we weren't totally surprised to find similar scores, with XP completing the test in 743 seconds, and both Vista (with graphics options set for Vista Basic) and the Windows 7 beta hitting 760 seconds. (Note: lower scores indicate better results.)
While our quick benchmark testing did not show a Windows 7 advantage, we can say that the Windows 7 interface responded more quickly and hung less frequently than Vista, where just opening the start menu or my documents folder can be a slog.
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