AA1 11.6 - Running Windows 7 RC-1

I pulled the hard drive out of my recently acquired 11.6" Pro and put in an empty one I had laying around to install Windows 7 on. The install went off without a hitch, recognized all the hardware and set everything up automatically. The only exception is that it sees the touch pan as a PS2 type mouse (so you loose the zoom function). I will look and see what I can find out about that.

I must say I am IMPRESSED with the performance of this little power house on W7 compared to Vista. Time from power on to the desktop is less than 1 minute (compared to just over a minute for my HP laptop with an AMD Turion 64 X2 1.8Ghz CPU).

Everything is much snappier. On a "g" Wi-Fi connection web pages load almost instantaneously, no lag between mouse clicks and windows opening, YouTube videos play without jitter, even in "HQ" mode. Vimeo videos played smooth as well.

Uncompressed VOB files play flawlessly in a window (using media player classic with ffdshow installed) and they look great. Going to full screen mode, they have just a hint of stutter, but are still very watchable.

With all the talk about the 11.6 using the slower CPU and it having slightly sluggish performance with Vista, I had been hemming and hawing about keeping this or returning it and going with the 10.1, but now seeing what kind of performance it is capable of, I think I am going to keep it. Windows 7 is free until June next year, and once it is released I imagine they will have some upgrade deals. I can reinstall Vista and then upgrade (hopefully for less than $100).

One bummer so far is that the 11.6 doesn't use the same batteries as the earlier Aspire One models (but does use the same charger). Mine came with a 3-cell and it is supposed to be good for 4 hours. Haven't had a chance to test that out yet, maybe in the next few days I will load up some videos and see how long it runs playing movies on a full charge. I am curious how long before 6-cell batteries will be available (with their claimed 8-hour life).

Here are a few screen shots after the install...CPU is clearly the choke point. For comparison, on my HP laptop (AMD Turion 64 X2 1.8Ghz, 2GB Ram, 500GB HD) the Windows Experience score with W7 is CPU-4.6, RAM-5.3,Graphics-3.1, Gaming Graphics-2.0, HDD -2.9


**EDITED TO ADD THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION**

-After running setfsb to boost the clock to an honest 1.33 I reran the "Windows Experience Index" and it seems to have made much greater impact than I would have expected. CPU is now 1.9 (+.1), RAM is 4.2 (+.1), Graphics 2.9 (+1.9!!), Game Graphics 2.5 (+0), HDD 4.9 (+0). A quick check running an uncompressed VOB file full screen shows it to be smoother, hardly any noticable difference between full screen and running in a window.

5/24/09
-Installed the Touchpad driver off of the "Applications and Drivers" recovery CD and Touchpad now works fine, including the "pinch" feature.

 

using CPU-Z may not be accurate. It doesn't detect my l7500 cpu speed properly, hwinfo32 does so try that.

 

Hey

I recently bought an acer aspire one 751h (practically the same machine as yours) and since microsoft is probably going to force people away from windows xp, and because it's a pretty old operating system, I was wondering wether Windows 7 runs as well without the overclock (I haven't got the faintest idea of how to use that FSB programme, I only got as far as selecting the right clock generator), and wether it runs better than windows XP. I really doubt the latter but on the other hand I heard of people having installed windows 7 on computers with pretty old hardware (512mb RAM) and running it pretty much without a hassle.

I was planning to install the RC1 somewhere this weekend to see how it runs, but I'd like some information of someone who has first hand experience.

Thanks in advance!