Ed "The Computer Wizard"

I had my Windows XP set up the way I wanted it and everything was working. So what do I go and do? That’s right,I wipe the drive and install a BETA operating system. Windows 7 BETA is still available to anyone that wants to give it a try, just go here.

Now, I am not going to blow away a perfectly customized install and then have to start over if the BETA doesn’t work so well with my hardware, so being the cautious geek that I am, I did a back up of my current drive. Please forgive these pictures, I took them with my phone, and they are not the best quality to say the very least.
For easier viewing, all the pics below can be enlarged by clicking on them.

First of all, you have to understand that my HP Mini, like all other NetBooks on the market right now, comes without any sort of built in optical drive. Now, there are USB models to be had all over the internet, but what fun is that? Time for the "Computer Wizard" to work a little magic! I first downloaded the Win7 ISO from Microsoft and saved it to an 8GB USB drive. I took it home and used my desktop computer to burn the DVD. Now comes the fun part. I grabbed a spare DVD burner off the parts shelf and a USB to IDE/SATA cable and set up shop.

First I had to make sure that I had a good backup of my hard drive. So I took the shrink wrap off a brand new 16GB SDHC Card and dropped that in the card reader. Windows XP recognized it and it was already formatted, so nothing else needed there. I then hooked up the DVD drive and verified that it was working with my Mini. It was so the next step was to take a BartPE disk and drop that in my DVD drive.

I did a quick reboot and selected the USB NEC-DVDROM at boot up. Now, I have a copy of Ghost on this custom boot CD so I took an image of the internal SSD and saved it on the SD Card. That took a while, but there were no issues. I didn’t take a bunch of screen shots of the install process because they are all over the web anyway.

The Windows 7 install was very straight forward and was actually quicker than I thought it would be. It took right at an hour to install, and I thought it got stuck at one point. I attribute that to the speed of the SSD. It’s not the fastest drive out there, but it is tiny which I’m sure is why HP chose it. I just let it run for a while longer and the progress bar jumped from 45% to about 80% in almost no time.

When I logged in for the first time, I immediately notice the speed boost. This is a pretty low power machine, so I was expecting some sluggishness, but surprisingly there was very little. Now I browsed around my new OS and everything was updated and looked nice. I like how the new taskbar works. I did have to get my Quick Launch back, I need that! It was a quick and easy fix that is documented in tons of blogs already.

I’m not going to review each and every feature like so many others have done, as I agree with them for the most part; evenin BETA this is the best OS yet. Instead I’m going to focus on the HP Mini and a few apps.

Performance:

Knowing that I have an Atom Processor and only 1GB of RAM installed, I was wondering what king of Usability Rating I was going to get,and if any of the effects would be disabled. Well, I ran the Windows Experience Index and got a rating that was pretty low. Now what shocked me is that everything seems to work.

Now the inner geek in me just wouldn’t let that 2.0 score go, so I had to try to increase this score somehow! So I grabbed a 2GB stick or RAM and installed it. Then I allocated 4GB of ReadyBoost to the SD card.

Well my memory rating wet up a tiny little bit, but the hard drive is my bottleneck for now. Maybe when I get some cash I’ll spring for a faster drive.

Windows found all of my hardware, for the most part. It installed a generic mouse driver so I had to download and install a touch pad driver. No big deal. Now when I was working on the machine, there was a random pop sound. Turns out I needed an updated audio driver. That was a quick and easy fix.

I haven’t loaded this thing down as much as I did the last build, but I did install BlogDesk, Windows Live, Broadcaster Studio Pro, FlashGet, FireFox, Opera 10, Google Chrome, Launchy, etc… The only app I could not get to work so far is Broadcaster Studio Pro. I even got an email from 12Seconds asking why I haven’t posted anything in a while! Turn out the the guy who emailed me has an HP Mini, so I helped him with an know issue with the Microphone under WinXP. He seemed interested in the Hackintosh Project, but since my ISO is only at 10.3% I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I need to install DreamWeaver on here, but haven’t had a chance. It took 45 minutes in WinXP, so I am curious if it will go any quicker in Windows 7.

EDIT: I installed Dreamweaver last night and it took 50 minutes.  It’s very responsive though.

I’m going to do some more testing and will let you know how things are going in a few day, in the mean time feel free to post a comment or two. Anyone know of an alternative to Broadcaster Studio Pro?

Happy Computing!

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