I'm not sure why some programs failed, however. XP, it should be noted, worked well on the Dell Mini 9 with its single GB of RAM. While processor speed is important, the difference in performance between 1GB and 2GB of RAM was far more telling.
In fact, as I continued to work with Windows 7, I came to the conclusion that RAM was the single most important factor in determining performance. When I tried to run two or more major applications at the same time, the performance dropped from merely miserable to "Is this thing still on?" There simply wasn't enough RAM to run them effectively. Some problems, such as abrupt slowdowns when trying to run Microsoft Office 2003, Office 2007 and Quicken 2008, were clearly caused by memory problems. For example, Microsoft Word 2003 took 27 seconds to launch on the Mini 9 it took only 11 seconds on the HP EliteBook 2530p. Windows 7's built-in applications, such as Media Center, felt slow to respond. I experienced several difficulties running popular applications on the Dell Mini 9. range on the two Windows 7-equipped portables, the same downloads topped out at 30Kbit/sec.
When I use a Windows XP SP3 system, I usually see download speeds in the 100Kbit/sec. Both systems were, however, able to use network drives and printers, after ordinary network setup tweaking, using the Samba networking protocol and Windows Server Active Directory-based networks.Äownloading via BitTorrent also showed odd results. Both machines were also unable to locate printers while using Windows Peer-to-Peer Networking.
I also ran into this same problem, albeit not as often, while testing Windows 7 on my Gateway DX4710 desktop PC with a 2.5-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor and 6GB of RAM. This may not have been the netbook's fault. But if I tried to do both things at once, I ended up with a frozen system. For example, if I copied a file from a network server or watched a YouTube video, life was fine. For example, I was unable to perform two network-related tasks at once. Performance wasn't the only problem I came across. (In contrast, a high-end system with DX10 graphics is expected to score somewhere around 6.0 or higher.) On a scale running from 1.0 to 7.9, the Dell Mini 9 came in at a 2.0, while the EliteBook showed a 3.1 result. I tested both machines using Microsoft's Windows Experience Index, the performance benchmark that's included in both Vista and Windows 7. ultralight notebook that comes with a 1.86-GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM. To provide a comparison, I also loaded Windows 7 on an HP EliteBook 2530p, a 3-lb. Because of a netbook's lowered graphics capacity, you can forget about running the Aero interface, but even Windows 7's low-end non-Aero desktop took a while to load on the Mini 9. Once in place, Windows 7 was slow to boot up. The installation, from start to finish, took about an hour and there wasn't a single glitch. To get around this, I used a Sony DRX-710UL external DVD drive. What it doesn't have, as is the case with almost all netbooks, is an optical drive for the installation disk. The Mini 9 also has three USB ports, an Ethernet port, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and an SD card reader. The default resolution, which is typical for a netbook, is 1024 by 600. display is powered by the processor's built-in 945GSE graphics. The test machine had 1GB of RAM and an 8GB SSD. The Dell Mini 9 is powered by an Intel Atom N270 processor running at 1.6 GHz.