Removing Crap

Well after finishing the installation I let windows fix bugs (yes can you believe that I was already off Gold Status). All bug fixes chewed up the my remaining disk space leaving me with only 48Mb. Sucks twice.

The first option that I thought of is to get rid of some crap that I could not bring myself to use on a netbook. Earlier soon after the installation, I tried using Windows Media Center that had been installed. The video performance wasn't all that great but it worked. I am thinking it would have been okay if I used the 9" screen instead of the external output to the tv.

To get some disk space back, I removed a the following (Using Turn Windows Features on or off):

• All games (everything minus solitaire)
• Windows Media Center
• Print Documents and Services
  
• Windows DVD Maker
  

At the end of it all I managed to free up ~1gb of disk space. In between I installed MS Silverlight which did not consume that much space.

Now that I have some space, I am going to try working on a couple of things.

Networking

I would say the new networking features work great. It wasn't that hard configuring my WEP wireless service at home.

Graphics

As expected the graphics and displays are crisp. The OS comes packaged with a couple of themes which in my experience I can summarize to be a set of wallpapers that keep alternating.

Sound

Sound works!

Installation

This past weekend I installed Windows 7 "Retail" ultimate edition on my netbook. Here are the machine specs:

• Intel Atom CPU
• 1GB ram
• 8GB (more like 7.2GB) SSD
• 4 hour battery life
• 9 inch screen

That is enough to give you an idea of what this machine is capable of. Basically it is a Dell Mini 9 n series.

Prior to the installation I had Ubuntu Netbook Remix installed on there.

Besides struggling to prepare the installer on a 4GB usb stick, the installation process lasted less than an hour. I used the following instructions to prepare the USB stick:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/how_to_install_windows_7_beta_a_usb_key

I did try to compress installer files as suggested here http://gizmodo.com/5257386/how-to-install-windows-7-on-almost-any-netbook but it did not work as described.

After the install I was left with about 650Mb of disk space. Now for starters that sucks.

Creating a Windows 7 bootable usb stick

This instructions work:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/how_to_install_windows_7_beta_a_usb_key

So I got the RC1 copy of Windows 7 from Microsoft after the beta test period was over. I also just so happen to have a Dell Mini 9 Netbook that is running Netbook Remix. With the two ingredients to test W7 on a netbook at my disposal I hit the blogs to get instructions on how to prepare my machine.

First and last I found this post on Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5257386/how-to-install-windows-7-on-almost-any-netbook

Being on Gizmodo I assumed that he instructions had been tested and retested so they had to be solid. Boy was I wrong... I have been at this trying to build an image for the last 12 hours with about 6 hours inbetween to get some sleep.