As it is, most netbooks today ship with Windows XP and the few that actually ship with Windows Vista perform like a college student doing a problem set – i.e., procrastinatingly slow. The important question now is whether a netbook can handle the Windows 7 OS.
According to Microsoft, Windows 7 will have no problems running on netbooks. Windows 7 Starter Edition may be better than its Windows Vista counterpart, but there are still limiting features. (You can't change your wallpaper. What?!)
Using the WorldBench 6 rating system, employees at the Washington Post tested and compared the performance of the three different versions of the Windows 7 OS with the performance of Windows XP. They used a Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and the results were that Windows 7 ran slightly slower than Windows XP.
Windows 7 Starter, the edition meant for netbooks, received a score of 31 on the WorldBench 6 test, while the other two versions of the Windows 7 OS received 30s. The Windows XP OS received a score of 33. Three points may not seem like much, but it actually represents a difference of nearly 10 percent – ouch. Ready to reconsider Windows 7?
Via TheWashingtonPost.
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