With much trepidation I decided to try Window’s 7 on my 16 Gigabyte SSD Acer Aspire One, previous attempts at running XP and Vista on the machine left me feeling kind of numb. The issues with Windows and the SSD made the machine almost unusable for even the most basic tasks, these issues lead me to run Ubuntu on the machine for the last 5 months.
Now that Windows 7 has reached our MSDN account I decided it was time to test it properly, downloading the 32 bit version of Windows 7 Enterprise Edition I began the installation. Disheartened by two failed installs due to bad media (it appears my laptops DVD-RAM drive burns coasters!) I finally got the OS installed.
My initial impression’s of the install process and the system were good, the install took a grand total of 7 clicks to complete, the only slow point was the expansion of the files on disk and the initial configuration. Despite the slow speed it only took 2 hours to install, the first boot time was impressive. It takes about 30 seconds to boot to a usable desktop which doesn’t hang on me when I click and ask the machine to perform a task.
I did a quick scout around the internet for information on making Windows 7 more SSD friendly, I was pleasently surprised to find that the OS had carried out most of the tweaks suggested automatically as it knew it was installed on an SSD – thats a huge step forward from the RC we tried out in the office.
The only downsides so far are the terrible shutdown speed of the machine and the time taken to install Windows Updates – those though are things I can live with for now.