My experience running Vista on a netbook

I recently picked up an Acer D150-1165 10.1" netbook from Radio Shack for $349. I figured regardless of what OS it was running, it would be nice to have a small, portable machine that I could just pick up and run with or have in my vehicle with me and jump onto the internet via wifi connection to my cell phone and then leach off of my cellular internet connection.

After picking it up, I immediately made restore DVDs of the included XP Home using an external DVD burner and then wiped out the drive, installing XP Pro and Vista Ultimate x32.

XP Pro ran well - as well as it could with 1GB RAM. Vista Ultimate was a snail. Vista looked nice, but, was sluggish as can be!

After learning that this model could be easily upgraded (panels in the bottom give access to HDD, RAM and wireless, just like a REAL laptop, unlike the 8.9" model that required you to tear the entire thing apart to upgrade RAM or HDD!) , I replaced the 1GB RAM with 2GB and 160GB 5400RPM 8MB Cache HDD with a 320GB 7200RPM 16GB Cache HDD. These upgrades were to be done regardless of the OS to ultimately be used.

After upgrading all of that, Vista w/ slipstreamed SP1 ran perfectly! - until I installed all the drivers and Windows Updates. Then, the slug was back.

For running 1 app at a time it was fine, but, even then, the CPU utilization and RAM consumption was all over the board. Task manager's performance monitor looked like an EKG!

I went back to the XP Pro to test - ran NICELY. Multitasking wasn't an issue, CPU and memory was handling it all fine.

After that I went back to XP Home - this little box was just as fast, if not faster than with XP Pro!

Ultimately I think the CPU is the bottleneck here. My home box runs Vista Ultimate with an Athlon X2 3800 and 2GB RAM without any problems. I just think the 1.6 single core Atom CPU, although it is a hyperthreading CPU, just isn't fast enough to handle Vista.

Sure - you can run Vista on it, and maybe a less-than-Ultimate version would run much better, but, stick with XP Home or Pro unless you're a very patient person!

All in all, $349 for the netbook, $59 for the RAM (yes, I could have gotten it cheaper but opted to pick it up locally), $20 for a USB Bluetooth adapter (Walmart) and $108 for the hard drive upgrade - roughly $540 for a full blown mini PC. Not too bad really. Sure, I could have gotten a larger laptop with better specs for the money, but specs wasn't what it was all about - it was the small form-factor and light weight that was the seller here!