My Aspire One is now running Windows 7, and it runs pretty nicely too

Even though I never bothered to play with any of the betas of Windows 7, I was at Office Depot this weekend and decided to pick up the Windows 7 Home Premium "Family Pack" upgrade box, basically 3 licenses for $150.

I had 2 Vista machines (my desktop and the wife's laptop) to upgrade, and figured what the hell, I'll use that 3rd license to bump up the netbook. I did a clean install, nuked my Xubuntu install, just backed-up my music, videos, & pictures to another machine and swapped them back after.

I've never been a huge fan of Microsoft, but so far, it's not a bad OS. On my desktop I'm definitely getting better performance in Company of Heroes, and my netbook is running Areo just fine. As you can see, the 8.9" Aspire One of mine gets a roaring 2.0 in the Windows Experience Index... heh

Windows 7 Aspire One #1

Windows 7 Aspire One #2

Windows 7 Aspire One #3

Windows 7 Aspire One #4

The tabs previewing (in the taskbar) feature of IE8 is pretty neat, but I'm sure I'll have FireFox installed soon enough as I seem to have problems logging into my personal website here when using IE8.

The only caveat I had was the lack of a disc drive on the netbook, but that proved an easier fix that I originally planned. Instead of ripping the DVD to an iso and loading it with unetbootin, there's a little app called WinToFlash that will pull the setup files from the DVD and install it on your USB Flash drive. Just changed the boot order at start-up to use the USB drive and it installed in like 30 minutes. All my hardware was detected and the drivers installed from the start as well. The good press on Windows 7 seems to be warranted from my limited experience with the OS.