Dell Inspiron 10 - can it run Windows 7

Josey Wales

We have a Dell Inspiron 10 here in the house with XP installed. It is powered with a 1.33GHz Intel Atom processor with 1GB RAM. I've downloaded the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.

According to it the machine is capable of running Windows 7 minus Windows Aero. Does anyone know would there be any point in upgrading? Would Windows 7 run very slowly?

AlmightyCushion

I've got windows 7 running on my advent 4211. It has a 1.6Ghz atom processor and 2GBs ram. I imagine the dell would be ok. You could dual boot and see how it gets on.

Fysh

What do you want from windows 7? You probably could update to it and run it reasonably if you turn off the shiny aero stuff. That doesn't mean it'll be worth it.

Josey Wales

I just want to see if the machine will run faster under Windows 7. I have been told my a friend that it will.

Fysh

I don't think you're getting my point - you say you want to see if it will run faster, but run faster doing what? Browsing the web and doing the odd bit of Office document editing? Playing games? Using it as a media centre?

Depending on what you want to do with it there will be different overheads for the functionality in XP and 7, which will determine whether it's worth doing. If there's nothing you specifically want Windows 7 for that you can't already do in Windows XP, I don't see why you'd upgrade a machine with moderate hardware to a newer OS.

Josey Wales

Ah I see.

Well I don't use this machine myself but my wife has been complaining tht she finds it a little slow. She only uses it for web browsing and editing word documents. I was hoping that Windows 7 might be a little faster for these tasks.

Capt'n Midnight

Josey Wales wrote: »

Ah I see.

Well I don't use this machine myself but my wife has been complaining tht she finds it a little slow. She only uses it for web browsing and editing word documents. I was hoping that Windows 7 might be a little faster for these tasks.

No it will be slower than a clean install of XP especially if you tweak up the XP.


Windows has a half live , crud accumulates and while you can speed up some things somethines a clean install is the best option . Make sure you hacve at least 15% free disk space anyway.

And if it's suddenly gotten slow then do a malware scan to be on the safe sice and use Dell Diagnostics ( F12 ?) or hdtune to verify the hard drive is pmo.

Fysh

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

No it will be slower than a clean install of XP especially if you tweak up the XP.

+1, it's amazing what you can get out of XP on older hardware with a bit of tinkering - msconfig is a good place to start, but I reckon mukki's tips on improving Vista perfomance can equally serve to squeeze the best performance out of XP.

calex71

was running 7 on a 1.6ghz laptop with 1GB of ram and it was running reasonably well and i could work quite comfortably on it and was a little better than vista, however i installed a clean copy of xp with some optimization and tweaking and it makes 7/vista look like a snail.

Tester46

calex71 wrote: »

was running 7 on a 1.6ghz laptop with 1GB of ram and it was running reasonably well and i could work quite comfortably on it and was a little better than vista, however i installed a clean copy of xp with some optimization and tweaking and it makes 7/vista look like a snail.

But funny, if you go to www.mydellmini.com, you'll see lots of reports in the forums of people saying that Win7 works at least as well as XP on a Dell Mini 10 and in a lot of cases it's faster.

If you get a free copy of Win 7 it's probably worth at least trying Win 7. If you have to buy a copy for €200, I'd seriously doubt it's worth it unless you have a specific function of Win7 that you absolutely must have that XP can't do (and then it's unlikely that a Dell Mini 10 could do it anyway).

Fysh

Tester46 wrote: »

But funny, if you go to www.mydellmini.com, you'll see lots of reports in the forums of people saying that Win7 works at least as well as XP on a Dell Mini 10 and in a lot of cases it's faster.

Unless they can back it up with benchmarking data, I'd say this is wishful thinking. Given a single-core processor in the Mini 10, the only hardware advantage I can think of Win7 exploiting more fully is Hyperthreading, and I don't see it making that big a difference on a machine with such modest specs.

There again, why on earth you'd want a full desktop OS on a netbook is beyond me - the only reason I stuck fedora on my eee was to see how much work it involved, and I still use the onboard Xandros install most of the time...

pauly3

I have the same Dell Mini 10 and it is running both Windows XP and Windows 7 Ultimate without a bother. That's Windows 7 with Aero turned on! Both OSes are running smoothly, the main difference being XP is using around 256MB ram and 7 is using around 650MB ram. The graphics drivers for 7 accounted for 150MB ram, because on other machines 7 usually installs cleanly (with Aero turned on) on 480MB ram.

As the Mini 10 (Model 1010) has the memory soldered onto a daughter card (a mini-PCe) on the motherboard you cannot upgrade it unless you buy another card with 2GB directly from Dell. I have seen it configured with the 2GB option (see www.mydellmini.com for more info) but only at the build stage. Anyhow, whichever OS you choose, XP or 7, both will run just fine. You will have 750MB ram free with XP and 350MB free with 7 on a clean install. The Z520 (1.33Ghz) processor can accomodate either OS, and it has hardware decoding of AVC and VC-1 video if you need this.

Hope this helps.