Samsung NC10

I've installed some of the drivers now. The ethernet and chipset drivers wouldn't install, I think they just didn't recognise the OS version. The touchpad drivers installed perfectly (and the pad works perfectly now), as did the display and battery managers. Didn't bother with the sound or wireless, they're both working fine. Going to try the graphics drivers now, want to get a before/after windows experience score.

One potentially big problem, I ended up with some pretty tricky file corruption. Not sure what caused it, it surfaced after I'd installed the trackpad driver and rebooted, the chkdsk thing came up during the boot. It couldn't solve the problem, and when I skipped it I could load windows but not run any more installers. I had to boot back into XP and run a disk check from there. Seems fine since though.

rc28 wrote: »

Anyone know of a simple step-by-step guide to partitioning the HD to run Windows 7 Beta alongside XP (dual boot)? I'd really like to try 7 but obviously I'd want to keep all my xp compatible software etc (also, my college network wouldn't be compatible with 7 either- took them ages to allow vista).

Go to Bootdisks.com
Download a Windows 98 bootdisk
Burn it as a bootable CD
Boot from CD and at the d:\ (or whatever drive letter has been assigned to your CDROM drive) run the fdisk utility to partition your primary disk as you so choose.

Note: as your hard-drive is over 64Gb- you will need an updated fdisk utility- available here

basquille wrote: »

On the NC10? Hmmmmm... I see a flaw in your plan! (unless you've a external CDROM drive obviously)!

I guess- I assume everyone has a portable DVD burner/CDRW these days- its not a fair assumption.:o
Whack the files on a USB stick and off you go.......
I boot a light version of Linux with all my personal files on it, from a USB stick the whole time.

basquille wrote: »

About as well as Vista I'd imagine.

Its actually supposed to be less resource intensive and has a massively reduced footprint- so quite possibly a lot better?

smccarrick wrote: »

run the fdisk utility to partition your primary disk as you so choose.

As a not, fdisk won't let you reduce the size of an existing partition, so for someone who has all of their space allocated to their C drive they would need to remove that partition, losing their XP install.

Anyone know of a simple step-by-step guide to partitioning the HD to run Windows 7 Beta alongside XP (dual boot)? I'd really like to try 7 but obviously I'd want to keep all my xp compatible software etc (also, my college network wouldn't be compatible with 7 either- took them ages to allow vista).

I used Acronis Disk Director to reduce my main partition and to create a new one. There are other tools that can do it too (see here), and it should be similar enough for them but using acronis all I had to do was:
-Right-click my main partition (the way I set my disk up initially was just the small system partition and all the other space in one big main partition) and choose "Resize partition".
-I picked a new size for it that was approx 30Gb smaller. This left me with 30Gb of unallocated space.
-I right-clicked the unallocated space and chose to create a new primary partition, picking to format it as NTFS and make it
-I applied the changes in Acronis and it went off and rebooted a few times making the changes and I then had my 2 partitions.
-Then I copied the Windows 7 ISO file to my C drive.
-Installed Daemon Tools Lite (other iso mounting software like Alchohol 120 should work just as well)
-I used it to mount the ISO image and setup began automatically (if not you should be able to browse to the drive in explorer and run it manually)
-When given the option between an "Upgrade" or "Advanced" install, pick advanced.
-It will ask what disk/partition to install to, pick the new
-It will then copy some files, reboot and continue installing.
-The installation is simple after that, it will ask you thinks like time/date settings, if you want to join a wireless network etc.

how well does it run on the NC10 with the 2GB's RAM?

It's running very smooth for me. I had the small problem above with disk corruption. It happened once again when I installed the sound drivers but hasn't happened since, so I'm reasonably sure the problem is related to driver installation. All corruption was on the Windows 7 partition, and looking through the logs all repairs seem to have been to index and shadow files, so there wasn't any danger to real data. Other other small thing I noticed was that it seemed to have started running a bit more sluggishly than before, windows were taking a bit longer to open/close, scrolling a web page would stutter a tiny bit. I figured it happened after I installed the battery management drivers so I switched to the default windows power plan instead of the samsung optimised one and it's working nice and fast again without a change in the projected battery time.

I know I've listed nothing but issues there, but other than those few things that were easily fixed it has been working extremely smoothly. I'm using it all of the time in place of XP.

Not strictly relevant to Windows 7, but with Windows 7 as my host operating system I've tried running some virtual machines through Virtual PC 2007, The first one was an XP image with Visual Studio 2008 and set for 512Mb ram, I tried creating a new silverlight app and building/running it, the second was a Windows Server 2003 image set for 1024Mb ram and configured as a MOSS server, I browsed around the site a bit. Both images ran really smoothly, not quite as quickly as on my desktop of course, but they stayed smooth and responsive. Better yet, Windows 7 stayed smooth and responsive and was fine for browsing the net etc while there was some intense processing in the VMs. These little machines are just fantastic.