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Windows 7 pre-beta on the Lenovo IdeaPad S10

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pdc keynote netbook

Having received the Windows 7 pre-beta last week at the Microsoft PDC, I decided to try the OS out on the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook. Remember that Steven Sinofsky, Senior VP of the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, mentioned last week that they intended to make sure Windows 7 was usable on a netbook system. This makes complete sense since Microsoft would love to see Windows XP finally die. Well.. I wanted to see if the pre-beta build would in fact work well on the Lenovo S10. For those of you that missed the Windows 7 feature list announcement last week (and where the heck were you anyhow), check out our day 2 keynote coverage over at Krunker.com for additional info about the upcoming OS.

Now as far as the Win 7 build provided to the developers at the conference – this is the M3 internal build (also known as the pre-beta build). It’s important to note that this build is NOT feature complete. It’s missing some of the newer task bar features such as Jump Lists and the integrated quick launch/taskbar buttons feature (UPDATE: Some of the features are actually in this build but they’re turned off to anyone outside of Microsoft. To enable it, check out this excellent posting at Rafael’s “Within Windows”). However, it is remarkably stable for a pre-beta build.

PDC attendees were provided with both the 32 bit and the 64 bit version of Windows 7 (as well as “the goods” hard drive).

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Installing Win 7 involved just connecting an external DVD drive that I have handy.

If you’re familiar with installing Windows Vista on a new system, then installing Win 7 is practically the same experience at this point. Here are snapshots that I took during the install of the OS on the S10.

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Installation took approximately 25 to 30 minutes – again surprisingly fast given the state of the OS.

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As you can see here, I’m dual booting my S10 with Windows XP Pro (I installed Pro myself) and Windows 7:

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The OS setup installed drivers for nearly all of the devices on the S10.

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As you can see, there were three unknown devices after the initial setup was completed. I installed the Windows XP versions of the  Lenovo Energy Management driver (actually designed for XP but works for Windows Vista/7) and the Broadcom Wireless Driver but could not find out what the third missing driver was.

device manager

While this isn’t a review of the pre-beta build of Windows 7, I thought I’d provide some initial impressions of the OS running on the S10 netbook:

  • Windows 7 installed relatively pain-free (would have been painless were it not for the missing drivers)
  • The OS was surprisingly snappy and responsive – especially when you consider the OS is a pre-beta build
  • Windows 7 itself is remarkably stabile – I had no problems using it while at the PDC conference
  • In this build, the OS still consumes about the same amount of memory that a new Vista OS consumes – easily going into 500 to 600MB of memory usage at boot. One of the things I’ve yet to try is to see what the S10 would be like with only 512MB of RAM installed (I upgrade my netbook a few weeks back to 1.5GB). However, based on the PDC keynote, we’re expecting the OS to be slimmer in memory consumption by the time it ships.

task mgr

  • Graphics were relatively responsive though there were places that were understandably slow (Windows Media Center)
  • Windows HomeGroup is a nifty idea – though I’ve yet to try it out fully

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Here are some snapshots of the desktop:

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Here’s a snapshot of the current state of Windows Media Center (notice the Zune like fonts in use)

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Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the current state of affairs with Windows 7. While the pre-beta build’s memory footprint hasn’t gotten smaller as of yet, the system is certainly usable and extremely responsive. I’ve been using the system for several days now and it’s held up quite nicely – can’t wait for the beta release next year!

Written by flung

November 3rd, 2008 at 4:07 am

13,628 views

Posted in Lenovo, Netbook Software, Netbooks

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