Many PC manufacturers, including netbook makers, are offering a free upgrade voucher for Microsoft's Windows 7 and it's time we found out how Windows 7 will perform on one of the most popular netbooks currently on the market! Using the release candidate, we installed Windows 7 on the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA seashell netbook and ran all the benchmarks we run in our full reviews in order to get a full impression on how Windows 7 stacks up against Windows XP on a netbook. Many in the community running netbooks are really hoping Windows 7 holds its own on a netbook because, let's face it, 2002's Windows XP on any 2009 system just seems backwards.
Installation
Armed with a 4 GB high-speed USB flash drive and step-by-step instructions by Kurt Shintaku, we were easily able to install Windows 7 on the 1005HA. We first burned the Windows 7 RC image to a DVD, but you could easily mount the ISO to a virtual drive instead. Following the linked instructions, we created a bootable Windows 7 installation flash drive with no issues.
Now, since the flash drive is detected as a removable hard disk to the computer, we had to edit the BIOS settings in order to make the flash drive the primary hard disk. Once we did this, the Windows 7 installer booted right up and we were able to begin our Windows 7 installation just as any other. There is a slight trick, though, as once the installer copies the initial set of files to the hard disk and reboots, you must enter the BIOS again and set the internal hard drive back to the primary so it is the one that boots. Besides that, installing Windows 7 was a breeze.
Windows 7 had drivers installed for all of our hardware right out of the box except the ACPI driver which allows the blue function hot keys to all work correctly. However, after a number of updates, Windows 7 actually knew that we had not installed the ACPI driver yet and pointed us directly to ASUS' ACPI driver which we downloaded and installed and it worked perfectly. I would also recommend installing the Intel Graphics driver from the optional Windows updates as it does install some additional files used by the ASUS ACPI driver.
Now that we have explained how we have installed Windows 7 on the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA seashell, let's see how it performed against the pre-installed Windows XP installation!
Battery Life
A long battery life in a netbook is very crucial. When buying a netbook, consumers want to know that it is going to get the job done without shutting off mid-surf. Windows 7 is supposed to offer battery life that would be acceptable on a netbook. This is the main reason netbook manufacturers are planning to make the switch to shipping netbooks with Windows 7 pre-installed once it is released.
As we mentioned, we did install the Intel GMA Graphics driver and the ASUS ACPI driver in order to give the best comparison possible. The monitor settings were the same at just under 50% brightness in battery saver mode. Let's see how Windows 7 did on our battery life tests compared to Windows XP.
As you can see, Windows 7 performed very close to what Windows XP did. Windows XP only lasted 9 minutes longer than Windows 7 at idle, but both lasted over 10 hours on our ASUS Eee PC 1005HA! Our movie playback test showed a slightly larger difference of 26 minutes, but we were still satisfied with the results. Our overall impression is that we were not overly impressed with Windows 7's battery life performance, but it did not disappoint, either.
Futuremark 3DMark06 & PCMark05
3DMark06
3DMark 06 is still a popular standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking and is the latest version in the popular 3DMark series available to run on Windows XP. 3DMark06 tests include HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, advanced SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance.
Windows 7 had a better overall 3DMark score than Windows XP, but XP did better in the CPU tests while Windows 7 did better in the SM2 tests. It was interesting to me that Windows 7 would do so much better in the graphics tests than Windows XP did. We were also happy that the 1005HA performed well enough on the Windows Experience Index test to be able to enable Aero on our Windows 7 desktop!
PCMark05
PCMark05 is an application-based benchmark and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. This allows PCMark05 to be a smaller installation as well as to report very accurate results.
PCMark shows that Windows XP has slightly better overall system performance than Windows 7. We did not notice any real system slow-downs while using the ASUS 1005HA with Windows 7 while we were using the netbook to write this review or do any other net surfing.
Cinebench & wPrime
Cinebench
CINEBENCH is the free benchmarking tool for Windows and Mac OS based on the powerful 3D software CINEMA 4D. Consequently, the results of tests conducted using CINEBENCH 10 carry significant weight when analyzing a computer's performance in everyday use. Especially a system's CPU and the OpenGL capabilities of its graphics card are put through their paces (even multiprocessor systems with up to 16 dedicated CPUs or processor cores). The test procedure consists of two main components; the first test sequence is dedicated to the computer's main processor. A 3D scene file is used to render a photo realistic image. The scene makes use of various CPU-intensive features such as reflection, ambient occlusion, area lights and procedural shaders. In the first run, the benchmark only uses one CPU (or CPU core), to ascertain a reference value. On machines that have multiple CPUs or CPU cores, and also on those who simulate multiple CPUs (via HyperThreading or similar technologies), MAXON CINEBENCH will run a second test using all available CPU power. Again, higher Frames/Second and lower rendering time in seconds equal better performance.
There is not a significant difference between Windows 7 and Windows XP in the Cinebench CPU Score, but this result is consistent with the CPU score results in 3DMark06 in that Windows XP performed slightly better.
wPrime
wPrime uses a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we're sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum.
It seems that Windows 7 is able to barely pull ahead of Windows XP on this pure CPU computing test. This is reassuring to see Windows 7 deliver on a CPU benchmark.
Sandra 2009, HD Tune and Geekbench
Sandra 2009 Memory Bandwidth
The Sisoft Sandra 2009 benchmark utility just came out recently and we have started to include it in our benchmarking. With Sandra 2009 you can now easily compare the performance of the tested device with its speed and its (published) power (TDP)! Sandra XII SP2 also has SSE4 (Intel) and SSE4A (AMD) benchmark code-paths, which is great for those of you testing next-generation AMD & Intel chips.
It seems we may have found a weakness in Windows 7 with this memory bandwidth test. We were surprised to see such a difference!
HDTune
HDTune is a free benchmark that measures the disk's transfer rates, access time, burst rate, and CPU utilization when reading from the disk.
Windows XP
Windows 7
We were happy to see that Windows 7 did not have as much fluctuation in the transfer rate test in HDTune. The averages and access time were nearly identical between Windows XP and Windows 7, but Windows 7 seemed to fall behind on the burst rate and CPU usage during this hard drive test.
Geekbench
Windows 7 seems to redeem some of its memory bandwidth performance problem in Sandra by performing nearly identical in Geekbench's memory score. The main difference in the scores above are in the floating point test, otherwise the performance was nearly identical in memory and integer scores.
Thoughts and Conclusion
Many in the industry are counting on Windows 7 to bring the netbook market to the next level. Having netbook manufacturers ship netbooks with 7+ year old Windows XP pre-installed surely deterred some from joining the ranks of households with the small, light and portable netbooks. It seems Microsoft has addressed most of the pitfalls of Windows Vista on a netbook by increasing battery life and performance to be very close to that of the lighter weight Windows XP.
We were happy to see that we did not experience any performance issues running Windows 7 on our ASUS Eee PC 1005HA seashell netbook. On some of our earlier netbooks we've reviewed, we noticed an occasional delay in responsiveness while simply typing an email. We did not notice any of this while running Windows XP or Windows 7 on the 1005HA.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the ASUS 1005HA was able to score a 2.2 on the Windows Experience Index's graphics test. This was enough to allow us to enable Aero on the desktop. We did notice that Aero is automatically disabled when unplugged in battery saver mode which makes sense if you are going for the longest battery life possible.
Our tests have shown that even the Release Candidate of Windows 7 Ultimate can be run on a netbook. We look forward to seeing what Windows 7 can do once it is released to the public come October 22nd!
Legit Bottom Line: Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system can and will be run on netbooks without a significant performance difference in most areas when compared to Windows XP. Consumers will be able to enjoy the enhancements had since 2002 without fear of turning their netbook into a clunker!
Source: legitreviews
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