More Netbooks Shipping With Vista? Save Us.

December 3rd, 2008 by K. T. Bradford  

A product labeled the NC11 is showing up on a few pages of Samsung’s Korean website. There aren’t many differences between it and the NC10 in terms of drivers and specifications, but apparently you can get it with Windows XP or Vista. TGDaily is reporting that the new 10″ Acer Aspire one will come with Vista, too (due to it’s large hard drive, which will be over Microsoft’s limit for new licenses of XP).  Why does Acer think that netbooks need 320GB hard drives anyway? Vista + Netbook does not always equal a great user experience.  There are configurations that can result in a good Vista netbook, but choose the wrong processor or not enough RAM and the result is less than stellar. Then again, by the time the NC11 reaches the US and the 10-inch Aspire One hits the shelves, maybe they won’t have Vista (or their specs will hit all the right notes). Hat Tip: Liliputing & jkOnTheRun (updated)

Comments (13 Responses) 

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13 Responses to “More Netbooks Shipping With Vista? Save Us.”

  1. Fanfoot Says:
    December 3rd, 2008 at 1:37 pm

    Ditto.

  2. eps Says:
    December 3rd, 2008 at 2:32 pm

    BS. I am running Vista on HP Mini 1000. Boots faster than XP, otherwise as fast as XP.
    Have you “journalists” ever tried Vista or are you just spreading this “Vista sucks and needs at least 4 GB of memory” hype?

  3. K. T. Bradford Says:
    December 3rd, 2008 at 2:37 pm

    How many GB of memory do you have? It’s been our experience that 1GB is not enough, and that’s usually how much netbooks ship with.

  4. Matt S. Says:
    December 3rd, 2008 at 3:52 pm

    How many netbooks actually ship with to my knowledge only the one with the *hi*ty VIA processor in it. There are plenty of accounts on the several netbook sites that say their netbook works just fine out the box with Vista.

    Sites really need to stop keeping the VISTA IS SATAN hype going.. My MSI Wind with only the stock 1GB runs Vista just fine.. I’ve ran Vista on a celeron and 1gbram in my desktop since it RTMed.

  5. Shawn Says:
    December 3rd, 2008 at 5:37 pm

    I am also running Vista on my Lenovo S10. Runs just as well if not better than XP did. The touchpad drivers don’t fully work (chiral has issues) but other than that everything runs as fast as i’d expect it to. I just wish the first partition wasn’t FAT32 basically means i need a external dvd drive to redo the partitions.

  6. K. T. Bradford Says:
    December 4th, 2008 at 9:11 am

    Actually, we’re pretty pro-Vista here at LAPTOP, just not for netbooks. For regular notebooks, yes.

    It may be worth an experiment to see how Vista fares on some of the netbooks we have.

    Still, there’s a reason most netbooks don’t come with Vista, and a big part of that is hardware. IF Acer and Samsung can make the hardware and Vista sing together, that’s nice. But what will it cost the consumer, in the end?

    And if the netbooks CAN run Vista, does that mean they’ll be better with it? Even more to the point, will they run better for the average consumer — the kind that doesn’t want or know how to fiddle with things to, again, make the netbook sing? It’s great that some people can, but how high is that learning curve? We all know there are people who just want easy and working right out of the box. This is why they keep returning Linux netbooks.

  7. Joanna Stern Says:
    December 4th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    Actually we have run Vista on a number of netbooks here at LAPTOP. Vista worked like a charm on the Eee PC 1000H (with 2GB of RAM). http://blog.laptopmag.com/eee-pc-1000h-runs-vista-home-premium-with-few-hiccups

    The Gigabyte M912 also came with Vista and the experience wasn’t terrible.

    Other netbooks don’t run Vista as well (i.e. the Dell Inspiron Mini 12) because of the lack of RAM and the different Atom processor.

    You will see in that post that my friend Kevin at NotebooksReview.com even found that benchmarks on the MSI Wind came out higher in Vista and sometimes battery life is better on netbooks with Vista.

    But why do vendors not put Vista on netbooks? I think my colleague Kim is right. The hardware on netbooks isn’t optimized for Vista. It can work but XP is a slimmer OS, especially on netbooks that only come with a half a GB of RAM.

  8. Fanfoot Says:
    December 4th, 2008 at 2:13 pm

    Guys,

    Lets not be trolls please. This site has absolutely the best netbook coverage out there. They have done extensive tests of every netbook available in the US, even some that aren’t. They have tested some models like the Dell Mini 12 with Vista and with XP, and made the advantages of XP’s performance quite clear from their testing. If you prefer Vista and your netbook runs fine with it, great! But lets give these ladies some space for their own opinions please, since they seem to be backed up by lots of actual experience.

  9. Fanfoot Says:
    December 4th, 2008 at 2:30 pm

    Hey K.T.

    Just read thru your 10-inch notebook comparo, very nice.

    One thing though. The boot times. I assume you measure these as shipped by the vendor, i.e. with all the crapware installed. Only fair I suppose. But I’m thinking a lot of us enthusiast types that read sites like this might be expected to go through and uninstall the crapware, disable various services like indexing, use msconfig to disable a bunch of startup utilities etc. Wondering if there should be a benchmark for boot times with some standard approach for optimizing stuff. Maybe disabling services and msconfig is a bit much to expect, but uninstalling crapware? Think about it. I know it would be a bunch more work, sorry…

  10. Matt S. Says:
    December 4th, 2008 at 3:25 pm

    I am by no means trying to troll laptopmag. I have full respect for the time and effort put into testing all the netbooks on Vista and XP and all the stuff they do. The tone of the article just seemed like it was bashing Vista for being slow when its perfectly fine if you have 1GB or more of ram and dont use a VIA processor. Had the article been worded differently then I probably would not have said a word.

  11. K. T. Bradford Says:
    December 4th, 2008 at 3:56 pm

    Fanfoot,

    I’d have to check, but I think we do remove the crapware before testing boot time, but don’t hold me to that (some of these reviews were done before I started working here). I don’t know about indexing or msconfig, though.

    Edit: I just checked and when we remove programs we’ll say so in the review and provide both boot times – one with and without. Otherwise we boot the way it comes out of the box.

  12. Fanfoot Says:
    December 4th, 2008 at 8:14 pm

    Thanks. I’m not really sure what’s right here. I have a Dell Mini 9, and read the MyDellMini.com forums constantly, so I’ve disabled various services, uninstalled the crapware like McAfee that came with the unit, disable virtually all of the stuff that was in the startup section of msconfig, etc etc and my Dell Mini 9 now boots much faster than it did originally. Soon I’ll have a faster SSD, running uncompressed and expect it to be faster still.

    I assume most people will just boot them as they come, so the manufacturers should get dinged for installing all the crapware that increases the boot time. But at the same time, knowing that the crapware can be uninstalled, some of us would want the unit that simply has the best hardware (fast BIOS boot, fast disk, fast drivers that are required) and none of the other stuff matters.

    A first step might be to report the boot time with the standard software load, then another shorter bar with crapware uninstalled. That’s a step I think even your average user might perform.

  13. K. T. Bradford Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    I will mention it to the testers :)

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