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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.