At the PDC conference just now, Microsoft’ s SVP of Windows and Windows Live Steven Sinofsky was talking about how much less memory Windows 7 uses. As an example, he pulled out a netbook, and said that this is the notebook he’s using right now, that it has only 1GB of RAM, and that the Windows 7 system only uses half of it.

To be fair, Microsoft has not officially stated that Windows 7 will run on netbooks. At a press briefing on Sunday, Sinofsky and other members of the Windows team said they had not yet set minimum specs for Windows 7 so they wouldn’t guarantee it would work on the small systems. But when the head of the Windows team whips one out and says this is the laptop he’s using now with Windows 7, you have to believe Atom-based systems work well with the new OS.

What netbook was it? From the hinge and shape it appears to be a Lenovo S10. I wonder how he likes it. Our intent is to install the pre-beta of Windows 7 on a bunch of netbooks to see how well it runs, as soon as we can get our hands on it.