I love my Dell Mini 10 netbook; it fits in my purse, it’s light, it’s small and I can take it anywhere, but now I have hit a brick wall with compatibility on it. I knew this time would come eventually but kept putting it in the back of my mind. It had been a while since I turned the netbook on and it looked like I had nothing but a bunch of random junk so I used the system restore to just set the whole thing back to default; it takes like 5 minutes anyway. When I restored it, to my dismay it looked like alot of the software I do use, are no longer supported on Windows XP. I used to have Skydrive on it but it seems that Microsoft yanked the support for it as now it only supports Windows Vista and above. Internet Explorer died. I am stuck with IE8 because IE9 is not compatible with XP and which is no longer supported by Google and some web sites don’t display properly or not at all. In a nutshell it was pretty pathetic and annoying.
I didn’t know for sure if Windows 7 would run on a Dell Mini because these things were designed to be streamlined. The name of them “netbook” is pretty much all it was intended to do; access the Internet. They do not have powerful processors and the max amount of memory they support is 2GB. It’s pretty much a tablet with Windows if you rip off the keyboard and yes they also can run Android OS. So I already knew from jump that Windows 7 was probably a no-go on this thing so I’ve put it off as I know the video card is also going to be a problem since it doesn’t support Aero, although that’s just eyecandy. Performance was also a concern for me because I knew it would install but could Windodws 7 run efficiently on a Dell Mini?
So today I put that question to the test. I don’t use the netbook much anymore as I used to since I no longer commute to work, it’s just been sitting in the closet for months. I don’t have anything to lose just for trying it out so as I sit writing this, Windows 7 is now installing on my netbook, so I’ll let you know how it turns out …
Well, Windows 7 install completed and I have to say I am amazed. I wasn’t expecting Aero to work because when I did the Windows 7 system check, it told me Aero would not work on the Dell Mini 10’s video card. Lies. It runs pretty fast, much faster than XP me thinks but then again I haven’t installed anything on it yet either. Usually computers start to show their true colors once you start putting your programs on it. As I said before these things weren’t meant for much so all I’m installing on it is probably Office. I might consider Chrome but it also struggled to run fast in XP.
