Win7 practical on an old netbook?

[BernieDD]

The ol' Acer Aspire One (Model Zg5) netbook is getting very slow, and I'm wanting to reformat and reinstall the OS. It's Win XP right now, 1.6 GHz Atom procie, 1 GB RAM (the maximum it can take, I'm told), 9" LCD screen. Will this hardware allow reasonable performance if I use Win7 instead?

[kujoe2002]

Can you do it? Yes, will it perform well - NO. Per M$ site:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/w...m-requirements

If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:

1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

This is just to get the OS to run. Now if you want to use any peripheral software, it may be more problematic.

[rimmerchant]

The system will run win7 as well as winXP speed wise but with the specs you listed it will run crappy.
my suggestion upgrade the 1gb ram chip to a 2gb one and it will run smoother. and if you can afford to put alittle bit more cash in it get an older model 64 or 128GB SSD. (they go pretty cheap now)

your netbook will run like it's a new i3 machine for most office/internet use

[kujoe2002]

The system will run win7 as well as winXP speed wise but with the specs you listed it will run crappy.
my suggestion upgrade the 1gb ram chip to a 2gb one and it will run smoother. and if you can afford to put alittle bit more cash in it get an older model 64 or 128GB SSD. (they go pretty cheap now)

your netbook will run like it's a new i3 machine for most office/internet use

He said its maxed out at 1GB of RAM.

[rimmerchant]

He said its maxed out at 1GB of RAM.

I don't think so. I was looking at that earlier

service manual here:
http://tim.id.au/laptops/acer/aspire%20one.pdf

youtube disassembly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lyKE7NoTiI

It looks like it uses standard 2.5" SATA HDD and DDR2 soDimm.

IIRC during the hype of the netbook era you NEVER see any netbook come with over 1gb of ram. It was some jack dumb agreement with intel and vendors that they are limited to under 10" screen and 1gb ram because it segment the netbook to prevent them from cannibalizing their regular notebook sales.

I think if they say "max of 1gb" is a scam based on what I describied. the chipset I'm sure supports say 2gb dimm.

[rimmerchant]

update: opps doing more googling.

it looks like it has 512mb soldered in and can accept 1gb ram (total is 1.5gb)

BUT:
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/thr...le-Onboard-RAM
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/thr...quests-section

according to this you might be able to flash the bios to disable the soldered 512mb memory to support full 2gb ram.

[TedBellLover]

I second the motion to add an SSD. It sped up my older netbook in an amazing way. It has a little better specs than yours but runs XP. Have you considered a good maintenance routine for your netbook, to speed it up? Try a registry cleaner, and maybe defrag the HDD.