Vista on the Eee PC 901: Intel’s Atom is the little engine that could
Did we jump the gun on Intel’s Atom by thinking that Vista would be way too much for the chip to handle? The jury is still out on that, but it appears that the votes are swinging the other way. Enter Exhibit A: jkk has Vista running on his Asus Eee PC 901 model, with a single gigabyte of RAM and the 1.6 GHz Atom. Exhibit B is the eleven-minute video demonstration that shows Vista isn’t a slug with this device. Granted, there are no third-party apps loaded up to bog down the drive and jkk is actually using a traditional, magnetic drive. Nope, he’s not testing this on the SSD of the 901, he’s got a 30 GB drive inside for two reasons. First, Vista won’t easily fit on the 4 GB SSD drive and the second, the SSD unit isn’t quite fast enough to run an OS efficiently.
This definitely has me shifting my views and hopes for Vista running on an Atom-based device. It looks like Intel has done quite a bit of optimization and work on the Atom from when we first saw examples of Vista on it. Very nice!
Vista isn’t really the slug that it seemed to be at first. I have hated Vista running on my Dell M1330, but lately I’ve been experimenting with tablets, and Vista tablet features are fantastic.
As an experiment I put Vista Home Premium on a 3 year old HP TC1100 tablet with 1.5 gb of RAM and a newer 5400 rpm hard drive. The Vista scores are not as good as what the EEE 901 shows, but it is running quite nicely and is not that slow so long as you can live without Aero. I’m actually not surprised the EEE with 1.6 atom is running Vista OK.
Vista in not as bad as people think shock. More at 11.
Just a little note.
Vista is not as bad as it was earlier this year. Those updates seem to actually be fixing things for a change.
I’m running Vista on an original Samsung Q1 with a gig of ram and I can tell there’s been an improvement over the course of the year.
Internal 30gig HDD? Does this device have room inside for a full size laptop drive? SATA or IDE?
so which Atom is in here, Silver or Diamond? which 1 was the good 1?
Vista install vlited to 995mb install onto thumb drive. Once installed on 4gb partition of 30 gb ssd used 2.9gb with sp1.