One of the most significant advantages of HP's Mini-Note netbook system is that, unlike all the other Atom-powered netbooks currently available on the market, it can support a Windows Vista operating system. This is also one of the reasons for the higher price tag that comes attached to the Mini-Note, especially when one compares it with most of its direct competitors. However, it looks like some of these netbooks running Intel's Atom CPU might soon become technologically-able of rendering a Windows Vista operating system as well.

 

As most of you must already know by now, running Vista eats up a considerable amount of the system's resources, whereas the old Windows XP is less demanding. This means that running a Windows Vista on a system with less than 2GB of DDR2 memory can turn out to be a really unpleasant experience.

 

Netbook systems running on an Intel Atom processor can only be equipped with a maximum of 1GB of system memory. That's mainly because of Atom's System Controller Hub (SCH) specifications, which don’t allow system builders to equip an Atom-powered device with more than 1GB of memory. Ultimately, this is the reason why there are no Vista-capable netbooks powered by Intel's Atom processor.

 

Fortunately, according to a new PDF from Intel, an updated version of the System Controller HUB will include support for up 2GB of RAM. It is unclear whether this will happen in the upcoming systems or whether it will become available for all the other Atom-powered netbooks, through a BIOS update.

 

One thing is for certain, netbooks running on Windows Vista will certainly be more expensive and, as far as their performance levels are concerned, things might not turn out as expected. On the other hand, a 2GB netbook would be very good at running a customized Linux-based operating system as well, which could ultimately increase customer interest in the netbook market.