Testers that have already had a chance to play around with Windows 7, via the public Beta Build 7000 releases, know that installing the operating system is a process similar to what Windows Vista brought to the table, only faster. Deploying Windows 7 takes no more than 20 minutes from the time users select the platform's language to the first boot, but only on fully-fledged PCs and laptops. When it comes down to netbooks (sub-notebooks), things are a tad different, as the install can last over 1.5 hours.

Justin Zarb, a Project Dedicated Supportability engineer part of Premier Field Engineering within Microsoft UK, removed Linux from an Asus Eee PC 900 Series machine and installed Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 instead. And it appears that Microsoft is living up to its promise that Windows 7 can adapt to notebooks without problems.

Zarb quotes the owner of the Eee PC as saying that “'Linux is unusable, nice looking bit of kit, however can’t use it for anything useful' so I thought I would change that, as an experiment of course. The Netbook has a 16G internal flash drive (HDD) with a nice array of connections with 1G off memory as standard. A small key board and the screen is nice, compact and clear. The approach install Windows 7 Beta 32bit Ultimate and Office 2007.”

The installation was performed using a USB HDD boot, and Zarb emphasized the fact that Windows 7 was just at home on the machine, since it had all the drivers for the Asus Eee PC 900 by default. The result? A usable netbook running Windows 7 Beta.

“Ok, so the install post HDD file copy was not fast. Approx 1.5 hours to get to a working desktop. However, a working desktop I have,” Zarb stated. “Performance seems quite acceptable, however with a 2G DIMM upgrade it will fly. So Windows 7 continues to impress, I really think we have something good here.”

Microsoft has been indicating a strong focus on netbook PCs since the unveiling of the Windows 7 SKUs. In this context, Brad Brooks, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows Consumer Product Marketing, promised at the start of February 2009 that Windows 7 would play nice with netbooks, as the popularity of the machines increased constantly, with over 42 million units estimated to ship in 2012.