Windows 7 Starter?

Does anyone have this on their netbook and find it useful for basic tasks such as email, pictures and web browsing?

I'm looking for something for my grandmother and figured 7 will be more secure, while being easier to reinstall than XP in the event of a virus catastrophe.

 

I just ordered an Samsung N210 it`s supposed to have up to 13.5 hours of battery life , it should be hear tomorrow.

Only you cannot change the wallpaper or enable aero unless you find the hacks.

 

Cool, I'll be looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it.

Do you think 1GB is enough to run Starter? That seems to be the standard ram in the HP Minis.

 

I will upgrading to 2gb as soon as possible, assuming i keep it, pity the N210 has only one memory slot as i have a few 1gb sodimm lying around

 

I may do this is well, as I'm currently running 2GB on my 7 Home Premium machine and it seems fine.

The Atom cpu may be the real test. Do you think it is worth $25 to upgrade from an N455 @ 1.66GHz to an N475 @ 1.83GHz? The Passmark scores for the cpus show almost no difference......

 

Passmark is not 100% accurate , it`s up to you 25$ is not a lot.

 

Yeah, I guess a $25 upgrade is not much considering the already low price.

Thanks for your help.

 

Windows 7 Starter is great not just for netbooks but also for aging, low end notebooks. We have a 6 year old Dell Inspiron 510m with a 1.5GHz Pentium M, 1.5GB RAM and 40GB HDD and it was sluggish in Windows XP. So we put Windows 7 Starter instead and it runs much smoother and faster.

This is down to the low number of resources and services required from the OS. The old Dell actually booted faster than my current T61 with a 7200RPM Boot Drive and Win 7 Pro x64 in real world times which showed how quick it is (but the SSD changed all that later!).

 

Excellent, since I was leaning for 7 over XP anyway. Thanks!

 

Agreeing with all the other posters, Windows 7 is a great choice for netbooks. I have the Acer Aspire One (D250). I originally had Starter, but I preferred the added features of Home Premium and later upgraded. It actually starts up faster on 1.6ghz/1gb then a Dual 1.73/2.5gb on a laptop. Originally I preferred XP over 7, but now I'm leaning towards Windows 7.

 

My Mini 110 came with Starter, and it worked fine, but I threw on Ultimate just for fun (and easy customizability)

 

excuse me i just want to ask , how if i upgrade my windows 7 starter to windows 7 Home Premium ?
my spec : acer d260 | 1 GB RAM |250 HDD | intel atom n455 1.66Ghz

 

That is a common misconception actually.
Fragmented boot sector files and large quantity of installed programs affect the OS performance.

My old DELL Inspiron 1300 runs Win7 Ultimate just fine for example (upgraded to 2GB RAM).
A clean install will always speed up your boot time.

Windows 7 Starter is simply too limited in functionality to be usable.
Netbooks can cope with Home Premium or even Ultimate editions of 7 just fine (provided they come with over 1 GB RAM).

 

The old Dell we have is primarily used for just web browsing, nothing else. It's the same as it had with a clean installed XP, just the web browsers and some plugins to make it work. The old laptop is used by my dad who's not a techie person, he just browses the web reading the news and turns it off once done. Yet under XP with SP3 with the same configuration it felt sluggish.

We evaluated and based on my dad's usage the Windows Starter edition is ideal. Simple to use with the familiar Windows interface, low number of services compared to the other editions to speed things up, a secure and updated OS platform compared to XP and allows him to use a more responsive computer in the end to do his web browsing. For us there's no justification putting on Home Premium (he doesn't use the Media Centre features) or Ultimate (does he really need Bitlocker, Branchcache, Applocker...the list goes on) so you just adding unnecessary services which overall will bog down the system. Yes while you can install Home Premium/Pro/Ultimate you still have to evaluate the user who will be using the computer in the end.

Obviously if you do require more features then you will need to step up an edition, but for those who just want a computer OS to do basic web browsing, even minor office documents then the Starter edition does a great job.

 

Windows 7 is very basic. I hate the fact that it doesn't even have Aero Peek and I cannot even change wallpapers! I can live without Aero and those aesthetics and whatnot, but Aero Peek is very useful for me; in 7, it only display the title of the window/s when hovering the mouse over a taskbar tile...

But so far, it's fine for my needs. Productivity, Internet, and other basic tasks, it's not that restricted. And it's quite speedy, too. Just the limitations of the CPU and RAM [which I can upgrade anyways, so yeah] in my netbook.

 

Interesting!

Can Win 7 Pro etc be configured to run as fast as Starter?

EDIT Comparisons between the diff versions:
From Starter to Ultimate: What's really in each Windows 7 Edition? | ZDNet

1. Starter does not have fast user switching.
2. Not sold in retail (at least in US)