Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 28th Oct 2008 23:40 UTC
I've been running Windows Vista Ultimate on my Acer Aspire One netbook (with 1.5GB of RAM, and a 30GB hard drive) for a while now, without any problems or performance issues. I have the full Aero Glass experience, and I didn't need to do any performance tweaking or fiddling with services. I even made a few very crappy videos to show it all off. Apparently, Steven Sinofsky thinks Vista - and therefore, Windows 7 - can run just fine on a netbook too, and that's why he demonstrated Windows 7 running on a netbook this morning during the Windows 7 keynote. In an interview with Ars he gave a little more details.
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Member since:
2005-11-11
Yes, there is a performance hit. Each frame displayed has to be translated from the 8 bits (256 colors) it runs at to whatever bit depth your x server is using (16 or 24 most likely - unfortunately 8 bit doesn't work).
This is done on the GPU where possible, using shaders. Otherwise it's done on the CPU. This is slow. My old Athlon 1400 couldn't do it fast enough until I applied the DirectDrawRenderer opengl registry key which let it use the GPU. Unfortunately the eee's integrated intel decelerator can't do it, and the CPU can't do it fast enough.
That platinum rating means everything works, and it does (aside from some battlenet menu issues, which the platinum rater overlooked). Most modern computers will have either a sufficient GPU or CPU to get Starcraft running in wine with no slowdown, but the eee has neither. It's close but ~70% doesn't do it (it runs with no errors, just slow). Perhaps wine will implement a DIB engine someday and then it will work at full speed even on the eee. I'll keep checking.
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Thanks for the info on Puppy Linux. That's close to what I want, but it is sort of missing the essential ingredient of not writing to the SSD at all unless I want. Unless the pup_save file can be stored on a tmpfs and the changes written to / when desired? I guess that could do it. I figured it was possible (someone must have done something like that) so thanks for the heads up. Next I'll want to know if it can be done with Debian
Edited 2008-10-29 12:53 UTC