Win7RC on Tecra S1 Pentium M 1.7GHz 512MB Update

Now that I have had a chance to work with this laptop on a frequent basis I can give a little more accurate of an assessment of Windows 7 Release Candidate’s performance on it.

The unit is configured as follows:

• Toshiba Tecra S1
  • Intel Pentium M 1.7GHz single core no HT
  • 512MB RAM
  • 60GB 5400RPM IDE hard disk.
  • 15” high resolution LCD
  • ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 (not WDDM compliant)

The Task Manager looks like this:

While this laptop will not run Windows Vista to give one a reasonable workstation type experience, Windows 7 will at least give decent performance for most tasks.

This is what one can expect to see when there is Outlook, IE8 with a couple of tabs, and a couple of other windows open and trying to open a new tab or initiate a search:

Outlook almost always complains that it is not responding when it is pulled up from being minimized to the tray and asks whether it should be terminated. Ignore these messages and the requested window will eventually respond and show up on the screen.

In the mean time, the hard drive light is pretty much constantly lit with the swap operations.

So, we need at least 1GB of RAM to provide a more seamless window swap when switching between open applications or opening a new application. 2GB of RAM and this laptop would fly. Not much different than our initial experiences with Windows XP when it was released.

For basic use though, this setup is more than enough for browsing and e-mail. It would also make a great inexpensive college computer for a student living on a tight budget.

Going back to Windows Vista after getting more and more comfortable with the Windows 7 SharePoint integration features and Search is quite painful too.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer