For a bunch of reasons the Eee PC ships with either Windows XP (I'm sure Microsoft's still annoyed at that) or a customised version of Debian Linux. Both work reasonably well although my experience is that Linux doesn't seem to suffer from the same performance degradation as XP over time. Personally, I've ditched both default operating system options, preferring to run Ubuntu for the Eee.

As part of a story I've penned for PC Update, I've been playing with the beta release of Windows 7 (Build 7000). I expected to run into some hurdles with my Asus Eee PC 900 as the installation requires about 9GB of contiguous disk space. My Eee PC 900 has a total of 12GB but it's split between 4GB and 8GB disks. Interestingly, the installation actually failed but then restarted and succeeded. I'd seen this with previous versions of Windows but it seems that the installer is smart enough to start over but skip the problematic files.

I expected to encounter all sorts of issues with with the PC. However, Windows 7 lacked the correct video drivers meaning that I was initially stuck with standard VGA. This was something of a surprise as the video chipset is an older one but perhaps Microsoft is sending a message about support for older computers. Resolving the video driver issue was easy enough as the Windows XP driver seems to work perfectly.

The wireless networking worked without any messing about. In fact, the only hardware that didn't work with the Eee PC was the integrated webcam. However, to be fair, the main problem was that Asus made the appropriate Windows XP driver hard to find.

To get Windows 7 running nicely I needed to make a few tweaks. Windows 7, by default, offers to manage the best balance between performance and appearance options. However, I found the Eee PC a little sluggish but by turning off many of Windows 7's interface animations there was a significant boost in performance.

The Eee PC took about 2.5 minutes to start up and be usable. Launching Internet Explorer took about five seconds although, once it it was loaded it performed quite well. The Eee PC 900 running Windows 7 was by no means unusable and on a par with Windows XP, the OS that shipped with this particular Eee PC.

Windows 7, at least in the current beta release, shows great promise. It seems slim enough to install and performance is certainly OK. If Microsoft can resist the urge to add more features and concentrate on stability then Windows 7 might end up being an excellent option as a mobile operating system.