Microsoft released a lot of information surrounding Windows 7 during PDC earlier this week and one of the bullet points that spread fast was the much lower system requirements. Many have been complaining about how Windows Vista requires too much and at the same time the PC market is being flooded by netbooks and other less powerful machines that makes it even more important to Microsoft to create an operating system that can run on computers with less RAM and weaker overall hardware than regularly found in stationary PCs.
They took things so far that they presented a netbook with Windows 7 installed and revealed that the operating system only required half of the RAM installed, without starting any other applications of course.
Over at Laptopmag they wanted to investigate further and decided to install Windows 7 on an ASUS Eee PC 1000H. Overall they were quite pleased with how the 1.6GHz Atom processor and 1GB RAM handled the new operating system and even if it is tough to get a straight comparison with Windows Vista, it does seem Microsoft was right to claim that Windows 7 only needed 500MB RAM.
One of the news they highlighted and were much pleased with in Windows 7, which will come in handy with a netbook, is the new network manager that makes it much easier to connect to wireless networks. On a personal side note, it is quite interesting to see that Windows is adapting features and looks that have been around with Linux for quite some time.
We hope to see more evaluations like this one, but more direct comparisons to XP and Vista, but for being an early beta Windows 7 looks to be heading in the right direction.
