[emdc]

I have an extra mini 9 on hand (long story) & decided to install Windows 7 on it for a side by side comparison with Leopard. The most obvious difference was speed. Nothing felt 'snappy' on Windows 7 but at least it looks pretty.

Boot time:
Leo - 47 seconds
7 - 2:25

Shutdown:
Leo - 8 seconds
7 - 2:38

I fail to understand why it should take longer to turn a computer off than to turn it on. I went through & performed a few tweeks recommended in the Win7 section of this forum but noticed no difference in performance.

I put the task bar on the left & set it to auto-hide & that improved the look of the desktop. The task bar has been greatly improved & is very customizable, making it almost Dock-like. There were a couple of times the Control Panel stopped responding & I had to Control+Alt+Delete to regain control of the computer. I don't recall the System Preferences in OS X ever causing the computer to stop responding.

I look forward to seeing a real comparison between Snow Leopard & Windows 7 on a Dell mini. Now it's time to install something else on this little computer & leave Windows 7 to those who have a real need for it. Fortunately I don't.

[agianino]

Wow - My min boots much faster than yours. You sure you have set the custom dsdt.aml from DellEFI?

[WolfKeeper]

2:25??

Your Mini 9 is screwed up or defective. My Win 7 Mini boots to the login screen in about 26 seconds and is usable about 10 seconds later. No tweaking or customizations other than setting the swap file to 300MB permanently.

[emdc]

Originally Posted by WolfKeeper

2:25??

Your Mini 9 is screwed up or defective.

I seriously doubt that. Ubuntu booted fine, XP was okay (just not likable) & 10.5.7 booted in about 26 seconds.
From where I sit, that makes Windows 7 the culprit, not the computer itself.

Since this was a rainy day project, I'm reinstalling 10.5.7 on it. I'll deal with Windows 7 when it becomes absolutely necessary to do so.

[DiMAn0684]

Originally Posted by emdc

I seriously doubt that. Ubuntu booted fine, XP was okay (just not likable) & 10.5.7 booted in about 26 seconds.
From where I sit, that makes Windows 7 the culprit, not the computer itself.

Since this was a rainy day project, I'm reinstalling 10.5.7 on it. I'll deal with Windows 7 when it becomes absolutely necessary to do so.

There's something wrong with your install. Win7 RC boots in about 30 sec for me.

[ishagi]

I agree with everyone else. I have a Win7 and OSX 10.5.7 dual boot. The startup time for both OS is about 30sec. OSX does shutdown faster than Win7, but that doesn't matter to me.

Since the OP doesn't seem to like nor want Win7, I won't bother to suggest reinstalling it or debugging the timing. :-/

[efenili]

I also dual-boot Win7 and OSX 10.5.7 and both boot up at about the same speeds.

Something wrong with your install or something.

[emdc]

Thirty seconds for a computer running Windows Whatever to become fully operational after turning it on? Forgive me for being skeptical, but I've never seen ANY computer boot ANY version of Windows in 30 seconds. Have I slipped into a parallel universe where such things are even possible?

I did a search & saw videos of various netbooks starting up with Windows 7. One got to the login screen in 34 seconds but that's not the same as having a usable Windows 7 computer in 30 seconds.

After a 2nd fresh install of 7 & all of the recommended tweeks, it was still too slow for my taste. Several times during the configuration process things would slow to a crawl & I'd see 'control panel not responding' at the top of the window.

It really looked pretty & I appreciated the ability to customize its desktop & task bar easier than previous editions. However, simply working with it was frustrating & not worth the effort.

For what it's worth, the SSD in this particular mini 9 is a 32GB Super-Talent that was on sale at Newegg a couple of months ago & apparently not one of their fastest models. There was also 1 GB RAM.

I think I'm going to try Linux Mint on it next. If that's slow, I'll put Leopard back on it because it ran just fine & started up in about 38 seconds.

[mfruit]

On my Win7/OSX dual boot with a 32GB STEC, Win7 comes up from a cold start in 36 seconds (this includes 10 seconds for POST). I can launch Firefox and have that come up within another 4 seconds.

For whatever reason, OSX is quite a bit slower. From cold start to desktop, it's 55 seconds (including 10 seconds of POST). I don't use OSX often enough these days for me to try another install though. Perhaps when 10.6 is out, I'll start from scratch and see if I can get faster speeds.