[RhoXS]

Although I have had a Mini 9 for almost two years now, I rarely use it because it is so slow. It has W7 installed on a 32 GB SSD and even though I have 2GB RAM, it really is not practically useful. I almost always gravitate to my bigger and heavier IBM Thinkpad because it is so much faster. I bought the Mini 9 on not much more than a whim because of its very small size and small price. Since I never really had much expectations from it, I never really gave its rediculous clunky performance much thought.

Recently I have been considereing installing XP on it thinking XP has a lower overhead and might make it perform better. Last night, on an inspiration, before I installed XP, I turned off W7 Aero graphics. I then saw an immediate and what appears to be significant improvement in performance. It boots much faster and even shuts down faster. The time it takes for a program to load is also much faster. All around my first limited impression is that it is a different machine.

This surprises me because I did not think Aero would consume any consequential overhead when there are no visible graphic demands. I hope I was wrong and my first impression is accurate.