[MJamus]

I've had Leopard running on my Mini 9 since I purchased it 6 months ago. When I came to a fork in the road of installing Snow Leopard or Windows 7 - I decided to give Windows a try again after jumping ship with Vista.

After a week of heavy usage, work and personal, I can say I AM GLAD I WENT WITH WINDOWS 7!

I did a regular install via a USB drive (I didn't use V-Lite). After the install I did most of the suggestions in the Windows 7 SSD thread (Turn off System Restore, remove un-needed programs, turn off indexing and defrag, etc).

I experimented with differernt Pagefile settings and currently have my Pagefile set for the default 2GB size.

I have Office 2007 SP2 installed, Safari, and some other odds and ends.

The performance is EXCELLENT. I can watch shows on Hulu without an issue, I have all of the "pretty" features still on (like Aero peek, etc) and it all works flawlessly. I use torrents on a regular basis and my Leopard install with Transmission would choke and I would never be able to download using my full bandwidth - that isn't a problem now with Windows 7 and Utorrent. MS Office 2007 runs surprisingly well, I use Outlook all of the time and it doesn't even feel like I'm using any resources when it's running.

All and all I am extremely pleased with my Windows 7 install and would highly suggest it to everyone else. The MAC-ish Taskbar is great (I have it on the left instead of the bottom). Programs start and close very cleanly and quickly. The sleep feature works like you would expect. Dual-Monitors, clone, or a single external monitor are now options (I couldn't do that in OS X 10.5).

If you are looking at this thread wondering if you should take the dive or not - DO IT! You won't regret it.

[atm153]

did you have issues with popping audio? I do, and it annoys the hell out of me when I'm on Hulu.

[MJamus]

Actually, no I don't have any popping audio. I only use headphones though, if that matters. I'm watching FlashForward from Thursday right now...

[bmaltais]

I can also attest that Windows 7 on the Mini9 is a much better fit than Leopard / Snow Leopard. The thing can actually fit under less than 4 GB after vlite and tweaks.

Flash is also much smooter and will allow for good youtube playback. VLC also appear to run better on it.

Installation off a USB key is very smooth (but long) and result in a fully functional system that is low maintenance.

I recommend it to every mini9 owners... even if I still prefer Snow Leopard on capable hardware.

[mattchiro]

Hmmm... as interested as i am at seeing how well my 10v runs windows 7, i have been using Mac since Tiger (late 2007 Macbook Pro - which still runs like a dream and has ironically turned into my home "desktop" machine) and i don't know if i could stomach the thought of a Windows machine again, let alone an antivirus.

Anyone here dual booting OS X/Win 7? If so how much time do you spent in each respective OS?

[holmes4]

There's lots of discussion of dual-booting Win7 and OSX in the Dual Boot section of the forum. I intend to do this on my Mini - first attempt was not successful (got OS X installed, but no further.) However, I consider OS X as just something to play with and don't expect to use it heavily.

[IanDell1010]

hi all my 1010 has run 7 since the day it arrived and it is great the only issue I have is BBC iPlayer if you use there software the shows are not watchable but if you download as WMV all is good. they should ship with 7 as they work so well. I have full 7 OEM U loaded with a few bits turned of but have media centre as have the built in TV card.

Please bring out some new drivers for the 3G/GPS card to allow it to use the A-GPS and this would be even better.

Don't hold back read the guides and load 7 you will not go back.

[LibbyLA]

I have just installed Win 7 Enterprise (Ultimate) on my Mini 9 w/ 2 GB RAM and a 32 GB Runcore and the performance is so much smoother than it was with XP Pro! Part of that is probably the fresh install and fewer things loading at boot time, but I'm not getting the stutters when web browsing (which I was getting even with caching the browser to a RAM disk). It's like I have a whole new snappy computer! This puppy hibernates in a flash and comes out of hibernation very quickly, as well.

[Retiresoon]

I installed SL on my Mini9 and replaced the SSD w/XP still loaded on it. If I buy an enclosure from MDD and make it a 8gb USB Hard Drive, can I boot from it with XP and then update with Win 7? All the while leaving SL on the onboard 32gbSSD?

[Loreto]

I'll be installing Win7 on my Mini9 this weekend; this after installing it on my desktop which yielded much better performance than XP-SP3.

The secret to Win7 is the disk sub-system routines and it's cache which access the disk (or SSD in our case) up to 70% less (that what M$ claims).

Did anyone have problems with drivers such as 3G, video, audio (read about the popping sound), etc?