[romansoft]

Hello,

I have a Mini 10 with:
- Dell Inspiron 1010
- Atom Z520
- 1 GB RAM
- 120 GB HD

It came with Windows XP SP3 Home edition (ULCPC) but I wanted to get Windows 7 a try so I got Windows 7 Ultimate (I downloaded the ISO from internet but I have a valid and legal Ultimate license) and installed it. Then I installed drivers from Dell.

The look&feel of Win7 is nice but now my system is quite *unusable* due to slowness. :-((. It's horrible.

So I'm thinking about other choices:
1/ Come back to WinXP. At least it worked ok ;-)
2/ Try a "cooked" version for Win7 Ultimate. I saw there are several of these ("lite", etc) and they promise to be fast. The drawback is that I don't truss unknown "authors", I'd prefer an OS coming directly from Microsoft and/or Dell.
3/ Try a Win7 version from Dell and ideally for my laptop (I guess "Win7 starter edition" or some cooked and lighter version by Dell). The problem is that I couldn't find such a version, I guess it comes with newer laptops. Furthermore, I have no guarantee of it being fast enough.
4/ Use a guide for optimizing Ultimate (disable indexing, some services, etc). I don't think it will be sufficient to get a decent speed...

So I'd like to hear from other users with the very *same hardware* model as me (Mini 1010, Z520 processor, 120GB non-ssd hd) and know about their experience with Win7. Is it fast? Which version are you using? Would it be possible to get a copy of Windows 7 image shipped with Mini 1010? I'd like to get it a try.

Thank you in advance for your patience and help.

Best regards,
-Román

[rrfranczak3]

hello and Welcome to the forum,

I have a Mini 10 with the z530 and a 500gb drive...I have both Win XP Pro and Win 7 Ultimate loaded, I think that XP might run a little faster than Win 7, but Win 7 isnt slow by any means....I dont think that the z520 compared to the z530 makes that much of a difference..probably makes some though...dont know what else to tell ya, good luck.......

[Montala]

I spoke to Dell only a couple of days ago, and was told that they will only supply the 'Starter Edition' of Windows 7 with a newly ordered Mini, and not as an individual 'upgrade' afterwards.

Personally, I am surprised that you are finding Windows 7 'unusable' on your Mini 10. I have a 10v and am pleasantly surprised at its performance, using the 'Home Premium Edition' of Windows 7 which I thought I would find frustratingly slow, especially after using my desktop PC, but I don't.

I know the spec of the two models are not identical, so hopefully some other Mini 10 users will add their comments here also.

Welcome to the forum anyway!

[israel102]

I have a dell mini 10v which should be less powerfull than your model. I have the N270 Atom with 1GB of RAM. I installed (a full, not "lite" version of)windows 7 ultimate and it works pretty well. I do think that xp is a bit faster but windows 7 is perfectly fine and is obviously much much prettier.

I wouldn't ditch windows 7 alltogether. It's obvious you have a specific problem like a bad image or something.

[yeewiz]

I have a 1010 and freshly installed Win 7 Home Premium over the factory XP. IMO W7 runs about the same speed as XP. I would suspect your downloaded copy isn't quite right. The way you phrase "valid and legal Ultimate license" suggests the downloaded copy comes from an unofficial site. I would get a real production copy of W7 and try again

[WolfKeeper]

Ditto. Something I noticed after installing Windows 7 from Dell's actual OS DVD over a downloaded "RTM" copy is that shutdown time was cut in *half or less*, which leads me to believe something wasn't kosher with the RTM copy I was using.

[atm153]

Originally Posted by WolfKeeper

Ditto. Something I noticed after installing Windows 7 from Dell's actual OS DVD over a downloaded "RTM" copy is that shutdown time was cut in *half or less*, which leads me to believe something wasn't kosher with the RTM copy I was using.

I think it's just some tuning Dell does, because my RTM copy from Technet had the exact same symptoms until I applied a few registry tweaks. This got it to being about the same as the Dell OEM copy.

[romansoft]

I agree with atm153 in that my copy is OK (I checked the md5sum against official MD5 list). The license is also ok (got directly from Microsoft store).

I also did some tweaks; for instance, I completely disabled all visual effects (aero, etc) and indexing. Although the performance got sensibly better and now the system is "usable", my system with Win7 is sensibly slower that when using XP. It maybe possible that Win7 boots up faster than XP, but the UI handle is slower. So I switched back to XP.

Anyway, I'm a bit disappointed with my Dell Mini 1010, since it's 1 gb limitation makes it little flexible. Using default XP from Dell, memory spent from the system is about 650 MB. So there's only 350 MB (numbers are approximate) for cache and applications. Try to run both Firefox and Thunderbird, and your system begins to crawl (even with XP), due to system paging (+1gb spent).

I'm thinking about selling my little Dell, or considering using Linux (since MacOS doesn't work also in my exact hardware, I've read -due to gfx card not being supported, if I recall correctly).

Do you have good experiences with Linux and my exact Dell Mini hardware? Is there a Linux image freely available to download from Dell? (since Linux is usually free I though it may be possible). If not, I could try a fresh Ubuntu install, but I prefer to ask you first...

Thank you for all your advices.

Cheers,
-Román

[brookheather]

I have all the Dell Mini models installed with the same RTM Windows 7 version and the Mini 10 is by far the slowest except for maybe the Mini 12... if you want to keep the form factor then a move to a Mini 10v (ideally with 2GB ram) will be quite a bit faster than the Mini 10. Personally I really like the 11z form factor - I got a great deal from the outlet on a dual core which blows away the performance of the Atom and is only a bit bigger and heavier but has the higher resolution display and decent GS45 integrated graphics.

- Simon.

[atm153]

Wow, I didn't see that you had 1GB of RAM, that's definitely why 7 is slow. It's basically unusable with less than 1.5, in my experience.