Daily Archives: June 26, 2010

Windows 7 “Upgrades”

Over the last few months, I have been transitioning our production computers over to various Windows 7 configurations.  Currently we have two desktop production computers, both running 64 bit versions of Windows 7.  One is running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit and the other is running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.  Both of these systems had Windows XP on them, but with the security issues of running an “old” OS, we decided to upgrade everything running Windows XP.  I “upgraded” both desktop computers to 4GB of RAM, prior to doing a clean install of Windows 7.

In addition to the two desktop production computers, we also have two Windows 7 laptops, one running Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit and the other laptop running the 32bit version.  Both run Windows 7 with 2GB of RAM on board very smoothly, and I think better than they did on Windows XP.  All of the computers were “upgraded” doing a clean install.

I upgraded our Acer netbook from Windows XP Home to Easy Peasy today, so that we don’t have to worry about Windows XP security issues on it anymore.

Easy Peasy

A couple of days ago, I was on Distrowatch and noticed a Linux distribution called Easy Peasy.  It’s a distro that’s specifically written for netbooks using Ubuntu 8.04.  Since we have a netbook laying around, I decided to give Easy Peasy a try.  After downloading the ISO and downloading the installer for a USB stick, and I booted the netbook, ( an Acer 8.9″, about 1 1/2 years old, with an Intel Atom 1.6ghz cpu and 1GB of RAM).  It ran fine straight from the USB stick, even finding our wireless network, so I thought about installing it on the hard drive.

Today, I backed up some pictures that Carolyn had stored on the netbook, (it was running Windows XP Home).  I stuck the USB stick back into a USB slot, and booted the OS up, and installed it to the hard drive.  Easy Peasy has an extremely smooth install process, and I was finished in about 10 minutes.  I rebooted the netbook, removing the USB stick, and was really impressed by how fast the boot times off the hard drive are.  After customizing the “look and feel” of the interface, I surfed my favorite websites using the preinstalled Firefox.

Easy Peasy has done a great job remastering Ubuntu to run on a netbook.  I give this distro a solid 2 thumbs up!