Windows 7 runs on the MSI Wind netbook - and runs well!

There were a lot of netbooks running Windows 7 at CES – and, it appeared, running it well. The Windows Vista experience on a Centrino laptop has made us a little sceptical about using any version of Windows other than XP on an Intel Atom-powered netbook, but in the interests of research, we thought we'd investigate further. After all, Windows XP is already past its sell-by date, at least as far as Microsoft is concerned, so it's unlikely to stick around once Windows 7 is out of the door.

So, equipped with an MSI Wind U100 and DVD burned with the public beta of Windows 7 Ultimate, we sat down and prepared ourselves for a good couple of hours of blue screens, driver wrangling and possibly some strong language. In fact 20 minutes later, we ended up with a netbook that worked perfectly. With Windows 7. No, we couldn't believe it either. In fact we were so surprised that we shot a video – after the cut.

After the most painless (and one of the quickest) operating system installation since Mac OS X, almost every component on the the MSI Wind worked normally under Windows 7 – the only exception was the onboard Wi-Fi, but the MSI Wind 32-bit driver sorted that out. We should point out that we couldn't get any of the other Wind drivers (video, chipset and so on) to install, but we only tried those out of curiosity – the Wind seemed perfectly happy without them.

Better than More than happy, in fact. Where we expected to see a bloated, sluggish operating system than ran like treacle on the Atom N270 processor (much like the Sony VAIO P Series experience...), we discovered a slick and snappy version of Windows that, while resembling the awful Windows Vista, ran more like excellent Windows XP.

We have more Windows 7 tests planned – and more operating systems on our MSI Wind – but for now, we thought we'd show you what you can expect from Windows 7 on a typical netbook. And we'd be lying if we said it wasn't dramatically better than we ever imagined possible.