Tested - Windows 7 vs Windows XP on the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA

We saw Windows 7 running on various netbooks at this year’s CES and we installed the public beta on an MSI Wind, and, in short, we were impressed.

With the October 22 launch of Windows 7 now all but sealed (Microsoft announced the operating system's release to manufacturing today), LegitReviews has performed a side-by-side performance test with Windows XP on the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA.

In our tests, Windows 7 installed like a dream and ran extremely smoothly on the 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor in the MSI Wind. LegitReviews has much the same experience and the Windows 7 RC even found the single missing driver for download at the ASUS web site.

We won’t spoil the detailed comparison test by giving away the results, but it’s interesting to note that there was very little difference between Windows 7 and Windows XP when it came to battery life on the Eee PC 1005HA and even the performance benchmarks were surprisingly close — surprising when you consider how badly Windows Vista performs on the Intel Atom processor, that is. The Eee PC 1005HA was even powerful enough to enable the transparent Aero interface.

If you’d like to try Windows 7 on your own netbook, the release candidate is still available for free download, although only until 20 August. You’ll have until 1 June 2010 to use it too, although it will start shutting down every two hours from 1 March 2010 in an attempt to persuade you to buy the real thing.

[ LegitReviews via EeePC.net]