Skip to main content

Samsung NC10 with Window 7

samsung-nc10I got my hands on a Samsung NC10 this week. Call it a birthday present to myself. I’ve read so much about this Netbook that I’ve been refraining myself from purchasing one for a while. But I gave in when I had some disposable birthday cash. Just after ordering, I placed another order for a 2Gb memory DIMM. I think 1Gb isn’t realistic for anything anymore, even a Netbook running XP.

The first thing i did when I got my hands on the unit, was pop in the memory upgrade. There’s a nice access panel specifically for you to do this, it’s even labeled ‘Memory’, so it wasn’t a problem.

The next thing I did was boot to my newly created Windows PE 3 USB stick and install Windows 7. All the hardware was detected during the installation, but some operated better with a driver update. I was happy for example to just update the Graphics, Audio Drivers and Touchpad driver. Of the Samsung suite of tools, the only tool I installed was the Easy Display Manager. This tool reactivated some of the function keys and the ability to adjust the screen brightness. I would have liked to use the Easy Battery Manager tool, but I wasn’t happy with the way it worked with Windows 7. So I opted not to use it. The only feature I miss is the auto dim of the screen when you move from AC power to battery.

Windows 7 runs brilliantly on the device, in every area. A much more modern looking OS compared to the ageing XP. I tried Windows 7 on the NC10 with just 1Gb of memory, and it makes no difference to the OS itself. The difference becomes obvious when you start running memory hungry apps like a couple of Office 2007 apps at the same time.

With web browsing only, the average battery life I got on the three cell battery was just over two hours with WiFi on and the screen brightness at its lowest. This worried me, as I was expecting to get 3+ from this. Concerned, I restored XP as shipped and was surprised to only get 2.5 hours under the same circumstances. I’m not sure if it’s the combination of XP and sharing the power load over 6 cells that gives the NC10 it’s 8 hour battery life, but was quite disappointed with just 2.5 hours.

Not liking XP and an extra twenty minutes not being a deal breaker for me. I reinstalled Windows 7. Now, knowing I was happy with the OS, I started playing with the other applications I would use. I’ve got a set of applications that I use regularly, but was aware that some of them weren’t really suited to the confines of a 1024 by 600 resolution display. I’ll blog about some more experiences over the coming day’s but I’ll end by saying that Windows 7 is certainly a Netbook OS worth considering with only the sacrifice of a little battery life.

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

Convert Linked Mailboxes to User Mailboxes in Bulk

My organisation has gone through a massive migration project to unify Active Directories and Exchange organisations. As a result of these migrations a lot of mailbox migrations have resulted in a lot of mailboxes ending up as linked mailboxes even though their not. The official TechNet article on this explains how to disconnect the mailbox and re-attach it to the user account correctly as a user mailbox. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201749(EXCHG.80).aspx Another way to make this appear to be corrected is to manually change the “Recipient Type” AD property on the affected mailboxes. This though, is unsupported. Using the official method from Microsoft results in the loss of any specific mailbox information such as SMTP, x400 & x500 addresses, mailbox sizes and any other individual mailbox settings. Only e-mail addresses and mailbox sizes were important to me (I must admit, I forgot about mailbox sizes at first). I came up with the script below that would properly con
17 comments
Read more

Creating a Windows PE 3 Bootable USB device

I’ve used Windows PE for a long time. And I’ve grown to love it. It’s an extremely useful tool, not just for OS installation, but for diagnostics. Since there’s a version of WinPe for x64 & x86 (& itanium) I like to keep both x64 & x86 on my USB stick. Essentially copying the each version to the root of the USB stick as needed. Meaning at any one time I have three copies of WinPE on my USB stick. Other applications I copy directly to my USB stick, so that I don’t have to remount the image every time i need another application added. Shortly after Windows 7 was released came a new version of WinPE, WinPE 3.0 on the Windows Automated Installation Kit. Preparing the USB stick. You’ll need to prepare the USB stick. To do this open a command prompt using Run As Administrator and use the following commands. diskpart list disk select disk 7 clean create partition primary select partition 1 active format quick fs=fat32 assi
8 comments
Read more

Upgrading Exchange 2007 Clusters to SP2 – Workaround

I posted last month about a problem delegating installs of Exchange 2007 SP2. Delegated Admins will receive an error message stating the following… You must be a member of the 'Exchange Organization Administrators' or 'Enterprise Administrators' group to continue. Have been looking into the issue and have had a case open with Microsoft. Turns out that you only get this issue on a fully patched server. If you try upgrading or installing as a delegated admin on a fresh install of either server 2008 or 2003 you don’t see the problem either with Exchange SP1 or SP2. I haven’t had time to identify exactly what patch causes this yet, if I’ll bother at all. If you have patched your server though, MS came up with this workaround. Disable update checking for the BPA by heading into the registry and HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\ExBPA and either creating or modifying a DWORD named “VersionCheckAlways” and set it to ‘0’ Copy the installation files to a local drive and replace S
2 comments
Read more