About a year ago I purchased a nice little machine from ASUS.
It is an Atom N270:

When I opened the box, the machine was preloaded with Windows XP. It performs well with XP, and has 1 GB ram, and a 160 GB hard drive. A big mistake I made was installing Vista on it – Very slow.

It only took about a week of pain before I switched back.

So, after hearing all of the big excitement over Windows 7, I wanted to see if it was any better, or faster on this less than powerful machine.

A problem with that is that I do not have a USB DVD/CDROM drive right now, and as you can see from the picture – there are no drives built into that machine.

This means I need to install from a bootable USB memory stick.

I was able to do it, and while I was at it I wrote down what I did so you can too.

What you need:

Copy of Windows 7, and A running version of Vista, Windows 7, or 2008, and a Memory Stick that is at least 4GB in size.

Preparing the USB Memory stick

First, the memory stick needs to be prepared. Make sure you don’t have anything important on it since it will be totally erased.

Put your USB disk in the computer, and wait for it to be recognized. Then get to a command line (Make sure you run that as an administrator)

Type:

DISKPART <ENTER>

This will launch the disk partition program. You need to be real careful here since you can blow away partitions and drives of any drive on your system. Start out by listing the current drives on your system

LIST DISK <ENTER>

You should be able to identify your drive from this list:

So looking at the list, I know that DISK 1 is my flash drive. Make sure you properly identify your drive, or risk destroying important data.

Next, lets run the commands that will prepare your drive.

Note that disk1 is what we determined before. If by chance you have a nice fat USB hard drive sitting on your desk and it happens to be disk 1, and not your flash drive – you will erase everything!

Be careful!

Type this into DISKPART:

select disk1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

Now your flash drive is bootable.

Copying the Install Disk

Now the disk is bootable. Get your Windows 7 Install disk and copy the entire disk to your flash drive. With my computer, F: was the flash drive, and G: was the DVD ROM drive with the install disk. Copy the files from the command line like this:

xcopy g:\ f:\ /s/e/f e:\

Installing From Flash

Now, reboot and go into your BIOS and make sure it is set to boot from flash devices. I wish I could create a nice tutorial for this but there are so many different BIOS menus it would be difficult. Here is what mine looks like:

So make sure it is the first boot option, and you should be ready to install Windows 7 right from a flash drive. Save your changes, reboot…and install goodness will commence.

So you may be asking. How fast is it? Is it slow as Vista or Better than XP? I will let you know next time

Xavier Lauwaert here. We at Sony are excited to welcome the arrival of Windows 7 with its performance, ease of use and connectivity innovations. Indeed, pre-release reviews and engineering investigations show that Windows 7 is in line with industry needs and end user requests for an operating system that is leaner, faster, easier to use and more connected.

These last months we have been working with Microsoft to ensure that not only the operating system but also our PCs create a symbiotic effect whereby end user usage models are optimized. The end result is an improvement in day-to-day life performance as well as simply making the PC more fun to use. We live in a very PC-centric and connected world and Windows 7 addresses both these needs.

With households increasingly switching from desktops to notebooks and even having more than one PC, the concept of mobility and connectivity increases in importance. At the same time, Windows 7 is built on a solid foundation. Be it a netbook or a mainstream notebook, we expect to deliver unprecedented performance and connectivity options through Windows 7. Faster boot up times, improved battery life and the ability to stream your contents through the “Play To” feature will not only make the PC omnipresent but Windows 7 will also bring content “to life”.

Windows 7 will provide new solutions and expectations and we look forward to leveraging this release on our platforms.

Xavier Lauwaert
Senior Manager Product Marketing at Sony

The original Vista Bootscreen is very similar to Windows 2000, and is very bland and boring (you know, with the little catepillar bar scrolling from left-to-right).

But did you know that Vista comes with a much better highly visual bootscreen? Did you know how easy it is to enable it? No?

Microsoft may not have enabled this by default because of potential hardware issues, but that doesn’t make sense because the minimum video card requirements to even run Vista should handle the new bootscreen without any problem. In either case, here is how to make Vista look that much cooler with the “Aurora” bootscreen…

1. First start by running msconfig (either from the Run dialog or Start menu search box).
2. Click on the Boot tab, and then click the “No GUI boot” checkbox. Click OK.