Windows 7 Professional on a Netbook

Doesn't get more specific than that, does it?

I'll be using DiskPart:
1. Diskpart
2. List Disk
3. Select Disk 1 (Replace 1 with number reflecting your USB Drive)
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. active
7. format fs=fat32 quick
8. assign

I'll take a the USB Drive and set it up, then drop the contents of the Win7 image onto the drive. I'll turn on the netbook with it plugged in and it should install just fine. I already prepped the netbook for installation and I am going to do a fresh install on it as I've read that there are some discrepancies and problems with XP going to Win7 anyway. It should be faster installing it this way than an optical disk.

If all goes well, I will tell you of my triumph (or tragedy.)

Any OS, any version, any point in history it has always been better/cleaner to do a fresh install vs an upgrade. This is especially true when you consider the crapware hardware makers stuff in.

I put Windows 7 on the wife's HP Mini a couple of weeks ago and she loves it. It had XP on it before and ran decent, but it had a terrible problem with dropping network connections, especially when coming out of sleep mode.

That has gone away with Windows 7, and it comes out of sleep mode MUCH faster as well. Even has the aero graphics working. I have been very impressed.

Just curious, what brand of netbook did you purchase? I'm thinking about getting a Sony, with the only real competition a Dell. I've been looking for a couple of months now, and I narrowed it down to the Asus and Dell. Then the Sony came out. I got to see all three last week at best buy, and I didn't understand what the craze was for the Asus, besides the slightly longer battery life. The dell's only good feature was the keyboard. The Sony was the best looking to me, with the best screen. All other components seem to me almost identical, with the Dell gpu being a bit of a letdown.

The craze about the Asus EEE is that it's really easy to upgrade and mine has bluetooth, webcam, 802.11b/g/n, SD card reader, and it has a nice battery, all for a cheap price. Whatever you hear about getting a stock SSD is bull. You'll have to buy an after market one yourself and put it in.

You can order a stock SSD through Dell, but for some reason it must come with Ubuntu, which I haven't figured out yet.

Do you think it would be easy to put a stock SSD into a Sony?

The ASUS looked alright to me. But when I look at it compared to the Sony, it just looked cheap. The unit was a fingerprint magnet all over, same with the Dell. I think I'm going to go Sony again with a netbook, with the only real upgrade being an SSD, as it already seems to have everything else it needs.

But, as I type this, I remember seeing a roadmap or something saying that the new netbook procs were going to come out this fall. I can't decide whether to wait or not. Seems like I should just go ahead and get one now...

I couldn't tell you about the Sony, at least at this hour.

AFAIK, Sony makes a super high end netbook that really is out of budget of the rest of the market, unless you're eyeballing something I haven't seen yet.

On topic, I had to figure out what the Diskpart script wasn't working, when I realized the tutorial was wrong, but I got that squared away. Then Virtual Clone Drive didn't work in order to open a test image and put it on the drive to boot, so I had to go find Gizmo. I am now downloading Win7 (legally) and I am going to hopefully deploy it when I wake up tomorrow.

I just picked up the new Acer ONE 11.6" netbook. So far, I am fairly impressed with it. It runs the new Atom Z series processer, 2 gig of ram, 250 gig hdd, I get about 3 hours of battery life with the 3 cell battery, the only downside is it came with Vista, which is decently quick, but I don't know why they didn't just put XP on it. I plan to upgrade to Windows 7 asap.

Diskpart is just a crappy program and crappy means doesn't work in my book. I had to go find another guide to prep my key. I ended up using PeToUSB. I had download problems with the image, so I will try to download it again tonight. I just need to get the image and dump on the drive and should be good to go. Like the shuttle launch, we are slated to go tomorrow!

Unetbootin FTW!

Finally done. I managed to install Win7 alright, but it kept restarting the install, so I tried restarting and pulled the thumb drive and it started loading the installation so I jammed it back in. Other than that, it went without any problem. I am impressed how snappy and fast everything is. I can tell it loads faster and is faster than XP. Everything works out of the box, even my network card. I will have to go look for the proprietary EEE software so I can use some keyboard shortcuts, but that is not Microsoft's fault.