VMWare produce various pieces of software that allows you to run a virtual machine and in the case of VMWare Workstation for example, this allows you to run Windows inside a Linux Box or the other way around. IN effect then it allows many different operating systems to run without you have to reformat your machine every time. At the other end of the scale is VMWare vSphere Hypervisor ESXi – this is a bare metal (i.e. wipes your hard drive) installation and allows many virtual machines to run at the same time on a headerless (no monitor) box – often servers.  I thought I would take an existing desktop machine and see how this ran – let is begin my journey into ESXi.

The Hardware

The first piece of the puzzle is the hardware to run it on, in this instance I choose a ACER Aspire E700 Desktop machine, this has 5 GIG Ram, Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz CPU and a 250GIG HD. Now this machine had a broken Network port on the motherboard and I had bought a TP-Link Gigabit PCI Card, which worked 100% fine in Windows. I had removed the GeForce 7600GT and used the on-board graphics card instead which meant the system was now whisper quiet.

Getting the Image

The first thing you need to do is grab the ISO, I headed to the main page and finally managed to download one of the many ISO’s on offer which I burnt onto CD. I tried the VMWare Go from a different machine, this involves booting the donor machine into Windows 7 and following the guide from another machine. This failed at the end, it complained about Firewalls and such but gave me a different link to download the client install.

Booting the CD

After writing the CD Image, I booted the machine and followed the guide, I was impressed that it knew what my Machine was (Acer Aspire E700) and once I accepted the Licence, it failed with an error and dropped to the command line – vmkctl.HostCtlException Unable to load module /usr/lib/vmware/vkmod/vmfs3: Failure

At this stage I was lost, maybe if I left it alone it might continue? Of course it never did and I went about searching on google. After some false information about setting option in the BIOS for the CPU and it was an issue with PATA or SATA, I finally got the answer I was looking for – the NETWORK CARD was at fault, seems ESXi Does not like the chipset that the TP-Link uses (RTL8169SC). I also heard that Broadcom are a problem and this is worrying.

Fixing the Issue

I still had the Intel Server Gigabit Network card which only works if you recall on a Server OS or Linux but not a desktop OS such as Windows XP or 7. I swapped them around and soon I had passed the Licence Screen and was on my way to installing the server onto the 250GIG HD. After a Reboot, I was presented with a simple screen showing me the IP Address to download the client and such.

Grabbing the client

On another machine, I pulled up a web browser and placed the IP address of the server and got the following screen:

From here I could download the vSphere Client and do other tasks as shown. Once the Client is installed, you get to manage the server from whatever machine you need to.

Converting existing Virtual Machines

As I already have VMWare Workstation with a handful of virtual machines, I wanted to convert these across to save remaking them. I Grabbed vmware vCenter Convertor and followed the process of picking the files and letting it go through the process. At the end I had the same virtual machines running on the standalone box as I did on my client machine.

Server Farms

At work we use the commercial version of this and instead of having one server per task, we have instead bought a high end server which comes with 4 x 6 Core Intel Xeon cpu’s silly amounts of Ram and harddrive space and run as many virtual machines as required. This not only stops us having to run rack after rack of servers but makes it easy to deploy another server without having to look at actual hardware.

Netbooks are often seen as not only been very portable but lasting longer then the equivalent laptop and one of the reasons I bought one all them years ago was to save me from having to carry out a normal sized laptop which never seen to last the stated life span on battery. Recently I choose to install Jolicloud onto my said netbook and while I was there, I wanted to see just how long it might last me on battery power – the results were a lot less then I expected.

Acer Aspire One A150

I bought this netbook when they first come out and I remember making sure I bought one with the least amount of Ram but a decent sized hard drive (120Gigs). The Specifications reads Intel Atom N270 / 1.6 GHz, 1.5Gig Ram, 120Gig Hard Drive, 8.9″ TFT running at 1024×600, a 3-cell Lithium Ion battery with a claimed run time of upto 3 hours and it is 1KG.I have replaced the wireless card in this with a Dell Wireless N Model (when I was using this as a Hackintosh).

The test

I ran BBC iPlayer which played a movie (dawn of the dead) which is using the screen, the wireless and the hard disk as it streams the movie. From a full charge, 30 Minitues later and the battery is down to 50%, so given this, if you wanted to watch a movie on battery alone – you will run short way before the movie is finished, in fact you will get half way through.

Hibernation

I closed the lid and it put the laptop into hibernation mode, thus saving battery, upon opening the lid, nothing happened. I had to press the power button for the netbook to wake up. It was a shame it never had some sort of quick suspend feature as this is one of the reasons why an Apple laptop is so good on battery, if you close the lid on an Apple Laptop, it is saves power and goes to sleep – open the lid and it is back to life.

I know a friend of mine took a train journey to Scotland – a good 5 hours I think to get there and he managed to use Apple Laptop all the way (on and off) and even had enough power left when he got to the other end before it needed power – yet here we have a netbook seeming to struggle keeping alive for one hour.

6 Cell Battery

You can get a 6 Cell Battery which is claimed at 8-9 hours, this adds of course weight and bulk to a small computer. You have to think how they test these laptops to get to the claimed 3 Hours, maybe that’s how long it lasts if it is doing nothing?

I have a desktop machine which I use purely for Linux, the specifications are Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz, 5GIG Ram, 80Gig Hard Drive, 19″ Widescreen TFT and nVidia 7600GT Graphics card. The on-board network has failed and it has an Intel gigbit server card installed (which Windows 7 will not recognise) and a PCI 54G Wireless Card. I had tested Fedora 13 on VMWare and liked the look of it – I set about wiping the present Ubuntu 10.10 and wanted to use Fedora instead on this machine – this is were it started to go wrong..

Fedora 13

Fedora is based from RedHat and much like every distro out there, you can choose the Gnome Look, KDE or various others. Of course one is going to look much like the next if they all run on Gnome for example, what is important here is how easy it is to install software, drivers and generally keep the system running.

I liked the look of the icons so off I went and wiped my current (working) Ubuntu 10.10 install and got this thing running. I do like using Compiz, not so much for the flashy bits but more for the multiple screens, quick switching of applications and finding out what is running at the time. This is were I got stuck to be honest, it told me my current graphics card does not support 3D – Wait, What!!

Using a different Driver

Fedora uses nouveau driver, this is free and not written by nVidia and it looks like it does not think my 7600GT is capable of 3D. After spending time on google, typing many items into Terminal and failing – I start to wonder why I wiped my machine in the first place. I looked around and found that Linux Mint has in fact a new version – currently Version 10 and out in Release Candidate stage.

Linux Mint 10 RC

Not long after Ubuntu finally got to 10.10, Linux Mint which is based off Ubuntu (which itself is based off Debian) gets there new version ready. The best way to describe Mint is you take a mix of Gnome and KDE, add in the various codecs that Ubuntu cannot distribute and you have Mint.

3D Comes as Standard

Once installed, there was an icon informing me there is a driver I can install, supplied by nVidia and once this is selected and installed – we have Compiz in all the glory. What I did like about adding stuff here is you press what looks like the ‘start’ button and type and if it is a package that is not installed, you can do it right there.

Use what works for you

Many people who use Linux say “Ubuntu is bad, use Slackware” or “Fedora is better then Ubuntu” – what I say in fact is your better of using what you know and if your more comfortable type ‘apt-get’ instead of ‘yum’ then go with that. This was the case of Mint vs. Fedora, I coul dhave took the time and got 3D Working in Fedora but I felt it easier and better for me to just install a distro I know how to get working..

As per my other post abut NAS Drives – yesterday I took it upon myself to build a NAS box from parts I already had and thus save myself spending any money. The goal if you recall was to have a system that was able to be upgraded in space later such as adding 1TB or larger Harddrives as needs arose. This journey took a while to get everything ready and was the end result worth the effort involved?

The Acer Aspire E700 Desktop

The machine was a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83Ghz which had 5GIG RAM (2x512MB and 2x2GIG), NVidia GeForce 7600GT but also had an inbuilt graphics card along with 6 SATA COnnectors internal and a total of 10 USB Ports. A Point to mention was the internal 1Gbit LAN Card was not working. This presently had two SATA Drives fitted, 1x250GIG and 1x80GIG. I added a Intel Pro/1000 T Server NIC I had spare for the networking.

Prepaing the 1TB Harddrive

In my Dell desktop, I had fitted an extra 1TB Harddrive – this stored all my applications, Tunes, Backgrounds, games and so forth. The first (and long) task was to move everything across to my 750GIG Drives that came with the Dell.  A Point to note here was that my Tunes directory needed sorting out anyhow and once I deleted them from iTunes, all playlist + number of plays and so forth would be lost

Preparing the NAS Box

I booted from the FreeNAS CD I had made and went through the menu to install onto a Flash drive (USB) – this was to make sure then when the machine was re-started, it would retain it’s settings. I did a few tests to see how it worked but at this stage no drives were formatted on the Acer. I stripped out the Graphics card, 4GIG Ram (leaving 1GIG) and re-routed the wiring best I could. I did a few tests to see how much noise was present and seemed happy to go forward onto the next stage.

Networking

As my old router broke which had 1Gbit Networking and my present 5 port Gigabit Switch only has 4 ports working – I had two choices here. I could either plug in the NAS Box into the router and limit it to 100mbit or take on of my other machines off the Gigabit network and run it from there.  In the end I thought it was just easier to place the computer near the router and run it from 100mbit port.

Preparing the drives

IN the Acer machine we now had 80gig, 250gig and 1TB Harddrive – all of which could be formatted by the NAS Box. IN the USB ports we had 500gig and 1TB iomega drives which currently have files already on (NTFS). Setting up the drives was easy enough, a long drawn out process though:

• Adding the Drive to the Disks Management
• Formatting the Said Disks
• Setting up a mount point
• Adding a Share per drive

All I ended off with was the same number of shares that I had drives. No matter how hard I tried though, I could not get to add the 1TB iomega drive and I said to myself that I would plug it into a Laptop and make sure it had no errors and such.

Copying the Files across the network

I choose the 250gig drive as my ‘Applications’ Drive – I started to copy across the various directories and was shocked how slow it was going across. I could understand why – 100mbit network compared to 1Gbit is of course going to be a lot slower. I stopped the process as it was getting late and would re-evaluate this NAS Box the next day.

I wish to also make a point about noise, while most people have no issues with leaving a computer (or many) sitting there humming away – I need the device to be silent and also the power it needs is also important – I do not need 250Watts been drawn 24/7 just in case I need a file one day across the network. After powering down all the computers and equipment – the fact it was also very warm that night – I could hear the fan grinding away along with the 2 External Harddrives been hot enough to cook eegs on. I powered the whole lot down – time to re-evaluate my needs.

What do I really need?

The machine that is most of the time is my Dell Core i7, my other machines come on now and then as needed. The few things that need sharing would be:

• Backdrops – This is currently 5gigs
• Tunes – be nice to have them on all machines.
• Applications – On the odd time I need to get them across to other machines.

I had a look though at what machines I use and a loss of 5gigs would be a drop in the ocean for backdrops given how much space each of these machines have. iTunes can already share out the music and the rest was easy enough to copy across the network from machine to machine as needed. The Bottom line is while I would love the idea of a large storage pool with fast copy speeds, I would need to spend some money to achieve this goal and the current crop of Harddrives I own are not worth of making into a NAS box.

End result

While it was a good exercise in making a NAS Box, I am in the process of copying all the files back to my Dell (which is taking a long time) from the NAS Box. I will place the 1TB Drive back into the Dell and move the files back into there respective places. I shall re-built the Acer E700 back into a Desktop machine – maybe using the 250Drive in another machine.

The Acer Revo R600 is what is termed a NetTop PC, this been very small form factor, cheap and low wattage desktop computer. I Spotted this on sale at ebuyer via a mail shot for £149.99. What do you get for the money? Is it a good media centre PC? Can it play games? Read on to find out more.

Specs

Intel Atom 230 1.6GHz

NVIDIA® ION™ chipset

1 x 1GB DDR2 800 SDRAM

160GB Serial ATA II

nVidia ION Graphics

High Definition audio (7.1) Audio

Wireless & Wired connections

Interfaces

• 6 x USB 2.0 ports
• Four-in-one card reader
• High definition headphone and microphone jacks
• DC-in jack
• Ethernet port
• D-Sub VGA port
• HDMI port
• eSATA port

Dimensions : 180 x 180 x30 mm

Verdict

The Intel Atom 230 CPU running at 1.6Ghz is about right for this small a desktop and while netbook struggle to cope with HD, when paired with the nVidia ION Graphics, it can handle HD in 720 and with a few tweaks to the settings, can even handle HD 1080P. Game is not realyl on the cards, maybe at a low resolution and settings but this is not what this machine is aimed at. If you wanted something small and cheap which can run 24/7 without burning to much electricity and no noise – such as running a web server, then this is also for you.  

In 2009 there was a big movement in providing a cut down laptop which featured a 8.9” Screen, Intel Atom Processor and even some running from Solid state drives. The goal of these were highly portable computers that you could just chuck in your bag with long battery life and of course cheaper then a full blown laptop. Many people looked at these and fancied buying one thinking they could use them while out and about seen as they were so light and small but do they suit every need? Let us break it down.

Physical size

I have seen screens ranging from 8.9”, 10” and even 11.1” – what does remain the same for most part is the resolution of 1024×600. This is the first issue that most people have but I remember running a desktop computer on 1024×768, not that much different from the above right. Another aspect that might effect the size would be the battery, a normal battery allows the bottom to be flush while a 6 Cell Battery will stick out.

Screen Size

Like I pointed out above, does working on a 1024×600 screen present a problem to you? Some NetBooks come with a Pre-set Linux interface which makes best use of that small space with icons as such:

I use windows 7 and for most part this is fine, there is the odd program that goes off the screen and I cannot get access to press next. Remember you can always plug in an external screen so this is not as major as you think.

Processor

The Intel Atom processor is about half the speed of the equivalent Celeron Processor of the same clock speed, this is by no way a replacement for even an AMD Laptop, it is not meant to be though. I find using it on a day to day basis is perfectly fine for the needs of the netbook but I will not be converting video’s on this machine or broadcasting via wirecast.

Keyboard

There is no way getting away from this, the machine is very small so the keyboard is also very small indeed. I find the keyboard to be the likes of pecking away to get the job done but as I am not writing my latest novel on this, the machine works just fine for my fingers (as in they are not fat). The machine features USB so yes you can plug in a Keyboard if at a desk.

Harddrive

You have a choice of Solid State drives (4GIG, 8GIG etc) or 1.7” drives which come sin normal capacity. I made sure I bought a netbook which had 120GIG Drives – more then enough for my needs. Solid State are faster and lighter but not sure I am happy with the limit of 8GIG.

Webcams

I have yet to see a decent webcam built into one of these things, yes they get the picture out and would be fine for chatting to someone on Skype but do not expect to be broadcasting in 2MP quality for streaming. I found for streaming in fact the webcam could not keep up for FPS, now maybe some of the other netbooks have better webcams but the CPU will give up long before the webcam anyhow.

Battery Life

The quoted battery life and reality is quite different, they quote something like 6 hours but I would say this is closer to 2-3 hours in real life use. You can get 3 Cell Batteries (2-3 Hours life) which are slim and flush to the laptop while the 6 Cell Beasts last 6 hours and stick out (some call this a stand) on the laptop.       

What is a Netbook for?

Quite a simple question, were would you need a netbook over a normal laptop for your day to day life? A Netbook weighs not much at all and takes up a very small space and this alone makes a difference to carrying around a full blow laptop. To give an example in a working environment:

The company I used to work for used Linux for Servers and quite often I would need to go out on site (Construction) armed not only with tool and networking gear but a bag containing a 15.4” Laptop, Power supply and various other software etc. All I need the laptop for in reality was to SSH into the server and configure the various parts and quite often the laptop would be running out of power after 1.5 hours of heavy use thus I had to go and find a power point to carry on the work, so the normal laptop in this instance was too cumbersome by far. With a netbook, I could reduce what I was carrying and last longer and get the job done, the keyboard was find to be typing Linux commands into and the CPU Speed did not come into play whatever.

Should I go and buy one?

This depends on what you do with a computer – if you spend most of your time at your desk then personally a netbook will not be for you, in fact it will just sit there was take up space, I guarantee you will not use it at all. If you have Fat Fingers (sorry) then you are going to struggle to type on this thing and if your eyesight is starting to go – this also will present a problem seeing what is on the screen.

A Strange thing happened with Netbooks though – the started to increase the screen size, add bigger drives and also started to increase the price. No Longer were they very cheap but instead people started to say “Why don’t I just buy a normal laptop?” and this is why the sales started to fall along with people getting confused as to why they had no DVD roms fitted – they were never meant to have otherwise it might as well be a Laptop.

Some Netbooks make excellent Hackintosh computers for example such as the Acer Aspire One, I had this running 10.5.8 no problems at all with everything working as it should (I replaced the Wireless card).

Conclusion

While a Netbook might seem the thing to have, go to the store, try one and see if you can use it like a normal computers. Try the keyboard, see how small the screen is, compare thin, small laptops and see if this is a better idea. Netbooks are not for everyone, I think they are great which is why I own one.     

I bought this little Netbook some time back now, it was an impulse buy and the goal was to have a small netbook to take around various sites to SSH into Server and for this it worked great. It came with 512MB ram (cheapest one with a proper HD) and I have installed Ubuntu, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 through it’s life. I thought I would give it a go at OSX – why not right?

Upgrading the RAM

Now the first thing I had to do of course was upgrade that RAM and I must point out you have to rip this thing apart just to get at the RAM, that’s a pretty bad design by any stretch and the board contained 512MB soldered on, so with only one slot, you can only get up to a max of 1.5GIG – pretty Lame. Had I know this info at the time, I would have stumped the extra cache and bought the 1GIG model. Anyhow, I installed 1GIG DDR2 Ram and this bumped it up to 1.5Gigs which helped the speed a great deal.

Installing OSX

I first tried iDeneb 1.5.1 which is a 10.5.7 distro, I had a problem with the keyboard in that 7’s would repeat and this made it impossible to type in a password or anything for that matter. I moved onto a Guide posted HERE which explains how to do this via iPC 10.5.6 distro and everything went well following that UNTIL I updated via the iDeneb 10.5.7 update and this meant I had to type “cpus=1” every single time, I could have easy fixed this but the next part killed it dead – I chucked in various Kext’s and was met with a white screen and a dead system in fact – moral here is do not go wild and chuck in any old kext or you will kill the system.

iDeneb 10.5.7 (1.5.1)

I was back to this again and worked out that I had to select the PS2 fix which made no sense but it helped and now the keyboard worked as well as the trackpad. I had a working 10.5.7 system at this point minus the wireless and it is known the wireless in the Acer One not to work fully, some have had a little success but mostly it is prone to failure. I tried the various fixes as listed and at one point had the wireless showing up but not connecting and upon reboot was met with a kernel panic.

Dell Wireless Card

With the Dell Desktop, I got a Dell 1505 Wireless N Card which came fitted into a PCI holder – now I had no need for this on my desktop (I connect via gigabit wired) but it would work a treat on the netbook. I ripped it apart once again (getting good at this now) and replaced the wireless and rebooted. Low and behold not only did the wireless light come on (which is new to me) but OS X Booted up. I checked and there was wireless symbol, it showed me all the wireless and I connected. We now had a fully functional Mac NetBook – something Apple has failed to provide as of yet.

Update to 10.5.8

I simply went to software update and updated – problem was, although the machine worked, the graphics were now 800×600 and no Quartz. After searching and finding various fixes, I found the 10.5.7 one and now had 1024×600 with Quartz, there was some slight graphical glitches but mostly it worked.

Working or not?

The end result is a Netbook Powered by an Atom 1.6Ghz with 1.5 GIG ram and Wireless N Networking running OS X 10.5.8 fully updated. It seem’s quite nippy and apart from the small screen size, can do everything a normal apple laptop could. Reason mainly for OSX was speed and just to see if it can be done.  

The Acer Desktop was small and was prone to getting very hot inside which caused the CPU Fan to jump from 998RPM to 4500+ RPM which meant it sounded like an Aircraft taking off. You could argue that UK does not get Hot that much but the room were the computer are was very hot indeed – even with Desktop Fans blowing onto me – it was still like living in a Sauna.

I had a spare box complete with ASUS P5N-E SLi NF650i 775 Motherboard but the only issue I had with that was there was no fixing plate for the CPU. I ripped apart the Acer and worked out how to get the holding bracket from the CPU Holder and re-attached this to the ASUS Board and now started to build this machine. The case was your pretty standard iCute case I got some years ago for free:

Once finally all back in one piece, I booted it up to make sure it worked and as expected Vista failed to boot. I stuck in the WIndows 7 RC1 64Bit DVD and proceed to install that instead. Now the number of fans went like this:

• CPU Fan – Spinning at 2200RPM
• Front Case Fan – Spinning at 900RPM – Cooling HD’s
• Back Case Fan – Extracting Air out of the Case.
• Top Fan – They say Heat Rises, fitted to MOLEX Connector – Spinning at full Speed.
• Side Case fan  – Never understood these – blowing onto Ram, Molex and Full Speed.

Now instead of pure silence and then Bang – Full RPM, this was now at a medium hum all the time but I noticed the CPU Temp was 40c even at idle. I finally removed (un-plugged) the Side Case and top Fans, on the grounds that they made the most noise due to been on full speed all the time and the system went down to a very low hum – this is now workable and I am happy and even better, the CPU went down to 32c.

Was it all worth it?

The Acer motherboard defiantly had some problems, streaming via ProCaster would Hold back the data for some reason, copying files were slow (GIGABIT Network remember) and now this mad Fan problem even though the CPU was cool. Not all is lost with the Acer, I can buy a new CPU Fan (Cheap one) and it already has a C2D 1.8GHz CPU in there along with Spare GeForce 7600GS – so I can make a new machine out of it over time.

The iMac was quiet no matter what and this has a 2.8GHz CPU and built into the confines of a monitor. Laptops by there very design are quiet for most part but desktop Machine’s for some reason are too noisy. I see them in the shops and they seem very quiet but the environment is not a library  – so easy to be fooled. I have seen (or rather heard) an HP machine which was so quiet, you would be mistaken that it was actually on until you work out the inside is low powered crap. 

I have two desktop computers up and running, one if a old Fujitsu Siemens and personally this was never totally silent as it is powered by a Athlon 64 3700. The case is smaller I would say then a normal tower case plus the Athlon 64 was never a cool CPU – the noise is bearable and constant but it would not be a machine I would leave on 24/7 for example and I notice that while the Temp rises while playing a game, it comes down quickly afterwards.

The other machine is off the shelf but along the way has had a few changes made, for example I swapped the 1.8GHz CPU for my 2.4GHz one, the graphics card from on-board to PCI-Express and slipped in there 4 sticks of Ram (which have heat spreaders on). The case inside is no bigger then the Athlon so there is not much room at all. There is two problems with this machine:

1. While trying to stream 640×480 on FME/Wirecast/Procaster etc – hold back data.

2. Once the Temp of the system (not the CPU) rises due to room temp, the cpu FAN spins up to 4500 RPM and its get noisy, a quick reboot fixes this but WHY does it not go back down?

I have a ASUS Motherboard spare and a case and even a CPU Heatsink/Fan but no mounting brackets for the CPU holder (just holes). I am very close at this time to rip the motherboard out of the Acer, see if I can take the mounting brackets off the CPU holes and re-fit the entire lot into this case. This would means a complete rebuild of my OS, for it to be placed in a case not as nice looking and no guarantee that the noise will get any better. It has crossed my mind that the system works outsaide of these minor issues and as I type this, the Fans are spinning at 3434RPM with the CPU sitting at 37c for example – motherboard reads 47c.

Maybe this is the reason people just go and buy a Dell computer – it works, it’s quiet and yes I agree you have no control over overclocking.

When I bought this netbook, after looking into it – I did wonder if I had actually bought the wrong one, meaning one with 1 GIG ram for example. After much digging around, I learned the max ram is only 1.5gig it seems – so the 1 GIG Model would have 512MB Stick as well as onboard and as I already had such an Item, I saved myself some money.

I Did follow a gide of sorts to get Ubuntu on there and for most part it worked well enough but there ws a few niggles such as not all web sites seeing the camera or telling me it was in use as well as the internal Mic been disabled. If the machine went to sleep (Closing the lid) it disabled the sound. I choose to move across to Windows on this thing. My task was to somehow run Ultimate Boot CD so I could make a ghost image of Ubuntu and swap back later if required. I eventually gave up on trying to make a bootable USB stick and instead ripped apart a IDE Harddrive to stick a CD ROM on there and allow me to boot and get the image done as well as Install Windows XP Pro.

My View is that the Linux you get with it is way too limited and Ubuntu just does not work as well as could be expected – maybe another Linux (Fedora) might work better. Windows Works very well, you can see the speed go downhill but this is mainly for installing apps and the lag on the Webcam can be seen also. My Guess is with AntiVirus running in the background and the slow CPU – this makes sense BUT WIndows is much more usable then anything else. My Plan is to use it as a portable streaming machine of sorts – maybe I might use another USB Webcam though. I think the machine is fast enough, the screen is workable at the given 1024×600 and the gloosy looks suits well along with the very low weight. If you have a main machine and fancy a netbook for on the move – I would say go and buy one.