After sev­eral months of con­tem­plat­ing on the idea of a school laptop, I finally caved in and made the pur­chase of an Asus Eee PC 1000. I’ve thrown the Win­dows 7 beta on there and it is abso­lutely fab­ulous to use.

The thing that I like most about the Win­dows 7 beta is that it actu­ally works. You can use it as an every­day oper­at­ing sys­tem almost flaw­lessly. All the hard­ware worked from out of the box, with the excep­tion of the Eth­er­net port and the web­cam. Just down­load the XP Eth­er­net driver from the Asus sup­port web­site (the web­cam is still some­thing I’m fig­ur­ing out). Per­haps I should note that installing Win­dows 7 on the 8GB SSD is not a good idea — stick just a few applic­a­tions on there and you’ll find you’ve got no space left.

Bat­tery life is about 5 hours from a full charge.

Con­sid­er­ing the size of this net­book, it is remark­ably easy to type on — even easier than most full-size laptops I’ve used. If you read the art­icles on the inter­net, though, there are com­plaints about the right shift key pos­i­tion. Now con­sid­er­ing that I didn’t think I even used the right shift key, let me tell it really is atro­cious as I keep hit­ting the up key instead — almost every time. Most of the other keys are well placed (although the Func­tion keys are a little to the left). The track­pad is also good.

The micro­phone is OK. Con­sid­er­ing that I’ll rarely be using it, it doesn’t really mat­ter. And because the micro­phone is below the screen, typ­ing is very loud.

Unfor­tu­nately, most other net­books are smal­ler and although they are sig­ni­fic­antly cheaper, I wouldn’t recom­mend get­ting one with a screen of less than 10 inches. You might think £280 is a lot for such a small machine but it’s the port­ab­il­ity, the bat­tery and the qual­ity you get — this thing looks abso­lutely stun­ning, the white ver­sion looks like a little Mac­book. When I’ve got the funds, I’ll be mod­ding it with a touch screen and a GPS dongle.

I should stress the import­ance of a Wind Surfer to help boost your Wifi sig­nal. Mine went from 2 bars to 4 bars and all it took was a few minutes of print­ing, cut­ting and sticking.

I’ve recently found myself enticed with all the Win­dows 7 art­icles demon­strat­ing things to come from the oper­at­ing sys­tem that’s now being dubbed “what Vista could have been”. And already it cer­tainly looks like Microsoft’s attempt at rec­ti­fy­ing all the things that Vista fell down on.

All the leg­acy pro­grams like Word­Pad and Paint have been updated and are now in fit­ting with the new look of Win­dows. Not­ably, the cal­cu­lator has received a large upgrade and it boasts fea­tures like con­ver­sions, a mort­gage cal­cu­lator and a gas mileage cal­cu­lator. What pre­vi­ously took a few Google searches and a long-winded Excel spread­sheet can now be done with a few clicks.

Everything just seems to integ­rate bet­ter with Win­dows 7 as well: chan­ging wire­less net­works just takes two clicks, the side­bar is no more but the gad­gets can roam the desktop and things like Aero Shake sug­gest (nice but poten­tially annoy­ing) Compiz Fusion–like effects.

Per­form­ance seems to be a lot bet­ter than Vista too: everything from shorter boot times to longer laptop bat­tery life seems to be the way that Win­dows 7 is going. As Vista seemed slug­gish com­pared to its pre­de­cessors, I’m excited that Microsoft have turned it back around. It can even run with a mere 1GB of RAM although con­sid­er­ing memory is dirt-cheap nowadays, there needn’t be a tiff if it were to require more.

The taskbar has also been hugely redesigned and while I’m not too hot on it at the moment, I’m sure it’ll all fall into place in time. Essen­tially, the new taskbar makes bet­ter use of the space and takes the pre­view win­dow to the next level.

There’s also prom­ise that Win­dows 7, from day one, will be more stable than Vista SP1. Whilst I’m not so sure myself, as every new oper­at­ing sys­tem faces numer­ous bugs, I’m fairly con­fid­ent that Win­dows 7 will be a strong OS that should see us through for a good few years.

Oh! How could I for­get that they’ve redesigned UAC to be insanely less intrus­ive? You may be able keep it enabled without los­ing your insan­ity. Indi­vidual applic­a­tions can be allowed forever and you can also change the fero­city of UAC, pre­sum­ably inside the depths of the Con­trol Panel.

All in all, Win­dows 7 has shaped up to be what could be the best oper­at­ing sys­tem the world has seen. I’m inter­ested in what devel­op­ments other oper­at­ing sys­tems will see as Win­dows 7 nears its launch in mid 2009.