Choosing the best OS for a Netbook

BANGALORE, INDIA: The true position for netbooks today is essentially as secondary computing devices for those who are travelling and don't want to carry bulky devices, particularly if they want to use it just for accessing the Net or some digital content such as pictures, songs, video, presentations, files, etc.

These devices are more or less identical in performance as they run on the Intel Atom processor, predominantly 1.66 GHz with 1GB of RAM and 160 GB of hard disk. We have made this generalization because majority of the netbooks we received this time for the shootout had these specs. But there is one more aspect which can make the difference while choosing a netbook or while upgrading/customizing it.

And that is its OS. We can't upgrade components which go inside the box (most of the netbooks we received didn't even had an option to upgrade the RAM, and if even they had one, it was just one slot with the installed RAM). However, we can go ahead and change the OS to get both, better performance and better look and feel in a netbook.

What are the options?
Today predominantly all netbooks come loaded with Windows XP. And in case of Linux, mostly it's any plain vanilla Linux distro which ships with the box. You can stick with Windows XP in your netbook and can get a decent performance, but Win XP is reaching its end of life and can be discontinued very soon. So, what to do? One option could be to upgrade to the upcoming Microsoft Windows 7.

Yes! You read it right, unlike Windows Vista, Windows 7 runs pretty well on a netbook. We will see some test results subsequently in the article and see how well it performed as compared against a Linux version and Windows XP. This OS not only gives a beautiful look to your netbook but also makes it pretty secure and of course will have a longer life. The other contender for your netbook could be a Linux distro. B

ut it shouldn't be any standard Linux distro, as most of them are big in size, and run so many applications, most of which are completely unnecessary for a netbook. You can select any of your favourite distro and tune it up by turning off most of the services. But if playing with Linux internals is not your cup of tea then you should select a distro from some of the customized Linux distros specifically designed for a netbook.

You can find five of them with this month's DVD. We tried one of those five distros called Eeebuntu, which is a customized Ubuntu distro for EeePCs and netbooks. But before we discuss its performance let's discuss more about the three prime distros.

Windows XP
Most netbooks are preinstalled with Win XP so the direct benefit you get here is that the drivers for Win XP will be natively available from the vendor and you don't have to hunt for any. But the drawback as discussed earlier is that it is pretty old, not as secure as Windows Vista and you shall soon see the launch of Windows 7.

The other problem is that, if you don't get it pre-installed, installing it could be a challenge, as it doesn't have a USB install option natively and netbooks don't come with optical media drives. And the other thing which can be considered as a drawback is its static look. After the arrival of Windows Vista Aero and Compiz in Linux, we are all too fond of animated desktop environment. Not just because it gives us something to flaunt but also because some of these features actually enhance productivity.

Eeebuntu
One of the biggest merits of this distro or for that matter any Linux distro is that it's free. And when we are talking about netbooks which sometimes are considered a device for low budget buyers, it actually makes a lot of sense as one can further reduce the price of a netbook by some 3k just by opting out from a paid OS. At the same time if you compare the look and feel of Eeebuntu with WinXP, Eeebuntu is far much superior.

Securitywise as well, a Linux distro like Eeebuntu is pretty much secure than WinXP and at the same time it does away with the requirement of installing an antivirus which is a must for Win XP saving quite a bit of processing power and RAM. This performance becomes more significant in case of a net book due to its low power processor.

Plus, while you install this OS, you also get a complete office suite (Open Office 3.0) and lot many useful utilities, unlike with any Windows OS. And surprisingly, even after installing so many utilities, it eats up less hard disk space and installation time taken is the lowest.

But with all these benefits, there are some drawbacks as well. And the obvious one is the lack of vendor support. There's no guarantee that you will get the right drivers for all the hardware sitting inside your netbook. So for instance while we installed Eeebuntu on a netbook (an EeePC to be precise), it still was not able to detect the LAN and WiFi drivers, and we couldn't find them on Asus' website.

We did found some compatible driver for the LAN card after a lot of search but it's actually ironical that a custom distro made for EeePC doesn't have all the EeePC drivers out of the box. And I am sure for a new user finding such drivers and configuring the devices by his own could turn out to be a nightmare.

Windows 7
The most awaited OS, hopefully we will see it in the Indian market by the end of October 2009. It looks pretty promising for netbooks. We tried out the Windows 7 RC1 Ultimate on the EeePC. For a change, unlike Windows Vista it supports Atom-based machines very well and actually runs on netbooks with full blown Aero. The look and feel was pretty nice and the installation was a breeze.

It also didn't detect the LAN and WiFi drivers but Windows XP drivers available from Asus' website worked for us and once the Net was on through that driver, it was able to detect and download the correct build of the driver from Microsoft.com and worked perfectly. Apart from this, two network cards, all other drivers were detected out of the box and worked fine. Moreover, the other benefit you will get here is that you can very easily create a Windows 7 USB installer from a Windows 7 installation DVD, which makes it very easy for installing it on a netbook.

Benchmarks and performance
Now that we have talked about the overall benefits of these three OSes, let's look at some real scores and numbers and see who won the race in terms of performance. To test the performance we tried quite a few things. We checked how long it takes to install all these OSes on a netbook, we checked for boot up and shutdown time, we checked for time taken to copy a 100 MB file from USB to HDD, HDD to USB and HDD to HDD and we even ran a platform independent benchmark called Geekbench on all Oses and saw who got the max score and where.

For testing all these we used Asus EeePC 1005HA with Atom 1.6Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM and 160 GB of HDD. All the tests were run while the machine was on AC power so that we don't get any performance difference due to processor stepping, etc. Though some of the OSes did support the USB install, we installed all these three OSes from an external DVD drive connected over a USB 2.0 port.

Installation time
We noted the time taken for installing all the three OSes discussed above. We made sure that we don't count the screens where user needs to feed in data, so the time of the actual installation process was taken into consideration. In this test, the winner was Eeebuntu which took just 12 minutes to get installed followed by Windows 7 which took slightly less that 17 minutes. The maximum time was taken by our good old friend windows XP.

File copy tests
We also tried copying a 100 MB file from a USB to HDD, and vice versa, and from HDD to HDD. We thought here we will not get any difference. But except in the case of USB to HDD transfer, which took 11 sec for each OS, we got some substantial difference in time. Eeebuntu won by just taking 3 seconds to copy the file from HDD to HDD followed by Win XP which took 5 secs and Windows 7 took 7 secs.

The HDD to USB transfer was the one which showed us the maximum difference. It took 3 seconds for Eeebuntu to copy the file, where as Windows 7 and Windows XP took 44 and 80 seconds respectively for the same.