I’ve got a netbook which I use for tinterweb via a dongle and the occasional game like uplink and the old C&C games. It’s running windows 7 at the moment but it’s too slow. What OS should or can I put on with no cd drive? Needs to work with iTunes too for my Jesusphone 4

nlite or vlite.

I think vlite is compatible with 7. Google is your friend.

I want to get rid of 7. I’ve thought about xp as it can be installed from a memory stick. Can the same be done from a memory card?

im running this aspire one on an nlited xp build I put together. I also made a bootable USB stick. Do a search on google for netbook bootable xp usb stick instructions.

you’ll need a copy of xp.

7 again but this one fits on a usb or card. I think the card and usb should act the same.?

I used nlite a couple of years ago to shrink windows XP to fit on a 4gb Asus EEE pc. Worked a treat and still works fine now.

Xubuntu or similar linux.

I’d like to try Linux. But couldn’t understand how to get it working 🙁

If you want to try before you buy (so to speak), google “Ubuntu live CD”.

As a rule of thumb, W7 will be faster than XP on a netbook, all other things being equal. Best thing you can do is pull the 1Gb RAM SODIMM and swap it for a 2Gb one. Also, look into readyboost with reference to your SD card slot.

There is a new version of ubuntu called ubuntu netbook. No prizes for guessing what its for. Go to the ubuntu site and down load the netbook version and the little tool for putting it onto a usb stick. No faf at all, my daughter uses it on her old pc. Don’t know about itunes though.

cougar – a number of peoples’ experiences in here have been that up to 1GB xp is consistently faster than W7.

I tried W7 on mine (16GB SSD, 1GB, Atom CPU) and it was unuseable.

It came bundled with fisher price Linux (Linpus) which was a pain as I need to run Excel. Hence the XP nlite solution which has been excellent.

I now dont really need to run excel on this anymore so cant wait to try Chrome sometime 😉

Go onto the Ubuntu website, find Live CD, follow the Windows instructions. And don’t be afraid, it’s really simple.
Check it out here.

neils OW, can you run google chrome browser on ubuntu?

A bit about itunes and Ubuntu.

Stoner, you can. Check the latest issue of Linux Format.

Failing that, have you considered adding some more RAM? 2GB should do it.
You should also look at paring back all the crap that comes pre-installed – any background processes, you could swap the Antivirus for something with a smaller profile and so on.
I have a Samsung N210 that is hella slow with the Samsung stuff pre-installed. Spend an hour removing it all, and it’s not half bad.

You could use any Linux you like, but I would say either something very small (Like Puppy) or something very popular and well supported (like Ubuntu). From Windows, get Unetbootin, you can use this to make a boot USB stick with the OS of choice. Have a quick Google to see what works with your hardware.

As said above UNR seems ok for most netbooks. I prefer normal Ubuntu because that’s what I’m used to. Or Mint, like Ubuntu but green!

neils OW, can you run google chrome browser on ubuntu?

Yes. I don’t know why you would, but you can.

I don’t like Chrome.

Ubuntu Netbook is for… netbooks.
Xubuntu and Lubuntu require less resource.
Mint is based on Ubuntu but minty in colour.
My Pentium 2-based Thinkpad manages Ubuntu, but it’s a very old version. It’ll get treated to Xubuntu Low Resource (a version of Xubuntu) sometime.

cougar – a number of peoples’ experiences in here have been that up to 1GB xp is consistently faster than W7.

Fair enough. I was kinda generalising, there’s a lot of factors. I guess the answer there is, one way to find out.

I have just plugged the daughters ipod nano in to ubuntu 10.04 and it recognised it straight away. It brought up a program called rythmbox which is the default music player. Looks just like itunes and behaves the same way.

The basic version of Windows 7 (can’t remember the version) is specifically designed for Netbooks and any recent Netbook will be specifically designed to run W7 efficiently. If it’s not working properly there is something else wrong.

I run XP on my 1Gb memory 1.6Ghz 16Gb SDD, and running Comodo anti virus and firewall.

It runs really really quick! iplayer works fine full screen, stuff like Word 2003 opens instantly & firefox works well.