I am struggling with space on my Toshiba Satellite laptop. The machine originally came with a 160 GB hard drive, but I gave up 30 GB of that to dual boot Windows XP. I increased the memory from 1 GB to 2 GB which helps run virtual machines but they take up some space too, so I am usually working with less than 20 GB. It doesn’t help that I download quite a few movies. I decided that in addtion to the pre-ordered netbook, 2009 would also be a “new computer” year for me. With the current state of the economy I expected to see some good sales on electronic items.

And so it was. While I was browsing at Staples last week, a display showed   a clearance sale of Dell Studio Hybrids at a price of $500 (plus local sales tax). The machine is supplied with 4GB of memory, a 250 GB hard drive and a 2 GHz processor. The form factor is what attracted me the most. It’s about the size of a thick textbook, not unlike a Mac Mini. On the downside I would have to deal with Microsoft Vista but this was to be expected. I had installed the Release Candidate of Windows 7 in a virtual machine and decided that it could coexist with GNU/Linux as either in a virtual machine or as a dual boot. Microsoft promises that it will run without problem at least until March 2010. Therefore I could dump Vista, install Windows 7 and either eventually buy the beast or convert the machine to Linux at any time. I proceeded to purchase the machine.

Before dumping Vista I noted some nice things… more about Dell than Microsoft. There was no crapware installed. Yes, there was a trial version of a popular antivirus, but you can’t run without one so I dismissed this. There was a dock installed. It was not as customizable as the Cairo Dock installed on my Linux box, but it was quite functional. A little poking around revealed an “About” screen showing that the dock was developed by Stardock for Dell. Not bad.

The Windows 7 install was not without problems. I canceled the first install when I was asked to decide between a clean install or an upgrade. A little homework indicated that I should opt for an upgrade. If possible, any Dell installed software would be kept including drivers and probably that dock that I liked. The next attempt indicated that not all the installed software was compatible and would have to be removed before proceeding. Nothing important, but again the upgrade was canceled, the offending software removed and the upgrade restarted. Again the upgrade complained about incompatible software. Why didn’t it find everything the first time? I repeated the removal process and restarted the upgrade for a third time. The install went smoothly and in about 45 minutes I had a working system. Well, working except for the inevitable Windows updates and reboots.

Two things were immediately apparent in contrast to Vista. First, the annoying User Account Control (UAC) warnings have been corrected. It now works as it should have in the first place. Second, the taskbar has a whole new look and some changes in functionality. There is nothing to dislike here but there are still no virtual desktops by default as they are in most Linux distros. Like a dock, they are not necessities but they  are quite useful.

I went on to install Google’s Chrome browser and a few of my favorite Windows utilities. These may or may not be topics of future articles. It is my intention to work with this machine in it’s current configuration for a few months. At this point, while I cannot recommend Windows 7, I can say that it seems to be a worthwhile upgrade from Vista.  Its compatibility with most Vista applications and the speed at which Microsoft got it released suggests that it might have been called Vista SE. Of course, Microsoft couldn’t do that because of Vista’s bad rap!