Installing Windows 7 on Acer Aspire 5500

Vista is notorious for being a hardware hog. The optimal specs for Vista is at least 3.0GHz of processing power, around 1GB of RAM and a 128MB graphics card.

And it just so happened that I had to reformat (yet again) my Acer Aspire 5500 because of the usual reason. Unfortunately for some reason, eRecovery was inexplicably gone. I have to reinstall Windows from the ground up. My XP installers are all gone, so I have to resort to either Vista or Win7. I did a quick check on the specs and got the following:

• Intel Pentium M processor 740 (1.73GHz, 533MHz FSB, 2MB L2 cache)
• ATI Mobility Radeon X700
• 512MB DDR2 RAM
• 802.11bg WLAN

Which is why the obvious improvement of Win7 over Vista was welcome. On my rig that contains both version of Windows, Vista consumes about 1.1GB of RAM, compared to Win7 that eats only around 500MB.

But the question still remains, is it possible for such an under-spec’ed machine to run Windows 7?

Hell, yeah.

The Windows 7 Experience

When the Windows 7 official beta ISO got leaked to the torrents at the beginning of this year, it became the most downloaded file on the Net, mostly because of first-hand accounts regarding the impressive changes the new version has over Vista. I was looking for a new OS at that time, and I almost ended up installing Win7 instead of Vista, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m not too keen on downloading torrents, and the BETA watermark written all over it is more than enough reason to dissuade me, even though everybody else claims that the beta was stable enough to be used as an everyday OS.

In Defense of Vista

On October 22, 2009, Vista will officially die to make way for Windows7. For Vista, it’s gonna be a sad and painful death. In this day and age, the battle for technological supremacy has never been more intense. War is raging on various fronts, including web browsers, game consoles, mobiles and of course, operating systems, where every involved parties try to outdo their competitors and even a minor flaw gets magnified a thousandfold thanks to the rabid supporters of each platform who flood user-driven sites. The whole thing is pointless, if you ask me.

It’s easy to understand why there was too much expectation for Windows Vista. Its predecessor, XP, was widely regarded by a lot of people as the best Windows ever. Period. XP was so good it lingered for more than 6 years, quite a lengthy period of time to prepare the next version of Windows. The pressure for Microsoft to top XP was quite high. And Vista failed to do that.

House Renovation

Front:

From this:

To this:

Living Room
From this:

To this:

??? What do you call this? LOL

From this:

To this: