Would Windows XP provide better performance than Windows 7 on Intel Atom Z520?

Question

I've bought a netbook Asus Eee 1101HA with Intel Atom Z520 1,33GHz and Windows 7.

Even though it is used for basic things (web browsing and simple photo edition in Picasa), its performance is totally bad - often hangs when 5 Chrome tabs and 2 Windows Explorers are open.

Do You think that downgrading to Windows XP would provide better performance for the following tasks?

• web browsing (most of activity)
• text processing in Word
• photo editing in Picasa

Answer 1

I think it comes down to RAM. 7 tends to not do as well at 2GB of RAM and below as XP does (though 7 certainly does perform well enough). So at that point I give the edge to XP. But if you have enough RAM, I think windows 7 would do as well XP, even on the Atom chip.

Answer 2

I am running W7 on my atom 230, it runs better than XP did on the same box, I have 2gb ram. Aero runs well also. I was shocked at the performance of W7 on such low end hardware. I had this PC triple booted XP, Vista, W7 at one point, W7 won out.

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Answer 3

I have a similar system with 2gb ram and Z520 processor running Windows 7.

I can surf with Chrome or FF with multiple windows open and not have these issues. Although I'm curious why you have to have two IE windows open as well as Chrome.

I do have an SD card installed that I dedicate to Ready Boost. That does help my webpages load significantly faster.

I suggest you use an utility like Glary Utilites and clean out any programs loading at startup that you don't need.

Process Explorer can tell you what programs you are running are using the most of your CPU. Perhaps there are things running that are hogging your CPU.