With the arrival last month of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, it’s time to revisit a familiar question: which operating system is best for a netbook? Linux-based systems may seem well-suited to lightweight devices (the original Asus Eee PC ran Xandros Linux), but there are advantages to the familiar interface and applications of Windows.

Indeed, if you buy a netbook today it will probably come with Windows 7 Starter, while older models are likely to be running Windows XP. Still, it’s easy to move from either to Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and of course it’s free. If you want to upgrade an older netbook to Windows 7 you’ll have to shell out £65 for the Home Premium edition, as Starter isn’t sold separately.

Each of these four operating systems has its attractions, but the key question is how each one performs on low-powered netbook hardware. To find the answer, I’ve spent the past few days installing them all – Windows XP Home, Windows 7 Starter, Windows 7 Home Premium and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, with all available updates – on an Asus Eee PC 1008HA, and timing a series of typical netbook tasks to discover which OS makes the most of lightweight hardware.

Test 1: Starting up and suspending

Nobody wants to wait around for their netbook to start up, or to wake from sleep. Happily, suspend and resume worked perfectly on all four operating systems, so I was able to time how many seconds each took to sleep and resume from an idle desktop, along with boot times from cold.

As you can see, I tested Windows 7 Home Premium with both the Basic theme and the standard Aero theme. For this exercise it doesn’t make much difference, but I suspected it might on later tests.

Result: Windows 7 is slower to boot than XP or Ubuntu, and the Home Premium edition, with its full complement of services and features, is the slowest OS. However, most of the time we expect you’ll be resuming a netbook from sleep, and here it’s effectively a three-way tie, with XP only a few seconds slower than the rest.

Test 2: Opening applications

For this test I used the latest version of OpenOffice.Org on all platforms (with the “Quickstarter” disabled) and opened the applications by double-clicking on a .DOC file and a .XLS file that had been copied to the local desktop. I opened each file twice, to get a measure of how quickly the applications were able to launch both from cold and once cached.

Result: Windows XP was clearly the fastest OS at opening and reopening applications, while Windows 7 Home Premium did poorly, especially with Aero screen composition disabled. Interestingly, Windows 7 Starter scored a consistent second place, while Ubuntu failed to distinguish itself.

Test 3: Web performance

For this test I loaded a variety of JavaScript- and CSS-heavy web pages into the latest version of Google Chrome and used the browser’s built-in monitoring tool to time how long each one took to render.

Result: Given the timescales we’re dealing with (that Y axis is in seconds), this is essentially a draw, though enabling Aero seems to have a deleterious effect on Windows 7 Home Premium — strangely, the opposite to the effect observed in the applications test.

Test 4: Flash benchmark

To test Flash performance I used the free Flash Benchmark 2008 by Snails Animation, using the latest version of Flash available within Chrome. None of the platforms was able to get further than the medium-detail test. This graph measures frames per second, so taller bars are better.

Result: Aero seems to knock a few per cent off Flash performance, but it’s clearly Ubuntu that fares worst. Linux users have long grumbled about second-class Flash support, and these scores illustrate their point.

Test 5: Video performance

WMV and MPEG4 video files at resolutions up to 720p played perfectly well “out of the box” under all operating systems. However, none of the operating systems could cope with HD files from either YouTube or BBC iPlayer — in all cases the framerate dropped to only a few frames per second, making videos wholly unwatchable.

Result: Ubuntu’s poor Flash performance seems to drag it down in iPlayer: in windowed mode, video was slightly jerky, and in full screen mode it was too juddery to enjoy. The YouTube player seems to suit Ubuntu, though, while visiting the same site in Windows 7 caused videos to stutter too much for comfort.

Conclusion

There’s no reason not to give Ubuntu’s latest Netbook Edition a try — after all, it’s free, and it’ll run direct from a USB flash drive or coexist with your existing OS. The simple Unity interface is arguably better-suited to a basic netbook role than either the dated XP interface or the feature-rich Windows 7 front end.

For basic web and productivity tasks, Ubuntu’s performance appears no better than Windows, and for online video and games it’s distinctly worse. So while Ubuntu gains marks for openness and simplicity, there are still good reasons to hang on to Windows, at least until Adobe gets Flash up to speed.

If you’re currently running XP, though, it’s probably not worth paying for an upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium: that OS isn’t designed for low-power devices, and it gave wayward performance in several of our tests. XP proved a stronger performer overall, and was the only OS to give a good experience across the iPlayer and YouTube tests. The interface is showing its age, but if that bothers you you can dual-boot Ubuntu and get the best of both worlds.

If, on the other hand, you’re shopping for a new netbook, Windows 7 Starter isn’t a bad deal. It’s not very customisable (for example, you can’t change the desktop wallpaper) and it doesn’t include any goodies such as Media Center or encryption tools; but its comparatively light weight lets it boot and open applications more quickly than Home Premium. Nor is Windows 7 as nippy as XP, but from an overall performance perspective the Starter edition’s as good as Ubuntu, and better with Flash content. By all means test-drive Ubuntu, but the truth is that no OS will magically turbo-charge your netbook.

The company has teamed up with Microsoft to create the rather prosaic It’s Better With Windows website.

“Windows helps you quickly and easily get online and connect to your devices and services – without dealing with an unfamiliar environment or major compatibility issues,” the site proclaims. It then shows a series of videos, with Eee PC-wielding people going about their lives in blissful harmony.

For the vast majority of netbook tasks there is, of course, nothing better about Windows at all. Web browsing, email and basic word processing are just as easy with Asus’s Linux-based Eee PCs as they are with the Windows XP models.

The issues crop up when you start using netbooks more like full-blown laptops. One of the Microsoft/Asus videos show people uploading photos from their smartphone on to the Eee PC, and then editing them on the spot.

As Jack Schofield noted in yesterday’s Guardian this isn’t “a failure of Linux, it is the failure of the netbook idea”.

“You were supposed not to need a big hard drive and a powerful processor running Windows because all your applications would be on the net, and you’d access them via a browser,” Schofield writes. “But it seems most people preferred the system they already knew.”

Jack’s right. The ever-increasing spec (and price) of netbook hardware means there’s little discernible difference between a “netbook” and a low-budget laptop. The original concept of a £150 machine that does little more than web browsing has all but disappeared.

Windows hasn’t made netbooks “better”. It’s just made them laptops.

When I had my first hands-on at IDF that September I was impressed, saying “the Eee PC could be a huge success in schools, particularly in emerging markets abroad.” If they’re totally honest, I reckon that’s what Asus thought at the time, too – I find it hard to believe anyone really predicted how big the lightweight laptop would become. 

Alright, Asus didn’t quite manage to hit that stunning price, but the Eee still struck an unexpected chord with consumers, growing in that short time from a newsworthy novelty, into an early-adopter fad, and onto a social phenomenon. Just count how many you see on the train each morning.

Back at the end of 2007, we thought the original Eee PC 701 was fantastic, marvelling at its usability despite the tiny 7in screen. It was a portable revelation, our conclusion marvelling, “what’s more, the battery lasts for well over three hours.”

Little did we expect the dimensions -and the juice – to grow as much as they have. Early 2008 saw the Eee PC 900 address the major issues by stretching the screen to 9in while raising the price. But it was summer ‘08 that saw the deluge. Acer’s Aspire One lowered the price bar for 9in netbooks, while the MSI Wind U100 threatened to steal Asus’s place at the head of the table by upping the screen to 10in, with an Atom processor and a more stylish body.

Rebadging let everyone in on the action, with the Advent 4211 doing the Wind for £50 less, and even printer giant Epson recently slapping its name on someone else netbook hardware in hope of gobbling some of the pie.

Asus wasn’t to be stopped that easily, though. The Eee PC 901 added the Atom to the already popular 900, and then Asus played its Ace: the Eee PC 1000H. A 10in screen, superb build quality and a real feeling of useability put it straight onto our A List, and had several PC Pro staff finally considering getting their wallets out (which, as a Friday night in the pub demonstrates, is rare indeed).

It’s since been threatened by MSI’s updated Wind U100-291UK with 6-cell battery, and then eventually dethroned by the near-perfect Samsung NC10, but no other manufacturer can boast anything like Asus’s netbook range. Asus has even managed to double its market share on the back of the Eee, from 3.7% to 7.4% in Q3 2008, sharing a whopping 80% of the netbook market with the other early adopter, Acer.

But while everyone else is trying to come up with a £300 beauty to compete with the established players – we’re very keen to see Sony’s first attempt if it ever arrives – Asus is moving on. Since all this netbook fuss reached ridiculous levels, we’ve seen the Eee PC S101, an attempt to take netbooks upmarket with Swarovski crystals, a ’mocha’ brown lid and an audacious price hike. We weren’t fooled.

Then the Eee PC brand got silly. The Eee Box B202 (above) put an Eee PC into a flimsy plastic box and took away the screen – and the whole point of an Eee PC. Robbed of the portability that was half the point of the original Eee brand, we wouldn’t go near it with your money, let alone our own.

And this month saw the latest Eee PC money spinner, the Eee Top ET1602 (below). Again, the Eee PC is shoved inside a PC, but this time with a screen – and a pretty impressive touch-sensitive one at that. For surfing recipes on the sideboard, or browsing your media collection while dancing round a bedroom, it’s an idea with some merit, executed with at least some success.

But I can’t be the only one getting a bit sick of seeing those three letters everywhere I look right now. I can’t wait for Sony to enter the market, and Lenovo and Philips and every other brand salivating over Asus’s profits with green eyes and a red face that they all thought it would never be a profitable area of the market.

It’s unlikely any of them will attempt to price-crash the party, but what’s certain is that the phenomenon of the netbook is only the start for a brand that Asus sees as capable of selling far more than just laptops. When the first Eee TV arrives in Curry’s at half the price of a Sony Bravia, we’ll know Asus has its eyes on world domination – and it’ll probably achieve it.

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It’s the one we’ve been waiting for, and now it’s arrived – rather unhelpfully, late on a Friday afternoon. The Samsung NC10 is the one we all think will challenge the Eee PC for the netbook crown, and from first impressions we remain convinced.

It’s the first netbook we’ve seen that actually looks like a laptop. It has much in common with Samsung’s larger portable models, and the manufacturer has been sure to spend a little time on the styling. Where the brilliant Eee PC 1000H looks like, well, a my-first-laptop, and the MSI Wind is curvy but feels like a toy, the NC10 has the silver trim and little style touches that make it feel like a polished, fully-fledged laptop.

The keyboard is every bit as comfortable as the Eee, and the screen looks like every other small TFT we’ve seen in the netbook range. If we have a complaint it’s that the touchpad is on the small side, and all too easy to slide off without realising. The joint mouse buttons aren’t ideal either. But we like what we see so far, and with battery life rumoured to be as impressive as the Eee, we look forward to benchmarking it thoroughly.

UPDATE: Read the full Samsung NC10 review here.

Now, finally, in the luxurious splendour of Monte-Carlo’s Fairmont Hotel, we’ve managed to get our grubby mitts on the Mini 9 itself.

The 9 in the title gives away the most important part of its specification. The screen is an 8.9in panel, which looked bright and vibrant, while boasting the usual 1,204 x 600 pixel resolution.

Unlike the rest of Dell’s brightly-coloured new ranges, the Inpiron Mini 9 is finished in a rather dour grey and black attire. The glossy black lid looks nice enough, even if it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet, and build quality generally feels pretty sturdy. Compared to the likes of MSI’s Wind, the lid and chassis feel just that bit more reassuringly stiff, and it seems like it’ll survive the daily rigours of being thrown in a bag.

The version we saw came with the popular Ubuntu 8.04 installed as standard. And while the specification list is the standard netbook fare – an Intel Atom N270 running at 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM and 8GB of solid-state disk -  startup was a touch on the sluggish side, taking a good 45 seconds before Ubuntu showed its face.

But, more crucially, we weren’t especially enamoured with the keyboard. Dell has opted to keep the letter keys as large as possible, while shrinking the surrounding ones, a choice which leaves the Tab, Shift, Caps Lock and other keys looking painfully small.

It’s a shame, as there’s a good 8/9mm of chassis to the left and right of the keyboard which has been inexplicably left fallow. In our brief encounter, we preferred it to that of Asus’s original 8.9″ models, but it was a far cry from the delightful ergonomics of MSI’s Wind, Asus’ Eee PC 1000 or Acer’s Aspire One.

Dell is offering two versions, the one seen here with Ubuntu for £269, and another with Windows XP for £299. HSDPA/3G will initially only be available on Mini 9s bought directly through Vodafone, but Dell’s reps didn’t rule out the possibility of HSDPA-equipped models becoming available in the future. And when we pressed them about other models in the range, such as the 12.1in Intel Atom Z530-powered model accidentally leaked by Tesco, they admitted that the company will be expanding the range in the not too distant future.

In the meantime, we’ll leave you with some shots of the Mini 9’s shapely sides to drool over…

When I went backpacking around the world way back in the dark ages of, er, 2004, we did things properly. I packed a bag with the cheapest clothes I owned, a pair of hiking boots, plenty of Immodium and a Lonely Planet. I opened a few extra credit card accounts for good measure, said a not particularly teary goodbye to my loved ones and buggered off for the forseeable future. Just me and the world. (And, I was soon to discover, half the population of Ireland.)

I checked in with home maybe once every few weeks, just to assure my family I hadn’t been caught drug running/beheaded by rebels/drunk into an early grave by the Irish, but the internet was the last thing on my mind for 99% of the time.

However, over the course of the last couple of weeks in the hostels of Rio, I was amazed to discover that many of today’s backpackers have no intention of leaving the real world of home behind. No, these days it seems the done thing is to return from your day’s pursuits, whip the Eee PC out of your bag, and let everyone know that even though you’re in a rickshaw in Tibet you’re still going to update your Facebook status every seven minutes.

“David has got the trots. Can someone Sky+ Prison Break for me?”

It wasn’t just Eee PCs either, I saw at least a few Aspires and several rebranded Winds (it seems other countries have their Advent equivalents too – does anyone actually buy MSI’s version?). Some hostels had free WiFi, and it was a common sight to see those not from the alcoholic territories (that’s everyone but us and the Antipodeans) rather unsociably whiling away the evenings on MSN.

I’m torn by all this. The PC Pro part of me thinks if I travelled the world again today I’d take an Eee PC and do the whole professional and insightful blogging thing, a la Dave Stevenson.

But the non-PC Pro part of me (that’s basically just the little finger they cut off during my initiation) is appalled by the thought of being constantly contactable, and always up to speed with things at home. It goes against (for me at least) the great appeal of backpacking to faraway places.

Whatever your point of view, it’s certainly another interesting progression made possible by the rise of the ultra-cheap netbook. And seeing as one of my colleagues just expressed astonishment at discovering I haven’t checked my emails for two whole weeks, I imagine it’ll only get more common from here.

For the record, the picture above of Christ the Redeemer and his netbook is not real – it’s merely an incredibly convincing Photoshop mock-up. He begged me not tell his dad, but I can exclusively reveal the big JC’s Eee PC is actually – whisper it – black.

When Intel declared, a year or so back, that the next big thing in technology would be mobile internet devices – or “MIDs”, as they’ve inevitably become known – I wasn’t having any of it.

I mean, I already have a phone for on-the-go communications and web browsing. And I already have a laptop for running “proper” applications. I simply didn’t see what I could do with a MID that I couldn’t already do – better – with my existing devices.

And it seemed Intel didn’t really know either. The MID homepage they put up was packed with buzzwords but distinctly light on killer reasons for choosing a MID over an existing device. MIDs didn’t look like an imminent revolution, more like a marketing concept that accidentally got made. They certainly didn’t look ready to go up against the likes of the iPhone and the Eee PC.

The MID among us

But last week at IDF, Intel finally stood up and started talking about MIDs in plain English. And as it spelt out its vision, it quickly became apparent that the company knew exactly what it was doing.

The point we’ve all been missing – thanks largely to Intel’s woolly marketing – is that the “mobile internet device” category doesn’t have to compete with the iPhone and the Eee PC… because both of those market flagships are mobile internet devices.

Sure, those particular models are the cream of the crop. Most of the MIDs Intel showed off at IDF (of which I reproduce a few here) were awkward little pocket consoles with fiddly keyboards and toy operating systems – the type of devices I’d always previously associated with the term “mobile internet device.” I still think these are doomed, unless they evolve dramatically in very short order.

But Intel doesn’t care about the precise form factor: it just makes the chips. As Apple and Asus have shown, there’s a very real demand for usable devices that can deliver internet access and a reasonable amount of computing power on the go. And it’s a brave man who’d bet on that demand dropping off any time soon.

Mobilising forces

MIDs won’t be taking over the world just yet. Questions of screen size, keyboard, battery life and processing speed will all need to be addressed or worked around before the pocket computer kills off the full-fat laptop.

But the history of computing is a story of incredible innovation, of pipe dreams becoming everyday realities and of multi-billion dollar markets springing up from nothing – often over the course of just a few years. Intel clearly believes that MID technologies are just at the start of this process, and it wants in on the ground floor.

It’s not alone, either: Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang declared at this week’s NVISION conference in San Jose that “the mobile device will be the next personal computer”. For now, his company’s MID projects are focused solely on Windows Mobile 7 devices (pah), but as the market grows they’ll be well placed to expand.

Of course, I wouldn’t buy into MIDmania just on the say-so of a few billionaire CEOs. The market moves quickly, and sometimes unpredictably. You don’t have to be in tech very long to learn to take “next big thing” declarations with a grain of salt.

But as I sat in the audience at IDF, listening to Intel’s Anand Chandrasekhar evangelising MIDs, I realised that I didn’t need persuading. I’ve been a MID devotee all along. Just last month I found myself intrigued, excited and almost wholly won over by the iPhone. Most of us did.

And the iPhone is at the very vanguard of the coming MID revolution. Just wait until you see the devices that come along to supersede it.

Straight away it feels sturdier than the Eee, more like a real laptop in its build quality. The curvy lid has a smooth sheen and uses a slightly different type of hinge – set back like a VAIO to make for a thinner lid. The 8.9in 1,024 x 600 screen matches the Asus, yet the more grown-up styling moves it away from that laptop’s my-first-PC feel.

Other than the extra inch or so in the Acer’s width, the keyboards of the two are almost identical: the Acer has its cursor keys slightly offset from the rest to make room for a larger shift key, and also includes the right-CTRL key the Asus lacks. It still retains the annoying half-height Enter key though, something we’ve yet to see a mini-notebook overcome.

The touchpad is responsive in use but it’s a bit too squashed and narrow for comfort, and we can’t stand Acer’s positioning of the mouse buttons either side of it. It’s fiddly and hard to get used to, particularly as there’s a large enough gap beneath the pad to fit them on the edge of the base.

The One comes with 802.11g Wi-Fi, 10/100 Ethernet and three USB ports spread over both sides. There’s a VGA output and two 3.5mm audio connectors, and we were intrigued to see two memory card slots, only one of which acts as a standard 8-in-1 reader.

The other is for storage expansion: when the internal hard disk is getting full, just pop in an SD card and the Acer will integrate it – rather than showing up as a separate drive, you’ll see the hard disk capacity grow as the two are combined. A nice touch, but we’re waiting to hear from Acer how the One ensures important application files aren’t spread across the two – removing the card at a later date could surely render apps useless.

The Acer uses the 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, so we’ll be interested to see how long the battery lasts. Options start from an incredible £199 inc VAT, which includes the Linpus Linux Lite installation, 512MB of memory and an 8GB NAND flash drive. Others will be available up to £299, which gets you Windows XP Home, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard disk.

First impressions are positive to say the least, and we’re currently busy brushing off our benchmarks and getting our XP disks out to see just how it does. Will it be faster than the Eee? The smaller amount of RAM suggests not – although models at prices closer to the £319 of the Eee PC 901 will come with a more sensible 1GB – and the 4,400mAh battery also packs less juice than the Asus.

But we’ll wait for the full results before we cast judgement, so check back for a full review next week.

Click here to see a hands-on video from the Acer launch at the start of June.

It uses the 1.6GHz Atom N270, with its 512KB L2 cache and 533MHz front side bus. Whether this will prove to be faster than the previous 900MHz Celeron remains to be seen; from our tests with the desktop Atom 230, we reckon it’ll prove to be similar, or perhaps slightly slower.

But the trade-off will hopefully be longer battery life, thanks to the Atom’s marvellous 2.5W thermal design power (TDP). The old 900 used a 4,400mAh battery and gave us a slightly disappointing 3hrs, 20mins light use in Windows XP; the 901 has made the sensible step up to a 6,600mAh battery (which does make it a little larger), so we’re keen to see how many hours it’ll give us.

The 901 also brings a few other changes. Bluetooth and 802.11n wireless have now been added; the Asus logo has been removed in favour of the Eee PC branding alone; and the slightly iffy touchpad and buttons have been rejigged with a full silver surround that works a little less stiffly. There’s a new hinge for added stability and a few more curves, and the only change to the keyboard is the addition of a shortcut button strip.

The changes are minor but necessary, and the price tag will be a little lower, too – £319 rather than the £329 of the Eee PC 900. The 901 will be available from July 1, and Asus reckons there won’t be a repeat of the shortages that have blighted previous Eee launches.

We’re currently installing XP and our benchmark suite, so check back for the full results.

UPDATE: Click here for the full review.

Called the Nova Lite PX24, it takes the design first used in the original Nova P20, and strips it down to a much more affordable level.

Cramming in a 160GB hard disk, DVD writer, 2GB of RAM and even an ATI RV620 graphics card – complete with HDMI and DVI ports – we were expecting a price higher than the provisional SRP of £300 inc VAT. An Asus rep also hinted that there may be an even cheaper version on the way, with an 80GB hard disk and with integrated graphics.

The one corner we can see that’s been cut is in the use of a Celeron processor, but for its intended use – a Media Center or basic workhorse PC – that shouldn’t be too much of a hindrance. It should at least be quicker than recent rivals such as the MSI Titan 700 and the Tranquil T2e Atom PC.

It comes with an ugly black and white Media Center remote and a stand that doesn’t seem to quite fit the width of the PC properly – it’s a bit wobbly to touch so you may prefer to lie it flat on your desk. Other than that we like the design, and the front panel has been nicely resurfaced with a fabric not unlike that of a speaker grille.

Size-wise, it’s 231mm x 184mm and about 5cm thick, and Asus claims to have power-saving technology that should limit the CPU to just 5W when idle – we’ll be sure to run some power tests along with our usual benchmarks before we post a full review in the next few days.

The Asus Nova Lite PX24 will be available in the UK at the end of June.