I had cause to set up Windows 7 Starter on a Samsung N150 Plus netbook last week and can only say it was a disappointing and frustrating experience and, indeed, not particularly an experience for a novice.
Most particularly, I could not believe how long it took me to set it up, bring it up to date and install additional programmes. Many restarts, slow in themselves, and just slow when finished. Ironically, I was in PCWorld earlier this week about a warranty repair for a small TV and witnessed a young person returning the exact same model because he said it was just far too slow.
By comparison, the full version of Windows 7 Home Premium runs so much faster on my nearly two year old Lenovo S10e netbook, once it has got past all the startup disk thrashing typical of all Windows versions.
My opinion, Windows 7 Starter is so crippled that it performs worse on a nettbook than Windows 7 Home Premium, and familiar functionality has been removed. Of course, the full version of Windows 7 Home premium is actually physically there on the hard drive just waiting to be freed by the payment of a rather too large fee to M$.
Apart possibly from battery life, the performance of netbooks doesn't seem to to have advanced much since the original Atom N270, which is still available on some models.
Of course, the 1Gig of installed memory is totally inadequate (for Windows) and needs be removed and replaced by 2 Gig, the 1 Gig removed then being of little or no use to anyone due to lack of demand for a I Gig module.
Somehow, I feel we are being conned somewhere along the line, the waste of 1 gig modules is a disgrace and Window 7 Starter performance appears to be abysmal.
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Moley - I had very much the same experience when first starting up my N150 Plus with Windows 7 Starter. It is, simply put, a disgrace. However, the N150 Plus is a very nice system when loaded with any one of a variety of Linux distribution. Ubuntu Netbook Edition loads perfectly, even finding and offering to install the Broadcom 4313 WiFi driver. It boots in about 1/3 the time that Windows takes, and loads and runs programs in correspondingly less time.
It's no wonder that so-called "Journalists" who focus on nothing but Windows are going around predicting doom for netbooks - Microsoft appears to be doing their best to kill them.
jw
I was give a Dell netbook earlier this year by a kind friend! It came with Windows 7 preinstalled. However, I installed the latest Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx...where do they get those names!) as a dual boot and I have to agree with jw, it loads and runs much better than Windows 7 starter. A few days ago, I tried to install IE 9 Beta onto the Starter 7, and guess what? It simply would not load. Tried some of the tweaks suggested on various sites, to no avail. So, it's mostly Ubuntu for me!!