Gigabyte Booktop M1022: Merging Netbooks and Nettops

General Windows Performance

Quite a few people also asked for some general performance numbers in terms of Windows boot/shutdown, hibernate/resume, and sleep/wake times. These obviously vary quite a bit between runs, depending on what you've been doing on the computer. If you have a bunch of open applications, it will usually take longer for the system to enter sleep mode for example. We performed these tests on all of the netbooks and laptops from an empty Windows desktop, and we used the best-case result for each system. We also need to note that the NV52 and NV58 run Windows Vista 64-bit, which took noticeably longer in the hibernate/resume tests. That's expected, since both Gateway systems have 4GB of RAM, but we also included results with Windows XP 32-bit as a point of reference.

Once again the ASUS 1005HA easily outperforms the competition, especially in the hibernate/resume tests. We're not sure if it's a faster hard drive or other optimizations, but ASUS clearly put a lot of effort into making these functions work better on the 1005HA. For instance, ASUS has a quick boot mode where it performs a minimal POST (Power On Self-Test), shaving off about seven seconds on the resume and startup times. That would make the M1022 and 1005HA about equal in Windows startup time were it not for this optimization, and it would be good if Gigabyte added such a feature to their BIOS in the future. Hibernate times aren't affected by that particular optimization, so it looks like the Hitachi hard drive in the 1005HA has better write performance than the M1022's Fujitsu drive.