Daily Driving a Netbook in 2024: Better than You'd Think!
Wrapping up Netbook November 2024... in December...
EDITORIAL NOTE: Locals user CyberianO brought to my attention the fact that this article was published on December 13, 2024 of the Gregorian calendar. That day on the Julian calendar was actually November 30. Therefore, this Netbook November article was technically still published in November… and knowing that makes me smile.
As this Netbook November came to an end I wanted to spend some time just living in the netbook world just to see if it would be possible to daily drive one of these little legends in a modern environment. To be upfront about it, it wasn’t half bad!
Let’s start by discussing my workflow for a little perspective. Much of what I use my computers for these days is writing. I write these articles, notate my podcast outlines, work on chapters for the book I’m chipping away at, and occasionally work on more academic or intellectual pieces for friends and family. Other than that, I browse the web a lot to research and document those writing projects. When wasting time I tend to spend most of that time on Locals, YouTube, and a handful of web forums, or playing games that are older than all of my children.
With that said, I figured my best bet to make this work would be to use the newest and “beefiest” netbook I’ve got: the HP Mini 1103. It’s a netbook from 2011 with a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N455 processor, but unlike the other two netbooks I have, this one has 2 whole GB of memory! That may not sound like much to the younger subscribers, but you might be surprised at how much of a difference that extra gig can make. It’s running Windows 7 starter edition and, aside from the dead battery, it’s in surprisingly good condition.
Naturally, the first thing to do is to see what modern software will still run on Windows 7. As a writer, I obviously want a quality word processor. This device came to me with a demo of Corel Office (Word Perfect) and even has Microsoft Office 2007 installed, but I wanted to see about good old LibreOffice. The current version (24.8.3.2) failed to install. I know I can go back in the archives to get an older build, but it would have been nice to have the latest version. It’s okay though, I just stuck with MS Office ‘07 for now. It’s a version I’ve used very little in the past, and it’s kind of an interesting experience.
Next up, I need a working web browser. I forget which version of Internet Explorer is on this netbook (I think it’s 10) but that isn’t going to do anyone any good. Instead I tried a few different browsers that claim to still be supporting Windows 7.
First up, I tried a couple of Chromium-based browsers: Superium and Thorium. Both installed just fine and appear to be currently supported, however neither wanted to render modern web pages properly. Locals was broken and YouTube failed to load for the most part. Google and DuckDuckGo worked fine, but defaulted to the mobile versions. FrogFind, naturally, worked just fine.
Just when I was going to resign myself to an offline existence with this device, I remembered how much luck I had with running Firefox ESR on OS X Mavericks to breathe new life into an old Mac OS install and grabbed the last supported Windows 7 version. To my chagrin, it worked flawlessly! Well, mostly. Some of the extensions I use acted a little weird — looking at you, BitWarden —, but that wasn’t a big deal.
Of course, it would only be useful to me if I could access and publish to my Substack. Unlike Superium and Thorium, Firefox ESR worked like a dream! I was able to sign into Substack — a feat that is more difficult than you might think on older devices — and even start putting together the show notes for an episode of the podcast.
The installer I got was for version 115.13.0. On a whim I figured why not check for updates and, sure enough, the browser updated itself to version 115.17.0 giving what I believe is a fully up-to-date Windows 7 web browser.
Another part of my workflow involves markdown. While I could just use Notepad.exe or literally anything else, I prefer to have a dedicated Markdown editor. While there are tons of great editors out there I decided to go with the one that got me started with markdown: MarkdownPad, or in this case MarkdownPad 2, and the latest version installed without issue.
Next up was the YouTube test. Now Superium and Thorium failed to load YouTube at all. However, Firefox, being up-to-date rendered everything just fine… BUT… it was SLOW! The YouTube home page took a good 10 seconds or so to load, and the video itself took even longer. With that said, once everything loaded, it played with very little stuttering at 720p, and only a little more at 1080p. Also, the little speakers on this thing aren’t terrible!
Now, after a few days of using the system, I got annoyed. One of the limitations of Windows 7 Starter is that you can’t change your theme or wallpaper. That’s stupid and so I went ahead and upgraded to Ultimate using Windows Anytime Upgrade.
With the upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate, and a tasty cup of Christmas Blend coffee, I was ready to get some more work done… also, yes, I did adjust my taskbar settings to look more like Windows Vista. Don’t judge me.
At this point, I was curious how this little netbook could handle some old games. I knew that Steam dropped Windows 7 support a while back, but I figured it was worth a shot. The installer will install the launcher as normal, but the Steam Launcher update check fails every time, even when you are connected to the internet. Likewise, Windows Update also appears to be done with Windows 7. Perhaps I will give this thing the Legacy Update treatment, but not today.
The upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate also added some other applications. I don’t have a full list of what is on this netbook, but here are a couple of screenshots from the Start menu.
Two things that jumped out at me that were already installed when I got it were Microsoft Office 2007 and Evernote 3.5 which came out back in 2010. 3.5 was probably the last version of Evernote I ever used before switching to other tools like OneNote and Simplenote. I liked it well enough, but just preferred those other two.
I also found Office 2007 of interest. The only office apps I really use are Word, Excel, and Outlook with the occasional PowerPoint mixed in. I know what Access and Publisher are as well, but what in the world is Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007?
You may have also noticed iTunes is installed. It was already there when it was given to me, and it has one song in the library; 2011’s Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen. I don’t know about you, but to me that just adds to the time capsule effect going on here.
Finally, I figured I’d see if I could get Outlook set up with my webmail. I had just been using Firefox to check my email, but I’ve been a using email clients since the late 90s so anytime I can have a local way of doing it, I will. To no one’s great surprise, Outlook 2007 doesn’t want to connect with modern webmail providers… or maybe it’s the other way around. In any event, I may tinker with it later, but for now, I just decided to move on.
Conclusion
All in all, I really enjoyed my time with this little netbook. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but I feel like it is much more capable than if frankly deserves to be in 2024. I was surprised at just how many modern things I could do, and there are plenty more that I could do if I took the time to work around the errors. In fact, there is an entire community of people who have just stuck with Windows 7 out there that are getting modern versions of Windows 10 and 11 software to run.
Maybe sometime in the future I will revisit these issues, but for now I think this is a perfectly adequate system for handling a few basic tasks. While I can check my email and watch online videos, simple things like word processing and listening to local music are where this thing really shines. I don’t have a daily use case for it at this point, but I would love to replace the battery at some point to make it portable again.
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