Nickname said:
MasterP ran win 7 pro fine on his netbook (1.6ghz atom, 1gb ram, 160gb hdd) and said it was definitely fast enough to be usable.
Before I put MATLAB, Mathematica, and a bunch of other crap on there it booted in about 20 seconds, now it’s in the 30-45 second range. Once it’s up it’s very usable, even with an antivirus on it.
If you have a dualcore and 2gb of ram you should be just fine. 4gb maybe if you want to play games but unless you’re getting into some serious memory hogs like BF2142, Hellgate, etc you should be fine.