Windows 7 Starter Edition restrictions has a lot to speak on its behalf. Some of them are plain ridiculous and hardly affect actual computer performance like inability to change a desktop wallpaper, and some are pretty frustrating like addressing no more than two gigabytes of RAM.
Of course, someone can always excuse such measures as Microsoft’s efforts to save the much more expensive Home Edition, Professional and Ultimate bundles from canibalisation. Except that sometimes it cripples otherwise pretty neat machines.
Exempli gratia, Windows 7′ Gaming perfoirmance score on Atom N270 backed nVidia ION with the latest drivers is 4.7 on Windows 7 Starter Edition and 5.3 on Windows 7 Professional Edition. Pretty much of a difference!
Although it’s still not enough for the modern video games, even such forgiving ones like World of Warcraft, but it more than ok for the Win7 Aero interface features. All of them are working perfectly smooth.
Atom N270, one of the first Atoms on the market, is a single core processor, so it hardly benefits anything from the dropping of Windows 7 Starter’s single-core-only restriction. Even though the Windows 7 Professional shows this hyperthreading CPU as two, it helps real life performance virtually nothing.
Summarizing, in terms of performance, it’s mostly the RAM—a quick jump from the “caged” by the Starter Edition 2 gigs of RAM to approximately 2.8 gigs (2Gb + 1Gb − about 256Mb eaten by nVidia ION) boosting little netbook tremendeously. Well, as much as it could be possible in case of the old cripled Atom CPU.
It isn’t documented anywhere, but it seams that Windows 7 Starter Edition cripples GPU performance somehow. At least, this is the only explanation for the Windows 7 Score difference for video gaming performance.