We purchased a Starling netbook about 1.5 years ago. We felt like it was a bit more pricy than comparable netbooks in the market, but we wanted to support System76 and the linux world.

The Starling was a bit dissatisfactory for us. It had Ubuntu 11.10 and then we upgraded to 12.04. The fan worked a bit hard and it was slow. But no major problems. To make it run a bit better, I just installed xubuntu 12.04 on it. And we need MS Office (unfortunately, LibreOffice doesn't do for our purposes) so I installed virtualbox. However, I was unable to install Win7 Pro 64-bit, because it wanted me to change something in the bios related to VT-x/AMD-V but I couldn't find that option in the bios.

So, getting impatient and being worried about how Win7 Pro will perform in xubuntu virtualbox in a netbook, I decided to try to install Win7 Pro directly. This time, ethernet and some other peripherals needed drivers, and I didn't know how to get them.

I'm thinking about installing xubuntu again and trying Win7-32 bit. However, I felt that at this point, I wanted some help about how to make the best use of Starling and whether it will perform well with this setup. Will Win7+MS Office run well under xubuntu in virtualbox? If not, where can I get the drivers for Win7? And why is the fan working a bit too much and it's a little slow.

I hope I can like Starling better after some support. Thanks.