Laptop Magazine had a go at installing the pre-Beta of Windows 7 that was given away at PDC earlier this week and judging by their success, it looks like Windows 7 is a lot less hardware hungry than Windows Vista.

In saying that, Beta versions of Windows always tend to be slightly less demanding than the final product, but fingers crossed that this won't be the case this time around. The Eee PC hardware is still not up there for more demanding tasks, although even 720p video stuttered in Windows 7 and they also ran into some problems using Skype with two-way video calling.

The Windows 7 Beta seems to suck up far less RAM than Windows Vista and it seems like 1GB of RAM is more than enough, which is indeed good news for netbook users. That doesn't mean that you'd want to skimp on your RAM, as once you start running a few applications, we're sure that you'll need more than 1GB.

Laptop Magazine is promising to return with some benchmark numbers at a later stage, but you can check out their early impressions here