To make a long story short: I recently bought a license for Windows 8 Pro, as it was quite a bargain for a limited time (29,90 euros), in order to upgrade my Windows 7 Home Premium installation of my Acer 751h.
The experiment failed: Memory usage always around 90% and CPU more than 75% all the time, with a couple of Chrome pages open, Skype, Skydrive and Sugarsync running in the background. That’s all. Netbook was so slow that was unusable. I was in a project meeting, preparing presentations… tough luck! I got so frustrated that I tried to download various Linux distros (e.g. Linux Mint 13 XFCE and ArchLinux) in order to be able to do at least the basics (e.g. browse online and check my emails; however, there was always some issue with the Linux installations, so I finally gave up…I have tweaked everything that I could (from disabling the Aero theme and system sounds to disabling Indexing in order to save some hard disk spinning time) but it was in vain.
I can only see two solutions now: Either I find a compatible 2GB SO-DIMM RAM module for this ill-fated machine, or I return to the Windows 7 installation, which worked pretty well (at least much better than Windows 8) with this machine.
This was really unexpected as it was mentioned that Windows 8 are not as greedy as Windows 7 regarding memory usage, but since the upgrade to Windows 8 only took place a couple of days before my trip, I did not have enough time to check the performance under real-life operation…
My personal blog / Το ιστολόγιό μου 
What about Peppermint OS Three?
Well, I do not know why you suggest the specific one but it was one of the two Linux distros I selected for creating live USBs for my netbook a couple of weeks ago – one for PixieLive (http://www.pixielive.org/dotclear/) which is a dead-simple Linux and one for the more feature-rich Peppermint OS 3 as you mentioned (http://peppermintos.com/).
PixieLive worked with my GMA out of the box – no issues identified so far. Peppermint looks much more beautiful but I have issues with my GMA500; it is not properly recognized so I can only see half of the desktop when I boot in Peppermint… it seems that I will have to do a little bit of manual tweaking before everything is properly set up: http://peppermintos.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4710&start=0
Btw, I am looking for a 2GB SO-DIMM DDR2 667/800 MHz SDRAM module to try and buy for the netbook; please let me know in case you have (access to) any of these or similar!
Thanks for information.Actually i was doing but i canceled now.I use Windows 7 Starter…
Thats better :3
Well, just keep in mind that I just described my experience with my low-powered Acer 751h netbook (1GB RAM, 1,3GHz CPU); the Windows 8 experience might be different with another netbook or with 2GB of RAM. In the meantime, I am still looking for a compatible SODIMM RAM module to test with Windows 8 before I uninstall them and move back to Windows 8….
I upgraded 1GB to 2GB before. So i will try?
Yes, and please let me know. In the meantime I decided to go back to Windows 7 Home Premium, as the netbook was almost useless.
Please also let me know the kind of RAM you bought and if you have any incompatibilities (e.g. freezes/reboots/blue screens) with the new RAM. Thanks!
More tab PCs by different major manufacturers like dell are adding more weapon to the microsoft arsenal. This could be a real plus compared to apple software products which are dedicated to its own hardware devices. Although this is not the case with android which is favouring a more open approach and this has been its foremost reason for its success up to now.
If you are still in need for a os that works on this machine, give Crunchbang Linux a try. I have not had any issues with stability and it actually seems kind of peppy on this machine. Good luck!
Hi John,
Thanks for the suggestion; I have currently settled up with Pepperming Linux which does the job fine, even with this machine. However, I like to experiment so I will give the Crunchbag Linux a try (probably with a live USB first).
Thanks for following up on this post!