At boot up it should give you an option to enter a key such as Delete, F2, F12, or ESC key etc. If you dont see anything but the logo and then windows boot, you can try pressing these keys listed or find the users manual for this netbook which should specifically tell you which key to enter the bios. Trying random keys wont hurt anything, the worst you could do is find a boot feature you may not have been aware of or key a keyboard error since the system thinks that a key is stuck down.
As far as OS goes. I'd stick with 7 and max out your RAM on this netbook. A few years ago I may have said to downgrade to XP, but the problem is that in favor of better performance you would be switching over to an old OS that will no longer be supported come April 2014. Even though some claim that Windows 8 is faster than Windows 7, I find it personally difficult to switch over to the new GUI without Start Menu and traditional desktop that has been with us since Windows 95. I have also heard of people running into driver issues as well as issues playing certain games on Windows 8.
To improve performance but sacrifice battery charge time, I'd set performance to the max. But to gain some battery life back out of this max performance setting, I'd pick up a low cost SSD and replace the hard drive with that SSD. *Just be sure to have 1 or 2 thumb drives available to make your system restore media set. My netboot takes 2 x 4GB thumb drives to make the system restore set. I had to boot off of one of the sticks and then place the 2nd stick into the USB port when prompted to continue with the OS install to the SSD. *And unfortunately as for my netbook you cant just use one 16GB thumb drive, if you do, you just wasted 12GB of it and still need another 4GB stick.
