Running Windows7 on my EEE PC 900

I guess somebody had to do it (and probably has done it before me) but goog…err windows live was only filled with search results for stories of announcements from ASUS and other netbook vendors of future machines that will run Windows 7, but no word on anyone actually doing it. Armed with a copy of vLite and a blissful ignorance of all the things I didn’t know about creating cutdown windows installs I went in a chopped out anything that looked non-essential. After installing in a VM (with a resultant vhd size of about 4GB) I was encouraged enough to burn a disk and give it a shot. It installed without a hitch, although I had to use the second, larger 8GB SSD in the 900 and the installer took a little while to complete. Only 3 devices didn’t work “out of the box” - the video card (fall-back to VGA, and a display res of 800x600) the network card and another “unknown” device (still not working…who cares). The wireless adapter picked up immediately, and before the install was complete it had identified my wireless network and was asking me if I wanted to join. There are almost 2GB left on the 8GB dirve (so that’s a 6GB install for those of you playing along at home) with the other 4GB drive untouched. The performance is fine for what I use my EEE PC for (casual web browsing, and reading PDFs and RSS feeds at train stations, and there are a number of additional tweaks I can try. Overall I thought this would be difficult, but I was completely wrong.

Comments