Joys of a wEee Little WinXP PC - Intro

Posted by: tjchan on Aug 02 2008

Asus’ Eee PC is truly one of a kind. After owning mine for about two months now, I am nothing but grins as to its performance and practically in most if not all of my daily PC tasks. From checking email and surfing the Internet to word processing and blogging…heck, even GPS navigation and retro gaming, the Asus’ Eee PC is more than most would expect.

I was recently at a computer store in Sharonville, OH and was told that this little gem was a lump of coal…good for practically nothing but the most basic of basics. After hearing a sales pitch like that, I would have totally avoided the Eee PC like the plague. Sure, this little guy has a Celeron processor and lacks an optical drive…but hey, its tiny, weighs only 2 pounds, and can access an optical drive just like the MacBook Air - via a network.

We’ll be starting out with Part 1 of a multi-part mini series on how you can get the most out of your Eee PC. From loading Windows to getting on all the extra little goodies that makes your Eee PC a road warrior, we’re sure to have a great time along the way!

Today I’ll be showing you what you can do to make the Eee PC a true ultra mobile personal computer (UMPC) - Easy to use, easy to work, easy to play. In fact, I wrote almost this entire article on my Eee PC while riding home from our recent trip to Ohio. In the background I have Delorme Street Atlas running with a Holux GM-210 global positioning system (GPS) unit. The system announces the turns as well as calculates any deviations from the calculated route. Oooo nifty..you say? That’s only the beginning as by the time we are through, you’ll get a plethora of ideas and develop many of your own in how to stretch the limits of this Weee WinXP PC.

First off, I’m not a Linux guy. I’m not good at Linux and it will be a while before I will be. So the first thing we’ll do is rip Linux off of this unit (Xandros to be exact) and load good ’ol Windows XP by following the N-Lite guide at I64x to create your Windows XP install disc and get Windows on there with all the drivers.

Yay! So now we have a miniature Windows PC, but we still have problems if we have to drag this large clunky external DVD and it’s accompanying A/C adaptor everywhere…

Not a problem…enter my Windows PC in the other room where I can set my optical drive to be shared over the network! What?! You’re telling me you don’t want to be tethered within the confines of your own wireless home network? Alrighty, not to fear, as Daemon tools is here! Daemon tools is a virtual CD/DVD drive that you can mount CD and DVD images. To Windows, this is a full featured drive. To you, it’s a jailbreak from home as creation of CD and DVD images are easy using any program such as Nero, Adaptor, Sonic, or any other at least half way decent burning software. If you don’t have any burning software that has this feature, go and get a copy of LC ISO Creator…can’t beat the size (14kB) or the price…and it does the job nicely.

So where now do you put a huge image file of an optical disc? In a nice USB drive! Your Eee PC can at times read SDHC directly from it’s own SD card reader, but mine doesn’t seem to do that 100% of the time so I elected to using the next best thing, an 8GB Class 6 (speed of card >= 6MB/sec) Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) card in a USB card reader. This allows me to get the fastest performance as the card’s rated and it doesn’t take up too much physical space. I recommend the A-Data 8GB SDHC card + reader sold at Micro Center. So now you have it folks, you can now copy entire CDs and DVDs over to a little memory card to which you can install programs as well as keep your optical image files on.

That eliminates the need for an optical drive and all the bulk that’s associated with one. Join us again next time as we will have Part 2: Gaming on the Eee PC!

Technorati Tags: Eee PC, How-To, Windows XP, Just Another Mobile Monday, JAMM

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