XP Pro on the Eee

I finally managed to get my bargain 4GB Asus701 Eee to run with XP professional and for there to be still about 1GB of spare space after installing all my must have programmes for travelling and suffering the SP3 upgrade.

Various points of hard earned wisdom are:-

Use nLite to shrink your XP but be careful what you take out and leave in. I used substanially these notes from i64X

However, make sure you leave the Internet explorer box ticked at the compatability screen and to untick the window sound drivers in the Drivers option. (The windows default drivers seem to screw up the installation of the Asus sound stuff).

Asos Eee in Paramo Taiga fleece

Programmes I’ve installed so far are:-

• Skype for contacting Sally on!
• Firefox with Extensions – Adblock Plus, Delicious, Foxmarks, Scribefire (for blogging),
• avast antivrus
• Foxit reader
• GPicSync for geotagging my camera pictures.
• GPS Trackmaker for downloading my Garmin traces.
• Flickr uploader
• Garmin Mapsource
• Filezilla ftp client for maintaing and setting up blogs for folks I meet.

So of the 3.71GB available I now have 722MB left (although I’m pretty certain Garmin will be getting deleted as its very bloatware like at 200MB).

Now to check out the battery life etc and to find WiFi connections.

And for you Linux geeks out there, I did so try to get GPSBabel running on the Asus Xandros OS but totally failed, although I did manage to get the full Linux desktop installed for a time.

All the above has probably taken about 3 solid days in time although the final nLite creation and installation was about 2 hours! Cold boot time is about 1minute.

Some of you may say what about the iPhone? My answers are:-
Its terribly fragile and as Euan knows not very water resistant!
You can only use its internal GPS / Camera.
Mine is still locked = hideous O2 roaming charges

So the trusty unlocked Treo680 will get another outing!