Eee PC 901 or 1000 ?

Got my starhub re-contract freebie, HP 2133 mini-notes. Quite like its design but not its battery life. So sold it for SGD750. Considering Eee PC 910/1000 which have 4 hours battery life :) 910 or 1000 ? Still cannot decide ...

Installing windows XP from SD card

What you need :

Hardware
1. 8GB SD Card
2. A windows desktop/laptop beside you

Software
1. ORIGINAL Windows XP CD with genuine license [LINK]
2. nLite [LINK]
3. Virtual Floppy Drive [LINK]
4. HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool [LINK]
5. SmartDrv.exe [LINK]
6. Virtual PC [LINK] (optional)

Steps :

1. Floppy Disk with DOS system file
Create a virtual floppy disk with Virtual Floppy Drive then format it with create DOS system file option. You will need it to make your SD card bootable later.

2. Bootable SD Card
Format your SD card with HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and select "Create a DOS startup disk" and point it to the virtual floppy disk that you just created in step 1. Now your SD card is bootable !

3. Windows XP Lite
Shrink your windows installation by using nLite then copy all the installation files into your SD card. Copy SmartDrv.exe into the SD Card. You can use Virtual PC 2007 to verify your windows installation on a powerful machine.

4. Boot from SD Card
Enter your Eee PC Bios setup by pressing F2 and select "Removable Dev" as 1st boot devide under Boot tab. Insert your SD card then save your bios changes and reboot.

5. Start windows XP installation
Once it boot to SD card in DOS. Run "SmartDrv /X" and start the windows installation by executing "winnt" command in I386 folder. Follow the instruction until you come to partition management wizard. Delete ALL the linux partition, including the one stated with "bios" and create a single 4GB partition for your windows XP. Format it with FAT32, because you will need to change the boot.ini later. Follow the windows installation ... This will take you around 30 mins

6. Cannot find system file
Your Eee PC will complain cannot find windows system file once you finish your windows XP installation. Don't panic, this is expected, windows installation are confuse between your SD card with the harddisk. So we need to fix it the human way, manual ;)

7. Changing boot.ini
Boot from SD card again and select the windows XP installation option. Go to recovery mode. Run "attrib -SHR C:\boot.ini" to unhide this system file then copy it to your SD card. Change the boot.ini using another computer and make sure it's "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)".
Update your Eee PC boot.ini and reboot it.

8. Starting Windows XP
So now you got your windows XP up and running on your Eee PC !!

So I got my 1st UMPC - Eee PC 701 4G

Paid SGd398.00 for a new toy Black Asus Eee 701 4G :) It come with Linux with the following specs :

• Celeron M 900Mhz
• 512MB DDR2 RAM
• 4G SSD
• 7" TFT LCD
• VGA webcam
• 802.11 a/b WiFi

Playing a while with it and decided to upgrade its RAM to 2GB since it's only SGD65.00 for a Kingston DDR2 667Mhz RAM. To make it more complete, I've equip it with an external 8GB Sandisk SD card for more storage space which cost me another SGD65.00

Total investment for this new toy = SGD398 + SGD65 + SGD65 = SGD 528.00

So what I can do with this new toy ?

1. Carry it around with my small bag
2. Connect it to projector and do presentation
3. Watch movies
4. Surf net
5. IM
   

The only drawback is its small keyboard. It takes some time to get use to it, but with it magic number 398, I wiling to give in to that. And now, I've already used to it ;)

Not going to post any photo because you can get it from Google Images