Installing Windows XP to the Eee 701 using the Eee 900 recovery disc possible

And so I’ve convinced myself to switch to Windows XP on my wife and kids can use it. They’re not Linux users, after all. (My 5- and 3-year old kids aren’t used to Windows, but they’re comfortable with OS X Tiger on their Mac Mini. But that’s another story.).

I was thinking of installing XP from scratch using a retail copy, but then I would have to optimize, customize and lighten the installation using the steps Asus had outlined in the 701 user manual. So I thought of just installing the copy that came with the Asus EeePC 900, since that seems to have been tweaked by Asus already.

And it does work. Since the EeePC 900 essentially has a 4GB SSD for its primary storage, the recovery DVD will restore the contents to the 701’s 4GB SSD just fine. It took me about 45 minutes for the recovery, plus some tweaks. The only things that that I had to change were the driver for the touchpad (the 900 uses Elantech, while the 701 uses a Synaptic touchpad), and the webcam.

Otherwise, all worked without a hitch.

Now as for apps, some of the 900’s programs were installed on d:\Program Files by default. So what I did was install these on a 4GB SDHC, which serves as my more or less permanent D: drive for that machine.

July 12, 2008 · Filed by jangelo under Software

Comments

One Response to “Installing Windows XP to the Eee 701 using the Eee 900 recovery disc possible”

  1. David on August 8th, 2008 9:59 pm

    Hi, this is a great idea- I’m trying to do the same thing, but I don’t have an external DVD-ROM drive.
    Do you know how I can do this from a USB drive? I’ve found the usual methods of installing XP from USB, but on the 901 recovery disk, I can’t find the XP setup files.
    Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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