Windows 7 Beta on Asus Eee PC 901

It’s pretty much a given that Microsoft doesn’t like the fact that they’ve had to do deals to get Windows XP put on new machines in order to keep a foothold in the rapidly growing netbook market. I’ve been happily using Vista since beta, but then I’ve been using it on a very beefy desktop machine and wouldn’t dream of putting it on a lower spec’ed device – neither would any of the netbook manufacturers! Windows 7 was always going to be a tighter version of Vista, and it’s clear that Microsoft wanted to make sure that it would be suitable for running on netbooks.

After looking at the available options, I got hold of an Asus Eee PC 901 a few months back, with a view to upgrading it to Windows 7 when it became available. So far I’m pretty pleased with the results, and I know that I can get it to perform even better (although I’m not going to invest that time until the OS is finished). In fact, I took the path of least resistance here – I’m sure plenty of people would say this isn’t the right way to install it, but then this is a beta, so a temporary situation anyway.

I’d already upgraded the RAM in my 901 from 1gig to 2 gigs, which was a good value upgrade at around 21 pounds from Amazon Marketplace. I’d also got an 8gig SDHC card in the 901’s SD slot that I was using for removable storage, but since Windows 7 can use any removable storage for ReadyBoost as long as it’s quick enough (my card is Class 6 SDHC, which is as fast as they currently get), I’d planned to use this to improve the performance. Looking at Amazon today, you can buy those two items together for just over 30 pounds, so we’re not talking huge expense.

I had access to a USB DVD drive in the office, so it was easy enough to burn the Windows 7 Beta iso that I’d downloaded through my TechNet Plus subscription. [Side note: I’d already installed Windows 7 x64 on my desktop, so when I downloaded the 32-bit version to go on my netbook, I was able to use 7’s new ability to natively burn an iso image to a dvd – handy!] If you don’t have access to a USB DVD drive, Gary Short’s blog goes though the steps he took to make a bootable USB flash drive to install W7 from. The installation process is pretty quick, but here’s where I had to compromise…

The Eee PC 901 that I have is the Linux version which is advertised as having a 20gb SSD (Solid State Drive). In actual fact it has 2 SSDs, a high speed 4gig drive which is soldered onto the motherboard, and a 16gig drive which is user swappable (in the panel on the bottom which also houses the RAM). Without using a tool like vlite to shrink down the installation (by removing features, many of which you would never need, like support for other languages) Windows 7 needs more than 4gigs for the installation. However, in order to keep the costs down (this is a cheap machine after all), the 16gig SSD that Asus put in the device is significantly slower, and you usually wouldn’t want to run your OS from it.

Anyway, taking the path of least resistance, and accepting that performance may be sluggish, I went ahead and installed Windows 7 Beta on the 16gig SSD (after deleting the current partitions and creating new ones for both SSDs, formatted with NTFS).

I did encounter a problem in the installation procedure, in that the screen went black for a period of time and I couldn’t see what was going on. This meant that I couldn’t see when the setup was asking me to input the name of the user account that it would setup as administrator. I had thought that the machine had gone to sleep, so I’d been hitting a combination of keys that I thought might wake it up (like Enter and Space). Seemingly this was sufficient for the setup process to complete, giving me a username of ‘1’ and a computer name of ‘PC’. Had I done more research ahead of time, I might’ve read: If you have an EeePC 901 Linux/Windows edition, please make sure you are using bios version 1001 or 1101.  Not doing so will render the installation procedure and login screen black out. If you’re reading this having not made sure you’re on those firmware versions, this is the way around it – briefly press the power button so the Eee PC does go to sleep, then press it again to wake the machine up and you should have a fully visible display.

Once the installation completed, I logged in, and in fairness it was useable, but not great. So I took steps to speed it up.

First, moving the page file to the faster 4gig SSD by going into Advanced System Settings (open the Start Menu and start typing “View advanced system settings”, you’ll only need to go as far as “View ad” before it finds it); under Performance, click Settings; on the Advanced tab, under “Virtual memory”, click Change. You need to make sure “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives” is unchecked, assuming your C: drive is the 16gig SSD and D: is the 4, you need to set the paging file size on D: to System managed (so they both are), then reboot the system before going back in and changing the paging file size on C: to “No paging file” and rebooting again. This will create a big file on D: and free up the equivalent space on C:. It also makes the machine quicker.

Secondly, I popped in the SDHC card and selected the option to speed up my system using ReadyBoost. I took the default settings here, which created a ReadyBoost file on my card of 4gb (leaving me with another 4 to use for files, which is fine for me – you might want to get a bigger card).

This gave me a working Windows 7 machine, with Aero Glass visuals(!), but with no networking. I simply installed the LAN and wifi drivers that Asus provides for Windows XP on the 901 on and everything was fine. I’ve got Windows Live Essentials installed; Skype 4.0 Beta 3 working (including video calls with the built-in webcam); PowerShell is happily included; and I can run all of those things at once as well as playing an episode of Sarah Connor Chronicles, full-screen, in Media Player. I still have plenty room on the drive to install Office, but I haven’t got round to it yet.

Even though I’m using the slower SSD as a system disk, it gives perfectly acceptable performance, and I’ll look to replace that SSD with a faster, larger one before Windows 7 RTMs. I do think that when netbooks start shipping with Windows 7 installed, people are going to like the experience.

[UPDATE] I’ve started posting about the Things I like about Windows 7. I’ve also been tweeting about Windows 7 on Twitter, so you might want to follow me there.