Install Windows 7 on the EEE-PC 1000HE

I thought about buying a netbook for a long time. Ideas have been roaming since last year, but his hands reached just now. The main reason for buying this is that the netbook fits in the rear trunk of the motorcycle, which eliminates the need to carry a backpack with a full-sized laptop. After a long marketing research, my choice fell on the ASUS EEE 1000HE. The Atom N280, an Apple keyboard, an 8-hour battery and a case and a rag included outweighed the competitors' arguments.

The netbook comes with a Czech version of Windows XP, which is unacceptable to me. Although, I know people who find it funny and even convenient. In this post, I will describe the procedure for installing Windows 7 on my netbook. I’ll emphasize right away that I need Windows to work. So let's go.

1. Download the Windows7 distribution from the official site in iso format. You can also generate keys there. I downloaded the 32 bit version. I do not need 64-bit on a netbook.
   
   
2. Update the netbook BIOS to the latest version using the included ASUS Update utility.
   
   
3. Prepare a flash drive (minimum 4Gb). Preferably empty.
   
   
4. Now you need to transfer the contents of the iso image to a flash drive in some way. I took advantage of DaemonTools, which I am the proud owner of. Whoever doesn’t, you can download a fully functional trayal here . Using DaemonTools, I mapped the image to a virtual drive and copied its contents to a flash drive. Attention! Before copying, you need to make sure that you have the option to display hidden and system files in Windows Explorer turned on. For those who do not like DaemonTools, they can simply burn the image to disk using any program that can do this, for example, Nero Burning Rom and transfer the files to the flash drive already from the disk. For the rest, you can use WinRAR, which also knows how to open iso-images.
   
   
5. If Windows XP is already installed on the netbook and there is a free partition on which you want to install Windows 7, then there is no need to make a bootable flash drive. Just insert it into the netbook and run the installer. In this case, you can skip the next item. My situation was just that. My EEE had Czech XP on board and a free 60GB partition, where I installed Windows 7. Now I have double boot.
   
   
6. If you have Linux installed or you need to shuffle the partitions on the disk, then you need a bootable flash drive. For this, I recommend using LiveUSBHelper. Download and install it from here . If at startup the program requires vb6stkit.dll, then you can download it here . For installation, I still needed a set of activeX components from Microsoft, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. The program itself will tell you where. The interface is intuitive, I will not describe the details.
   
   
7. We run the Windows 7 installer. To do this, we either boot from the flash drive or run it from XP. Attention, to boot from a flash drive, you need to change the priority of boot devices in BIOS. Although, my boot from the flash drive was already above the boot from the disk by default. There were no problems with the installation. Windows now asks less questions and everything is IMHO easier. Installation took about half an hour, forty minutes.
   
   
8. Almost all drivers are already in the distribution. For normal operation of the hardkey buttons, you need to install the ACPI driver from ASUSa. And the ASUS Instant Key Utility. Download all this from here . They don’t have versions for Vista and Win7, but XP drivers worked fine for me. One feature. Do not run AsusSetup.exe. He swears at the version of Windows. There is another installer in the same directory. For ACPI drivers it is Setup.exe, for Instant key Utility it is EEEInstantKey_1.08.exe. Here it and run in compatibility mode. Everything was perfectly installed and worked for me.

I had to dig a little bit over the wireless settings. Winda saw all the wireless networks, but for some reason did not want to connect to mine. At first I thought there were problems in WPA2. But Winda refused to join the network, even with encryption turned off. As it turned out, the drivers for a wi-fi card are a little damp and do not work normally with all routers. I have an Apple Airport-based network in g-only mode. Changing the mode to "Compatible b / g" cured the problem. I hope this problem will be resolved with updates. By the way, an update for wi-fi drivers is already available through Windows Update. This problem may already be fixed.

Now I will say a few words about performance. Windows 7 runs fine on this configuration. Even the transparency of the windows automatically turned on. I installed the standard Java developer kit, including the JDK and Eclipse. Eclipse installed fine and is fast. You can work more or less normally closing the side panels. The Android emulator slows down a little, but not so much that it was impossible to work. The main thing is not to close it after the first launch. :) Heavy netbook J2EE applications, of course, will not pull. If it pulls, then the development will turn into hell. But for something easy, quite normal. In this case, size and power can be sacrificed for mobility.

For the Internet, I recommend installing Google Chrome. It works faster than Internet Explorer 8. Although, perhaps this is subjective.