David WE Roberts wrote:

To be absolutely clear, I want to install to and run XP from a 40Gb
external USB HDD.
I don't want to use the HDD to install on my internal drive (which at
4Gb SSD in an EEE PC 900 is too small to comfortably run XP).
I have an external USB CD/DVD drive to use for my XP CD.
I want to use XP because I have bought the OEM CD which proved to me
that running XP from the SSD is too much like hard work.

Not the way you say you want to do it, but I am running XP Home on an
EEE PC701, with the 4Gb SSD.

The sneaky bit was installing 2 Gig of RAM, and using a 32Gig SDHC card
for programs and data. I also formatted the SSD as NTFS and compressed
the filesystem. There is no swap needed with this much RAM in spite of
Windows' dire warnings, so I set the swap size to zero. I also remove
the backup folders whenever Windows updates itself using a program
called, rather boringly, Windows Update Remover. Disable your browser
caching, too. The only gotchas are that system restore and hibernation
aren't possible and things slow right down when the free space on C:
drops below about 400Meg.

Another possibility with the EEE PC 701s is to replace the wifi card
with a PCI Express SSD, and that will give you up to 64 Gig of space,and
you can use a USB dongle for wifi. Some early ones actually have a spare
PCI Express socket on the motherboard, and they all have the solder pads
and space to fit one.
--
Tciao for Now!

John.