"John Williamson" wrote in message
...
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.

With you until you mentioned a 64Gb SSD - being of poor and 'umble stock
this is not financially attractive.
Besides, I already have the USB HDD.
I have programs and data moved over to the second 16Gb SSD - however this is
reportedly too slow to run XP effectively if the OS is installed there.
I also have the drive compressed and regularly clear out all but the latest
restore point.
It is the windows updates that are killing me, despite regular attempts to
sweep up behind them.
I could also get a fast SDHC card but the EEE PC 900 treats this as USB
attached at which point my bucket springs a familiar hole.

I originally planned to nLite the XP install and reinstall on the 4Gb SSD
but if I could just install on the 40Gb USB HDD it would make life so much
easier.
However, life was not meant to be easy.

Cheers

Dave R
--
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
[Not even bunny]

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

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