David WE Roberts wrote:
"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.
It's not essential, and I don't use one.
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.
There I can't help, as I've only got the 4GB SSD and a SDHC card slot.
But I doubt the SSD is *that* much slower than a normal laptop HD. The
gotcha seems to be that on the EEE, all the drives except the boot drive
are USB mounts. My boot SSD has 3.21 GB used (compressed from 4.83 GB),
and half a Gig of that is the antivirus database.
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.
Windows Update Remover (Free, no nags) will remove 99% of the crud that
Windows update leaves behind, at the cost of not being able to uninstall
any updates.
http://www.brothersoft.com/windows-x...er-190541.html
If you don't use it to remove the backup folders, it will also uninstall
individual Windows updates if they're causing problems.
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.
Whwether it's fast enough depends on what you want to do. My 701 is fast
enough for browsing and office work, the main problem is the screen
size, which is way too small at 800x480. If I can be bothered, it's also
acceptable for a bit of photo editing or ripping the odd CD.
I use it as my day to day machine when I'm touring and haven't got
enough power available to run the all-singing, all-dancing dual core
Toshiba. Using the USB mounted DVD drive, it will even play DVD movies
full screen using VLC. I have edited a short (30 second) video sequence
on it, but that was more a proof that it could be done than a
pleasurable experience.
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.
True, and when you think you've got it cracked, they change the rules. I
found that nLite didn't help that much, by the way. There is a limit
below which XP becomes unusable, and you can already do that by using
the install options on the XP CD.
Keep trying, and you'll find that the EEE PCs are more capable than they
seem to most people.
Now, if anyone knows how to format a SDHC card using NTFS, then I could
compress the drive and free enough space for a couple of movies. It
might even let it run a bit faster, as the bottleneck is the USB interface.
--
Tciao for Now!
John.