Although it was not the first company to release an ultra small notebook, Asus was the first to market an affordable, fully functional, yet low-powered, notebook that caught on with a large number of PC users. We could argue that other companies were responsible for the term “netbook” and that Asus’ timing just happened to be right; regardless, it’s safe to say that Asus is largely responsible for the current netbook craze. It started a couple of years ago with the introduction of the first Eee PC, and demand for the diminutive machines hasn’t quelled since.
The Asus Eee PC 900 was one of the first widely adopted netbooks. It featured an 8.9-inch screen, Windows XP or Linux, and mobile Intel Celeron processor.
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The first few waves of netbooks were enormously popular and sold very well. Today’s netbooks, though, are far more refined than their predecessors. Those early machines feel sluggish and severely underpowered in comparison, despite the fact that the platforms they were based on aren’t really all that much slower in real-world situations.
One of the more popular early netbooks was the Asus Eee PC 900. It featured a 900MHz Mobile Celeron processor, an Intel 915 chipset with integrated graphics, 1GB of RAM, and a funky storage subsystem that consisted of a relatively speedy 4GB flash drive for the OS volume and either an 8, 12, or 16GB secondary mini PCI-E SSD for additional storage depending on the included OS. The secondary SSD, however, was pretty slow (slower than most HDDs) and not adequate for hosting an OS.
Fast forward to today, and most netbooks are built around Intel’s Atom processor and mobile 945 chipset. They feature standard 1.8- or 2.5-inch hard drives and ship with Microsoft’s more streamlined and netbook-friendly Windows 7. All of that adds up to a superior experience.
Without some serious shoehorning, we can’t make a hard drive fit in an Eee PC 900, and 4GB isn’t enough space to install Win7 on the faster internal flash drive. But we want to help all of you early adopters out there to alleviate your netbook envy. There’s still plenty we can do to rejuvenate an older netbook to make it perform much better, and it’s possible to put Win7 on the machines, too. We’ll use an Eee PC 900 for our project, but there’s no reason you can’t do the same things with any of the other early netbooks that don’t quite stack up to today’s offerings in their stock form.
 The Mods
To mod our Eee PC 900, we’re going to replace its slow mini PCI-E SSD with a much faster drive and install Win7 on the machine using a USB flash drive. We should note that we upgraded this particular netbook to 2GB of RAM long ago, but because many early netbook owners did the same (and because, let’s face it, it’s a very easy upgrade), we won’t cover that in this article. |
SuperTalent’s aftermarket mini PCI-E MLC- or SLC-based SSDs offer much higher performance than the stock SSDs included in most early netbooks.
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A number of companies such as RiData, OCZ, Patriot, and Super Talent have released fast, mini PCI-E SSDs that are plug-in compatible with most early netbooks. Prices on these drives range from $49 for a basic 16GB model to over $200 for a high-performance 64GB model. For this mod, we got our hands on a fast 32GB MLC-based drive from Super Talent (model FPM32GLSE) that offers transfer speeds over 90MBps, but any mini PCI-E SSD will do. (Note that some netbooks require IDE Zif or half mini PCI-E drives, but those are available online, as well.)
Installing Win7 from a USB flash drive takes a bit of work and will require a drive with at least a 4GB capacity. A number of steps are required to prepare the USB flash drive for use, and we’ll need to copy the Win7 installer files to the drive, too. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Prep The Flash Drive
The first thing required to install Win7 on a netbook (without using an external optical drive) is to prepare the flash drive using the DiskPart utility included with Windows Vista and Win7. To prepare the flash drive, you’ll need to use a Vista- or Win7-based PC (WinXP will not work using the steps outlined here) that's equipped with an optical drive. Technically, the optical drive isn’t a necessity unless you have Win7 on DVD only, because the files can also be pulled from an ISO image. We’ll be using a full retail version of the OS and will outline the steps assuming you have an installation DVD, too.
First, launch a command prompt as an administrator by clicking the Start Orb, and then go to All Programs and Accessories. In the Accessories group, right-click Command Prompt and choose Run As Administrator from the menu; a command prompt window will open. At the prompt, type diskpart and press ENTER to launch the utility. You’ll be greeted by a simple prompt labeled DISKPART>.
At the DISKPART> prompt, type list disk and press ENTER to bring up a list of drives connected to the system. In the Disk ### column, you’ll see that numbers are assigned to each drive. In our test machine, the USB flash drive we wanted to use for this project was labeled Disk 3, but your drive may be different. Be sure to write down and reference the correct number for the flash drive you’re using to prevent unwanted repartitioning of another drive in your system. Once you know the number assigned to the drive, it must be selected in the DiskPart utility. Select the drive by typing select disk 3 (substitute the 3 with the number of your drive) and pressing ENTER. A notice will scroll by saying the drive has been selected.
The next step is to clean the drive and wipe out any partitions that may reside on it. To do this, type clean at the prompt and press ENTER. Once Disk-Part says the drive has been cleaned, a new partition can then be created. Create the new partition by typing create partition primary at the prompt and press ENTER. Next, the newly created partition must be selected in the DiskPart utility. Because the drive was cleaned, we know there is only a single partition on it; it should be labeled partition 1 (if you create multiple partitions on the drive, you can type list partition to see a list of partitions on the drive). Type select partition 1 at this point and press ENTER. Next, type active at the prompt to mark the partition, and thus the drive itself, as active—i.e. bootable—and press ENTER again.
With the USB flash drive cleaned, repartitioned, and activated, it’s ready to be formatted. For the purposes of this project, you should format the drives with the FAT32 filesystem. To format the USB flash drive with FAT32, type format fs=fat32 and press ENTER. Depending on the size of your flash drive, this process will take anywhere from a few minutes to a half an hour. When the formatting process is complete, the final necessary step to prepare the drive is to assign a drive letter or mount point to the volume. Simply type assign at the prompt and press ENTER. Finally, type exit at the prompt and close the utility.
The DiskPart utility included with Windows Vista or Windows 7 can be used to create a bootable USB flash drive, suitable for installing Windows 7 on a netbook (or any other system for that matter).
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With a prepped flash drive at the ready, it’s time to copy some files. As you might guess, you can’t simply drag and drop the files from the Win7 installation disc to the USB flash drive. Instead, you must use the xcopy utility along with a few parameters. Assuming your optical drive is drive E: and the USB flash drive is drive F:, the command necessary to copy the Windows installation files over is: xcopy e:\*.* /s /e /f f:\. The wildcards tell xcopy to copy all files and the /s and /e parameters tell xcopy to copy all directories and subdirectories, including empty ones. The /f parameter results in the full source and destination file names being displayed while copying. The copy process will take a good half-hour or so depending on the speed of your optical and flash drives. When done, the flash drive can be used to install Win7 on any machine that will boot to a removable USB device.
Dig Into The Netbook
With the flash drive prepped and ready to go, it’s time to get the netbook upgraded. Before replacing any hardware or installing Win7, though, we’d recommend upgrading the netbook’s BIOS as a precaution, as well as downloading any necessary drivers. For the Eee PC 900 we used for this project, the only driver we had to download was for ACPI. Win7 included the rest.
Disappointingly, Asus doesn’t have a Win7-specific driver posted on its site, but there are a number of modded drivers available that were created by members of the enthusiast community. You can download the driver we used from tinyurl.com/y9sgun7. If you have a different netbook, though, other drivers may be required.
After updating our system’s BIOS and downloading the ACPI driver, we set out to replace its SSD. To remove the stock drive, we loosened a few screws on the underside of the netbook to remove an access panel. Underneath the panel, two more screws held the stock mini PCI-E SSD in place. We removed those screws and simply unplugged the SSD; it’ll pop right out like a SODIMM. Then, we plugged the SuperTalent SSD into the slot, secured it in place with the stock screws, and reinstalled the access panel—ready to roll. Once we had upgraded the SSD, we plugged our USB flash drive containing Win7 into one of the Eee PC’s ports, powered up the system, and entered the system BIOS. In the BIOS, we set the machine to its defaults and enabled all of its integrated peripherals to ensure they’d be detected during the Windows installation. Then, we set the machine to boot from the removable USB flash drive, saved the changes, and exited the BIOS.
Upon rebooting, the Win7 installation will begin. Follow the on-screen prompts and step through the installation, making sure to select the proper SSD for the install location. Once the installation has progressed to the point of the first reboot, either unplug the USB flash drive or re-enter the system BIOS to set the replacement SSD as the boot device. Otherwise the system will continually boot to the removable flash drive.
With the Win7 installation complete, we installed the ACPI driver and ran Windows Update to fully patch the system. In our case, the complete installation, including the swap file, consumed a mere 8GB of the new SSD.
Grand Finale
Replacing the SSD and installing Win7 on the Eee PC 900 proved to be quite an upgrade. According to the Windows Experience Index rating, the system doesn’t rank very highly, but the speed of the aftermarket SSD in conjunction with the streamlined Windows 7 OS nevertheless transformed the machine. The combination of Win7 and the upgraded SSD resulted in noticeably faster application load times, quicker Web browsing (especially with multiple tabs open), and smoother multitasking, none of which were always possible with WinXP and the slower stock SSD. 
by Marco Chiappetta
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