Chad Dyess’ Blog

When I first got my Asus Eee 900HA, I thought about installing Windows Vista on it, but after doing some research, it turned out the performance was less than stellar, as you might imagine.  Then the Windows 7 Beta was released, and I found several articles where people had installed it on their netbooks, and were very happy with the results.  From the sound of it, Microsoft is getting Windows 7 right where Vista went wrong.  So I downloaded the Windows 7 Beta and decided to install it.

That’s where it got tricky.  Netbooks don’t have an internal DVD drive, so the only way to install it is from a USB flash drive or USB hard drive.  The Windows 7 Beta is well over 2 GB, but the biggest USB drive I had lying around was only 1 GB, so that wasn’t an option.  I have an old 200 GB USB hard drive though, so I dusted it off and went to work.  Unfortunately though, this was the most difficult part of the entire installation.  For some reason, I had a nothing but trouble trying to get my netbook to boot from the USB drive.  It took a few hours, and I had to try countless methods from various Google searches, but in the end, here are the steps that worked for me.
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Asus Eee PC 900HA

For Christmas this year, I got a great new netbook, the Asus Eee 900HA, in shiny black.  I was pretty excited about it too, as I’d been reading about the various netbooks for a while, and decided it would be pretty useful for traveling, given it’s small size.  I did a bit of research, trying to narrow down a make and model in a suitable price range, which was between $300 and $350.  I eventually came down to two models; the Acer Aspire One AOA150 and the Asus 900HA.  Both had similar specs, but based on the reviews I saw, it looked like the Asus would be my best bet, so I added it to my wishlist and crossed my fingers.  Fortunately, my wife knows how much I love toys like this, and also saw the value in a tiny notebook, so she got it for me.
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