Installing Microsoft Windows Vista on EeePC 900

Over the past 10 months that I've had my EeePC 900, I've tried a large range of OSs on it, OpenSuse, Mandriva, Ubuntu, PClinuxOS, DreamLinux, Puppy, EasyPeasy and MS Windows XP.

I found a couple of youtube clips of people running Vista on EeePC so thought I'd try it out.

A note on disk space - this is only going to work on EeePCs that have a 16GB second partition, as Vista needs lots of disk space during the install and you'll end up with 6-7GB disk space used up by the OS.

What you need to get started is a Vista disk (I used Vista Business retail) and USB DVD ROM drive. You should also go to the ASUS website and download the Windows XP drivers for the ACPI harware, chipset drivers, graphics card LAN and WLAN drivers - you'll need these later to put them onto a USB stick and unzip them.

Before you get started, you'll need to back up all your data - the 16GB partition is going to get formatted as part of the installation.

Connect the USB drive to your EeePC, put the vista disk in and reboot.

The installer will start up and at this poin you may notice that things seem to take a while - the solid state disk in your EeePC is not as fast as a normal hard disk so the install is goinf to take a while - when I did this I think the whole process took about two and a half hour.

When you are asked to choose where to install to, you'll only be able to select the 16GB SD partition. This is the only disk big enough to hold the Vista OS installation.

The rest of the install is as easy as you'd expect. Please note that is is going to seem like it has just stopped at a number of pointe with the progress indicator showing 0% and no drive lights flashing - stick with it, your EeePC is still working and the install will continue.

Once installed you'll find most of the hardware works. Apart from the WLAN card, which is annoying but can be fixed. If you go to the Vista Device manager you'll see two unidentified ethernet devices. One is the LAN card, the other the WLAN card. You'll have to use trial-and error to identify which is which (if you install the WLAN driver on the LAN card, you'll get an error saying that Vista couldn't start the driver at which point you can unistall the driver and try again). The WLAN driver you need can be found in the NDIS5x folder that is inside the WLAN installer you downloaded from ASUS. Install that driver directly and you should find everything works find. Don't run the setup for the installer - it installs a WLAN connection manager that is intended for use with XP and doesn't work with Vista.

You can use the same method to install drivers for the LAN and ACPI hardware. I also ran the setup for the graphics card drivers - it gives you the neat little intel applet that allows you to choose a few extra screen resolutions, but it's not essential.

So there you are - Vista installed. The big question is: how does it run ... and the answer is OK. Not brilliantly fast (I timed 40 seconds to login, 65 seconds to desktop loaded startmenu accessible and able to launch an application) and prone to a lot of disk swapping - a RAM upgrade would probably help with this. From my personal perspective it was just a little too slow, so I've gone back to a Linux distro - (EeeBuntu NBR to be exact).

I would suggest that installing on a EeePC 901 - with the Atom processor and faster SSD - would probably make for a good, workable OS. I have access to one and will do a follow up review when I've tested it.