March 19: Just a few months ago, the Taiwanese company ASUS released a new computer weighing under 2 pounds that is capable of running Windows XP. Like an Ipod Nano, the machine has no hard drive. While other companies, like Sony and Apple, also produce featherweight laptops, the price of acquiring one is prohibitive for many organizations. The ASUS EEE PC is different. It costs just $350 -- a price point previously unheard of for a miniature-sized, full-featured PC.

Just like the recently announced Apple AirBook, the EEE PC machine uses an SSD (Solid State) drive composed of flash memory. Of course, for $350 you only get a tiny SSD drive -- 4Gb. But it is an SSD, and those of you who have experienced a hard drive crash will be happy to know that the ASUS is more drop-resistant than similar machines that include many moving parts.

Here is a picture of the ASUS PC in action (it is pictured next to a PC modem card that houses the rest room key for Organizers' Collaborative). Typing on it does take some getting used to due to the small size.

In this photo the machine is running Organizers Database, the nonprofit donor management application developed by Organizers' Collaborative (OC). ODB fits nicely on the 800 x 480 screen of the EEE, and since many of ODB's functions are driven by the mouse, the small keyboard is not as big an impediment as it would be for word processing.

One of the reasons the ASUS is inexpensive is that it ships with the free Linux operating system. For some groups this will be fine for using Firefox, Skype, etc. but in our case we needed to install Windows. That can be a bit tricky for the novice, but ASUS does provide full support for doing this, and once you have Windows, the machine will do everything that any other Windows XP machine can do. Here is what I did, from start to Finish, to obtain the machine and get ODB running on it:

1-Ordered the computer from J&R Electronics in NY city on Monday morning. Cost of parts: $349 for the computer, $29 for an optional 4GB SDHC card, $8 for shipping - $386 total. Also needed during install only: 1Gb USB memory stick, external USB CD drive.

2-Machine arrived Tuesday afternoon via UPS, in Boston.

3-(optional step) Copy an entire Windows XP installation CD to the desktop of a spare computer. To get everything copied over, you have to go to Tools->Folder Options->View and make sure that the setting Show Hidden Files and Folders is turned on. Also uncheck the box "Hide Protected Operating System Files."

Using the software nLite 1.41, I was able to reduce the size of the installation CD folder significantly, from around 550Mb to only 450Mb. The nLite software takes about 20 minutes to run and it allows you to you remove server features and extra language files from your Windows installation to save on disk space. nLite can be used to produce an "iso" file which is compatible with any CD burning software, so that you can burn a new Windows XP CD with the reduced size XP installation.

4-(This step requires an external USB CD drive. If you don't have one, you can get a used one on EBay for under $25.) Connect the USB CD drive with your Windows XP Pro CD to the EEEPC, and then turn on the EEE. Upon startup, press the Esc key and you will be able to select the USB drive as your boot device, thus starting Windows XP Pro Setup. Follow the normal XP installation procedure; it can take 45 minutes and several reboots to get XP installed.

5-Now you have XP installed but the machine will have no sound, no network connection, and occasional error messages about your screen resolution. To fix this you must load the Windows drivers for the ASUS PC, which are supplied on a DVD in the EEE's box. If you don't have an external USB DVD drive, you can copy key files from the DVD onto a 1Gb USB 2.0 memory stick, as I did. Just create a folder at the top level of the drive named ASUS and then copy the Drivers folder plus the file setup.exe and all of the other loose files in the main folder, with the exception of the huge Linux image file (it is 800Mb, too big to fit and not needed). Copying the files took about 25 minutes -- I was using a generic flash drive purchased from MicroCenter; your flash drive could be faster.

6-Place the USB memory stick with the drivers into the ASUS while you are running Windows, and start the Setup program on the flash drive. Following the instructions in the EEE PC manual, you will be taken through installation programs for about 6 device drivers. Start with the "ACPI" driver and allow plenty of time for each driver installation program to get started.

After several reboots you should be able to get the machine's sound and network and touch pad to fully function. At this point the machine is ready to connect to your office network -- to customize it just as you would any other new PC. At this point you may remove the USB stick. (Note that it is theoretically possible to use a USB stick to load Windows, but it is difficult to make this work because you must reformat the device to FAT 16, something that is gonna take a while to get right even if you are a tech guru.)

7-Now, assuming you are connected to the Internet, you can run Windows Update -- again this can take a while! After rebooting once you then can select "custom" to disable unwanted updates. In my case I disabled the IE7 update to save on disk space. The whole update process can take a few hours but it will work unattended. Then you may want to add a virus protection software program that is not a resource drain. I choose the software that is available for free at http://free-av.com.

8-At last you have a fully installed, miniature Windows PC. And you can then run the installation program for Organizers Database. Whether you are connecting to a shared ODB database on your server or you are storing the database on your SSD drive, the entire installation, windows included, is likely to take up just over half of your SSD drive. Which means that there is still room to install additional Windows applications.

9-Although not required, I doubled the storage space on the EEEPC using digital camera memory. The machine has a built-in slot for an SDHC card and I added the 4Gb SDHC card made by Dane Electronics. By the time you read this it might make more sense to add 8Gb or 16Gb; see sites like dealRam.com and buy.com for the latest prices. The SDHC is about half of the speed of the built in SSD on the EEE PC.

10-Here are screenshots of the properties of drive C: and E: for the EEE PC after I completed the installation, and added some useful software like Fireworks 2, Firefox, WinRAR, WinSCP, PrintKey 2000, Adobe Acrobat Distiller, and Microsoft Office 2003 in addition to ODB:

You can see that we are using the SDHC card to prevent the SSD from filling to near capacity and slowing down our system. Currently MS Office and all enduser documents are stored on the SDHC:

Note: It may be possible to reclaim some of this space by using a Windows XP SP3 installation CD (when and if it comes out) or by using a utility such as the one here:
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_hotfix_backup.htm

11-In addition I upgraded the RAM of the machine from 512K to 2Gb. It is possible to obtain a 2Gb RAM chip for $40 and ASUS has announced that the replacement of the chip (which is technically not hard at all to do, just 2 screws to remove to get to it) will no longer void your EEE PC warranty. So now my ASUS has far more RAM than any of the desktop PCs in the OC office. After doing this it is possible to completely disable virtual memory, which offers speed advantages.

Feel free to give the procedure here a try and if you run into any obstacles, post your experience here or check out the forums at eeeuser.com!

Finally, for those of you who don't really care for the tiny 7" EEE screen, just wait a few months for their new model:

http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=10302