Good News and Some Very Bad News About My Asus Eee 900

Well yesterday was a very interesting day in my experiment to turn my new Asus Eee 900 XP notebook (named Vanilla Shake by my wife) into a serious work machine for my IT Enterprise Architecture consulting work. So far is has been pretty easy to accomplish, but i ran into a virtual show-stopper, too! Of course, I’m using Vanilla Shake right now to create this posting.

Remember the goal – to turn Vanilla Shake into a machine I can take with me on my business travels as an Information Technology Enterprise Architect, replacing my current system: a Kohjinsha SH6 UMPC. First of all, this means that Vanilla Shake must run my core work applications without a hitch. These are Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Project. As an enterprise architect I primarily create lots of written documents in Word, and create PowerPoint presentations of my findings and recommendations.  The documents and presentations usually have lots of embedded complex diagrams in them that are created in Visio. In addition, I’m constantly creating project plans to manage my own work and to create implementation plans for new architectures. Finally, for after-work at the hotel and while at airports or on airplanes, I want the machine to be able to run iTunes for transferring videos and audio files onto my iPod Touch (soon to be an iPhone 3G!).

First the good news, then the not so good news, then the apocalyptic news!

The good news is that Office 2003, Visio 2003, and even iTunes installed without a hitch on the 900 and work simply splendidly on it. I was amazed at just how well the notorious CPU hog iTunes runs on the little box. Navigating though the iTunes store was absolutely snappy! All the Office applications, and Visio, run quickly and without any difficulties at all. They reside on the D: drive (remember I changed the default Program Files location to D:), along with Firefox 3 and Thunderbird. There is over 5 GB of free space left on the 8GB D: drive.

Now for the not so good news: Project 2007 won’t install on Vanilla Shake. It complains that it can’t access some needed Windows files. Right now I’m assuming that is due to Project 2007 not being able to run on any XP Home machine. I found that the old Project 2003 software is available on the Web for a very cheap price, and so ordered it as it has all the features I need. Right now I’m assuming that Project 2003 will install and run OK, but time will tell.

Now for the apocalypse: Vanilla Fudge’s C: drive, where Windows lives, does not have enough disk space to run Microsoft’s normal software updates!!! I first noticed that turning on Auto Updates started filling the C: drive with over a gigabyte of Microsoft update files, and so turned off Auto Update and cleaned out the software distribution files that had accumulated on C:. I figured I would just do manual updates through the Microsoft software update Web site and pretty much do them one-by-one to minimize the need for disk space. Well, the very first update Microsoft demands be run on Vanilla Shake is XP Service Pack 3. Microsoft won’t even let you see what other updates are available until after you have installed that one. Attempting to run the SP3 update alone ends up generating an error message on the Eee 900 saying that it’s short of disk space by about 200 MB. Game over!

Now, I obviously can not use this machine in a work environment if I can’t get the latest security updates from Microsoft. So, it’s kind of back to square one. Now I need to figure out how to do one or more of the following:

1. Move the Windows Software Distribution directories to my E: SDHC drive, where there is tons of room, and thereby reducing greatly the demand for C: disk space
2. Move all of Windows off the tiny 4GB C: drive onto either the 8G D: drive, or the 16GB E: SDHC drive.

Until I do so, Vanilla Shake is pretty much just a toy.

Nevertheless, I’ve been having a ball playing around with the Eee 900 and have already learned tons more than I ever did about XP. I plan on moving ahead to see just how far I can go in meeting my original goal. So, let the games continue!

In the meantime, I sadly must say that I do not recommend that anyone buy an Asus 900 Eee XP system as anything other than a toy. It’s actually shocking to me that Asus would sell an XP notebook that can’t process Microsoft software updates.

Well, this epic saga will continue in the upcoming days and weeks, so stay tuned for more thrilling adventures!