Eee 900 Now Running XP SP3

Well, the apocalypse is over, Vanilla Shake (the name given to my Eee 900 by my wife) is now running XP Service Pack 3 and all the outstanding Microsoft security updates. I managed to get it all done without moving or modifying the Asus XP installation. Here’s how i managed it:

First of all, if you happen to buy an Eee 900 XP you should carefully follow all the directions below if you want to avoid the problems I ran into of not being able run the Microsoft software updates. I actually had to do a full restore of XP from the Asus recovery disk in order to start this process. So I started off just as if I had just taken my Eee 900 out of the box.

Assuming you have just powered on your Eee 900 for the first time, you’ll end up going through the normal set of Microsoft XP set up screens. When you come to the screen asking if you want to turn on automatic software updates, DO NOT enable this feature. After you successfully boot up into XP, and have set up whatever wired or wireless network you will be using, the very first thing you need to do is to check out the amount of free space available on your C: drive. The C: drive is about 3.8GB in size (this is the available space on a 4GB drive after formatting). Before you attempt to install XP Service Pack 3 you are going to need at least 1.5 GB of free disk space on the C: drive. If you find you have that much space, go on to the next step. If you don’t, try freeing up space on C: by deleting any unneeded software. I went ahead and deleted Star Office Suite, Microsoft Works, and the Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer. Important note: even if the software you delete actually resides on the D: drive, you will find that by deleting it you will likely save some significant space on the C: drive. This is because many programs utilize large amounts of disk space in C:\Program Files\Common Files directory. In fact, one of the things I tried to do was to move the directory onto another drive and reset its registry entry to point to the new location. Alas I found many programs are hard-coded to access Common Files on the C: drive and ignore the registry entry, so I had to give up this idea.

OK, so now you’ve got at least 1.5GB free on your C: drive (I actually managed to free up 1.7GB), you’re ready to install SP3. You can do so by accessing the Start Menu item “Windows Update”. This will take you to Microsoft’s Windows Update web page. You will be prompted to install all kinds of Active X components and the Windows Genuine Advantage software. Go ahead and do so. Eventually the Web page code will start checking your Eee 900 for needed updates. When it decides it knows what you want, press the Express Update button. This will get XP SP3 installed on your machine.

After the Service Pack installation is completed, check the available free space on your C: drive. You will likely be as shocked as I was when you find that you only have 100MB or so free. Do not despair, XP is not very good at cleaning up after itself following a service pack installation, but we can do it ourselves. The first thing that you can delete is the C:\Windows\Software Distribution\Download directory. This contains left-overs from the installation process and can safely be deleted without any worries. There is another directory containing almost 500MB that you can remove from the C: drive, but which I recommend you keep a copy safely located somewhere else. This is the C:\Windows\ServicePackFile directory. This directory contains everything you would need to roll-back the SP3 installation to SP2. While I don’t foresee myself ever having to do this, nevertheless I copied this directory onto my 16GB SDHC card before deleting it. That way if worst came to worst, I would be able to roll-back the install. Removing both of these directories will leave you with over 1GB of free space on your C: drive.

Now you are in a position to enable the Automatic Update process on your Eee 900. You can do so by going into the Control Panel Security Center and accessing the Automatic Updates function. Set it to “Notify me but don’t automatically download or install them”. This will give you the chance to pick and choose when updates you want to apply. For example, there a whole bunch of updates that are for Office 2007, and since I’m running Office 2003 on Vanilla Shake, I’m not interested in them. After you pick the ones you want, don’t forget to click on “Don’t notify me about these updates again” or Microsoft will mercilessly hound you about the ones you didn’t select!

After you have run a bunch of updates, which should execute without any problem given the amount of free disk space you should have on your C: drive, you may find some additional large directories hanging around after the updates. These will be named something like $ntservicepackuninstall$. You can safely delete these if you feel confident that you will not need to roll-back any of the updates.

Finally, before installing any additional software on your Eee 900 I recommend doing two things:

Using Regedit, navigate to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

There you will find a ProgramFilesDir entry. Change itsvalue to D:\Program Files as this will change the default location where new programs will be installed to your 8GB drive. Asus has already created a Program Files directory there and even has some software already installed there. Be aware that not all programs use this registry entry and some are hard coded to always use the C: drive. Nevertheless, everything I’ve installed on Vanilla Shake has ended up going onto the D: drive, including Office 2003, Visio 2003, Firefox 3, Ccleaner (get this utility!!!), Thunderbird, iTunes, and AVG Free 8.0 Anti-Virus, so almost all program installers seem to respect this setting.

Finally, move your My Documents directory onto your SD card drive (assuming you have one, and you really should!). This is very easy to do. First, create a directory named My Documents on the SD card. Then right-click the My Documents icon on your desktop, select Properties, enter the Target Folder Location path of your new directory, and click the Move button. Windows will automatically move the current contents of My Documents to the new location and will continue to use that new location in the future.

Well, that is about all I can say for now on this topic. I hope you find this posting helpful. XP SP3 along with a bunch of other OS updates have successfully been installed on Vanilla Shake and the little notebook is running just great! I extremely pleased with the performance of the Eee 900.