Personal Computing and Development by Dag J. Nedrelid

My Eee PC 900 – Windows 2000 Professional

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My Windows 2000 Professional experience.
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Before installing
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I had somewhat high expectations for having better performance results with Windows 2000 than I have experienced with XP pro. I recently borrowed a XP designed version of the EEE PC, and even there it was equally slow for normal use. Unusable I would say for even just listening to music and browsing the Internet. XP does too much read/write work “behind the scenes” and that puts you straight in the SSD bottleneck. Even with the most nLited version I could conjure without nerfing the system too much for taste.

After installing
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It’s fast.

It takes 55 seconds to load up entirely, from the moment I push the power button. This is a NON-nlited version, FULL original install from a legal disc I have with Windows 2000 Professional. When it’s done booting up, it performs faster than anything I have tried on it. I want to say it’s faster than Xandros, but I can’t really say.

Battery
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I finished the install yesterday, and am now testing the battery lifetime. It looks like it will last about 2 hours on an average basis with light/normal use, but this is not of major importance to me, as I don’t mind having to use external power for anything above 30 minutes on nearly any laptop.

Performance
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This is a full install of Windows 2000 Professional, and I can almost not even sense the slow SSD speeds by performing normal user tasks. Updating it to SP4 and all the security updates took a long time, but that’s the only thing I can think of that reminded me of the SSD drive. Other software I have installed so far is:

ASUS drivers (all works after you upgrade to SP4, I have turned off webcam in bios as it is of no interest to me to have it).
VLC – Videlan
Internet Explorer 6
Mozilla Firefox
Opera (I’m a webdeveloper, it’s a nice machine to test out browser incompability on with several browsers).
MSN 7
iTunes
Quicktime

Summary
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It’s simply fast. In my opinion the eee pc were made for the Win2000 operating system. I notice little to no lag at all when using the machine for normal tasks. Surfing the net, listening to music, checking mail, talking on MSN. It’s quick to use right after boot. Everything works, also hibernation/suspend if that’s desirable.

This was meant to be a test only, but I have no intention of recovering the Xandros system just yet, as it’s running so well right now. I notice that I want to use pc more now than before, for both small tasks and beside the workstation, simply because it works very well now with little to no SSD lag.

I  would give win2000 on the eee pc a 9/10 rating if I could. XP a 2/10 rating(even on dedicated eee pc’s). Debian/Xandros 7/10 rating.

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How I installed Windows 2000 Professional.
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How to install (should also work with XP)
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Make a USB boot drive with the HP tool, copy win98se bootdisc files to it + xfdisk and aefdisk.
prepare a USB drive with a copy of the Windows 2000 installation files.

1. Boot with win98se-bootdisc USB (remember the tools xfdisk and aefdisk).

2. Partition with xfdisk.

3. Format the new partition and make it bootable with format.com
(I used the command ‘format d: \q \s’)

4. Make the partition bootable by writing a MBR with aefdisk (or else you’ll get the Error 17 message)
(I used the command ‘aefdisk 2 /MBR’)

5. Reboot with SSD, it is now C: instead of D:, run ’smartdrv’ then go to the i386 directory of the USB drive with the copied Windows 2000 installation disc, and run ‘winnt’.

Then you just follow the installation procedure. Enjoy.

Resources for getting the tools I used:

A floppy drive simulator from
http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html#top

A good win98se custom (no ramdrive) bootdisc creator from
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool 2.0.6
http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm

xfdisk from
http://www.mecronome.de/xfdisk/

aefdisk from
http://www.aefdisk.com/

After using the HP tool with the virtual floppy drive as source for dos files, you now have a bootable USB flash drive that works as a win98se boot disc. Remember to copy all the files from the virtual floppy drive as the HP tool does not add all of them. Remember to add ‘aefdisk’ for writing MBR and ‘xfdisk’ for partitioning the SSD.

Use another USB drive where you copy the files from the Windows 2000 professional disc. I suppose you could even use the same drive, and just copy the i386 folder from the installation disc to it.

I hope this can be helpful or interesting for those who might be interesting in trying the Win2k system on their EEE.

I posted this article as well over on the EeeUser Forum.