Windows Fundamentals on an ASUS eeePC
The Asus EeePC is an awesome little machine. I have the 701 model, which has 4GB of hard drive space (basically a 4GB flash card), and 512MB of RAM.
This model comes with Xandros Linux pre-installed. Xandros is very useable out of the box. By default, the EeePC is in “Beginner mode” but you can switch it to use “Advanced mode” which is a KDE-based Linux desktop.
Linux is just fine for 99% of what you’ll want to do, especially since all the apps (OpenOffice, etc) are preinstalled and preconfigured. There’s no reason for most users to want to change the OS on the EeePC. But we’re going to install Windows on it, just because we can.
This is where Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs comes in. This is an OS that Microsoft put out to its corporate customers to install on Windows 98-Class machines. The requirements are super light — it needs 64MB of RAM, and 700MB or so of hard drive space. I had used Windows FLP before, but mainly on really old hardware or inside VMware virtual machines. It’s basically a very light version of XP SP2.