Windows XP logoI’m going back to the dark side (for awhile) with my EEE OS and have decided to install Windows XP on the internal SSD.

NOTE: I haven’t bothered (too much) about reducing the SSD writes as I have 2GB of RAM in the EEE and the calculations I have seen in a number of places put SSD failures in around the 5-7 year timeframe if excessively written. I’d hope that I’ll get a technology refresh green light within this time to move my EEE onto a less critical role.

I followed a few guides to make this as painless as possible, starting with a slipstreamed build of XP, inserting SP3 and the EEE drivers. Although I didn’t use this guide for the slipstream, I have used the registry and Firefox tweaks from that page, and the slipstream HOWTO is pretty similar to what I did.

There are some additional post-install tweaks to be made and this page was my main source of the tweaks, despite it’s move away from the creative commons licensing which initially built the wiki.

Essentially, the steps I followed were to:

  • Change my swap on the SSD to 128-256MB (minimum without swapping, frees up space)
  • Moved my user profile to the SDHC card (using the ‘Alternative Procedure’ – backup your registry first)
    • Create a secondary Admin user, restart and logon as the new user
    • Move your C:\Documents and Settings\[PrimaryUserName] directory to the SDHC card (  D:\Documents and Settings\[PrimaryUserName] )
    • Run ‘regedit’ and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
      • Find the key which relates to your primary user name
      • Change the ‘ProfileImagePath’ value to the path you copied your directory to (e.g. D:\Documents and Settings\[PrimaryUserName] )
      • Exit regedit
    • Reboot, logon using your primary user name
    • Delete the secondary admin user
    • Done!

In addition I installed (on the SDHC card wherever the install allows):

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