A while back I wrote this post and then completely forgot to post it *doh*. Anyway a few months back myself and the other half booked a holiday in Thailand, however the flight was going to be so loooong, to say the least, with multiple connections. I had been thinking for a while to get a portable media device, and then seemed like as good a time as any.

Anyway, to cut a long story short it snowballed. I started looking around and none of the devices had the battery life I was after, so I looked into portable DVD players but eventually I settled on getting a netbook. Sure I could of gone with the iPhone of the netbook world, the Samsung NC10, but I wanted to try something different, and liked the battery positioning on the Dell Mini 10 series. Along with it I also bought a spare 6  cell battery which will hopefully, with its stock 6 cell battery, give me 16 hours of power. Plus this way I got to kill 2 birds with one stone, the better half also needs a laptop, so, outside of travelling, this will be hers.

After weighing up whether I wanted the higher resolution screen of the Mini 10 or the better graphics card of the Mini 10v (why make us choose Dell?) I went with the extra grunt of the 10v (check out the gallery below), and about a week later I received it in the post. To save an extra €50 I bought the ubuntu version as well. I’d like to say I’m switching to linux and ubuntu but I work with linux enough in work that in the evenings and on a plane I like the ease of use of Windows. So I have a spare XP license lying around that isn’t being used since I moved over to Vista so I thought I’d install it onto the netbook.

Thing is, there are no CD drives on netbooks. I could of bought an external drive but that would be negating the money saved on getting it with ubuntu so I resolved to learn how to install it from a USB flash stick.

If you search yourself, you will probably come across this tutorial. Ignore it, it is outdated, takes longer and I ran into multiple problems using it. I’m sure it worked fine 2 years ago but a better utility has been released since. Funnily enough it took me a lot more digging to find it though. Hopefully you’ll have found this post, or the utility before trying out the old method first.

Here is where you can download the program:

EeeUser.com: WinSetupFromUSB

Here is a FAQ if you run into any issues:

Installing XP from USB FAQ

… and here is a brief guide I found for using it. It really is simple compared to the other method.

1. Get the program (linked above) and install it
2. Copy your XP source to hard disk if it’s not there
3. Run the program and select the XP source
4. Choose your USB disk. Click on HP Format tool and format it FAT16 if USB disk is less than 2GB and FAT32 if it’s more than 2GB.
5. Click GO and wait until it’s finished. If you want USB letter to be U: answer YES when it asks you.
6. Boot Eeepc off USB tapping ESC key during boot. Choose Windows 2000/2003/XP setup.
7. Choose First part (Text mode)
8. When in Text mode setup, delete ALL partitions on the hard disk and install. I am assuming you are installing to the first partition if you are going to create more than one partition. If not- use “BOOT.INI adjustments” in the program and change values accordingly. There are tooltips on each element of the interface, just hold the mouse over it.
9. Upon reboot boot again from USB and select Second part (GUI mode) and continue installation
10. Upon reboot boot ONCE AGAIN from USB and choose Second part + Start for first time
11. When windows is fully loaded give it a few minutes before unplugging the USB disk.

I’ve highlighted 2 important steps in the process that I initially overlooked. If you are familiar with the installation of XP, you’ll know that after it finishes copying over the files, it reboots and then you can let it boot from the HDD. You can’t do this when installing XP using this method, you have to boot from the USB stick a second time, and then a final third time to get into Windows.

I don’t know if it was something I did wrong during the setup, but I found after finally booting into Windows XP for the third time that I couldn’t boot into Windows without first booting from the USB stick. If you experience this issue here is how I resolved it.

Navigate to the root of your C: drive and set it so that you can see hidden files, open the “boot.ini” in a text editor:

Here is what the unaltered contents of mine looked like:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect

I changed it to this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect

I then saved it and restarted and it worked.

I’ve been using it for a couple of months now without issue. Truth be known it’s mostly being used by my other half but I get the odd bit of use out of it on flights and on holiday for watching TV shows (it handles 720p mkv’s fine) More recently, on a trip to Scotland, it came in very handy for getting an instant copy of the photos one of our kayaking instructors had taken during the day by using the SD card reader built into the netbook.

If you are thinking about getting a netbook I highly recommend this one.