My new Eee PC 900A and Windows 7

Last week I stumbled on a deal over at Woot!: a refurbished Asus EeePC 900A (1gb RAM, 4gb SSD) for $160. My addiction to shiny things had me clicking on the “Buy” button before I could stop myself. Considering my original 4G Surf cost twice that (albeit over a year ago) it was too good a deal to pass up.

The 900A has a 9″ screen (running at 1024 x 600 resolution) and is overall slightly larger than my 4g Surf (it still fits nicely into the neoprene sleeve case, though). Like my 4G Surf, it also lacks Bluetooth and the webcam.

EeePCs: 900A and 4G Surf
Out of the box it had the Xandros Linux distro installed but I wasn’t about to go back to using that. From the moment I ordered the unit I had plans to put the Windows 7 release candidate on it.

The first thing I did was a quick disk image using eeebackup just in case I should ever want to put the clean Xandros image back on it. Then it was time to research how to install Windows 7. Cramming a full Windows 7 install into 4gb of hard drive space requires some creativity. Luckily there are a lot of creative hackers out there. I ended up using a combination of various blog and forum postings (see the end of this post for the links) to create a bootable, vLite‘d version of the Win7 RC on a thumb drive and then used that to install it on the 900A:

Windows 7 installing on the Eee 900A
After some post-install configuration, cleanup, and compression, I had a trimmed down (but functional, even with Aero effects!) version of Windows 7 on my new Eee with about 1.4gb free on the SSD.

Windows 7 on the Eee 900A

I still need to put some more software on it (like AV software, Firefox, and maybe Office) so that final free space number will most likely be smaller. I’ll probably end up having to use an SD card for cheap, extra storage.

I think I’m taking a performance hit since I compressed the entire drive. Windows 7 isn’t super snappy, but it runs. I’ll give it a shot for a while and see how it goes before I consider switching to Ubuntu like I did on my 4G Surf.

Install Windows 7 on Asus Eee PC 900
Easy direct install from SD card to 4gb SSD
How to vLite Windows 7 Beta 1 and install it on a 901 using an SD card
The noobest noob guide to install Windows 7 directly on your Eee PC

Cleveland tourism videos

I can post these and laugh because Cleveland is my hometown. Unless you’re from there, you’re not allowed to snicker at these! 😀

Though humorous on the surface, they are a sad commentary on the current state of the city … the Flats used to be a really cool place. I have fond memories of going to the Powerhouse or Shooters on weekend, hanging out by the river. Or catching an outdoor concert at Nautica. And you can’t have lived in Cleveland in the early 90s without remembering the Free Stamp controversy.

Oh well … at least we’re not Detroit … and the Cavs are still going strong in the NBA playoffs!

Thanks for the links, Jaime!

Windows 7 RC upgrade

This past weekend I decided to jump in and start using the Windows 7 RC full-time on my home desktop. Rather than do a (recommended) clean install, I wanted to try the upgrade from Vista Home Premium. To prepare, I made a full image of my PC with DriveImage XML earlier in the week (which took over 27 hours to back up 164gb wirelessly to my NAS … in hindsight I probably should have used a wired connection or backed up directly to another hard drive).

My first mistake was that I tried to use the wrong release candidate, figuring I would try the 64-bit version of the software. Well, you can’t upgrade from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7 since the upgrade starts from within your current version of Windows (and you can’t run a 64-bit app in a 32-bit environment). A clean install is the only way in that case. I didn’t want to start over so I downloaded the 32-bit RC and then started the upgrade process.

Everything was going smoothly (for about an hour) until the last stage: copying over user settings and applications. The process got up to about 62% complete when suddenly my PC blue-screened and rebooted! I was then stuck in a BSOD reboot loop! Watching closely during the BSOD, I was able to determine that the faulting driver was named inspect.sys. Some Google searching helped me narrow this down to my Comodo Firewall software. What kills me is that my PC passed all the pre-upgrade checks. It only warned me about a possible incompatibility with the ATI Catalyst driver. I couldn’t find anyone else having the same specific problem during a Win7 upgrade so my only recourse was to undo the upgrade.

Lucky for me, the rollback process was smooth, and fast! It only took about 20 minutes to restore my Vista configuration and my PC was back to normal. Well, except for this:

Windows 7 upgrade fail

Hoping the firewall was the only problem, I uninstalled Comodo and then ran the upgrade process again. This time it was successful and I was up and running on Windows 7 with my settings intact … whew!

Windows 7 RC

I was able to download the 3.9 RC2 version of the Comodo Firewall and that seems to be behaving just fine with Win7 so far. Another minor problem I ran into was that the new Security Center kept reporting that AVG Antivirus 8.5 (the free version) was “turned off” when it wasn’t, so I had to disable that particular check. Also, when trying to shut down, my beta version of Trillian Astra crashes and I have to force the shutdown.

The new taskbar takes a little getting used to. Running programs and quick launch icons are almost indistinguishable at first:

Windows 7 taskbar

It was driving me crazy because I would think Thunderbird was running and click on the icon to restore the window, when actually it was not running and my click just launched it. I can see now that running programs have the square highlight around them. In my screen capture above, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Explorer are running, but Microsoft Money and PaperPort are not. See the difference? I guess this is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s dock. The other interface tweaks are nice, though, once you get used to them. I really like the Aero Peek and Aero Shake features, for example.

So now I’m using Windows 7 as my main OS at home … at least until next year when this release candidate expires.

You hear maniacal laughter in the distance …

I found, via slashdot, this great article on the history of Rogue, a character-based dungeons-and-dragons computer game from the early 80s, originally developed for UNIX.

While I had been playing paper-based RPGs with my friends and computer-based D&D games (like the Alternate Reality or Ultima series on my Atari 800XL) all through high school, I didn’t encounter Rogue until college. This makes sense since that would have been the first time I encountered a UNIX system (actually, though, I was playing it on the university’s VAX).

Despite the fact that its graphics were limited (your character was @ and monsters were letters like ‘Z’ for zombie or ‘V’ for vampire) and the controls were a little hard to get used to (H and L for left/right, J and K for up/down), it was a fun game to play because it was different every time: you never knew what monsters you were going to encounter (watch out for those monster party rooms!) or what cool weapons, potions, or scrolls you would find.

My daughter loves playing iRogue on my Treo (although should I be disturbed that she likes playing as undead? 😀 ). There’s even an iPhone version. Portable retro gaming at its best.

Windows 7 peace offering?

Microsoft made publicly available the first (only?) release candidate of Windows 7 this week, so I downloaded the image and then installed it at work on the same laptop I had put the beta on a few months ago.

Windows 7 dove and olive branchOne interesting thing I noticed was the new login screen background, which has what appears to be an artistic dove and olive branch image.

Is this a subtle peace offering from Microsoft, apologizing for Vista? 😀

It turns out that it’s actually a hummingbird as Microsoft switched the “mascot” of Windows 7 away from the betta fish (although that default wallpaper still appears in build 7100).

If you’re going to check out the release candidate, just be aware that starting on March 1, 2010, the software will shut itself down after 2 hours. It expires altogether on August 1, 2010.

One final side note: while trying to figure out where this image was located (it’s C:\Windows\System32\oobe, if you’re interested) I found this article about how Windows 7 will support login screen customization. Cool.

Could this be the year?

With the Cleveland Cavaliers kicking off the next round of the NBA playoffs against the Atlanta Hawks tonight, I got an e-mail from my sister with a link to this article on MSNBC.

Bob Madden sighs. He wants to believe. Oh, does he want to believe — to believe deep inside his body where feelings like these have only caused him four decades of heartbreak.

Madden, a longtime Cleveland sports fan, frets about whether he should expose himself to more of it.

“You wanna be optimistic, but you’re afraid to go there,” he says. “It’s hard to explain.”

Not for people who have Cleveland roots. For they share Madden’s sentiments. They worry about investing too much emotional capital in LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Yeah, fans hear the hype; it surrounds them. This time, a Cleveland team won’t break their hearts. This time, a Cleveland team will bring home a championship. This time …

The Browns, the Indians, the Cavaliers … I’ve been waiting for over 30 years to see one of my hometown teams win a championship.

Since I moved to the Tampa Bay area in 2001 I’ve seen the Bucs win the Super Bowl, the Lightning win the Stanley Cup, and the Storm win the Arena Bowl. Even the Rays got oh-so-close to winning the World Series last year which would have completed the sweep. But none of those victories were as thrilling as it will be to see one of my Cleveland teams finally bring a trophy home.

Despite LeBron’s anti-Cleveland attitude that really annoys me, he’s still our best hope for bringing this thing home. After that, he can go do whatever he wants …

GO CAVS!!

179 hours of HD goodness

Who needs to buy a brand new TiVo HD XL to get 1TB of recording capacity? After adding the Western Digital eSATA 1TB MyDVR Expander to my Series3 my recording capacity jumped from 32 HD hours (303 SD hours) to 179 HD hours (or 1,561 SD hours) … 1.3 terrabytes!

Just like the 500gb Expander attached my TiVo HD, installation was a snap: power down the TiVo, connect the external drive to the eSATA port, boot the TiVo back up, and then enable the Expander through the menu.

I’ve updated my Season Passes to keep more episodes of my shows now that I have the extra room. Except for Suggestions (and auto-record WishLists), everything recorded on the box should be in high definition. While I was messing with the wiring in the media cabinet, I also connected the S3 to my receiver via optical so I can get Dolby Digital 5.1 sound (I’m not sure why I hadn’t done that before).

WIJFR: Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut’s) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.” Ever since I read “Cat’s Cradle” several years ago, “Slaughterhouse-Five”  has been on my To Read list and I finally got around to it.

The main plot thread of the story follows Billy as he is captured by German soldiers in World War II and transported to Dresden, where eventually he and his fellow POWs (now residents of Schlachthof-funf) survive the Allied forces’ fire-bombing of the city.

Weaved in and out of that main plotline, we follow Billy as he jumps around in time after being abducted by the Tralfamadorians who experience time not as a linear event, but all at once, and thus have no concept of “free will” or being able to change the “future.” This has an profound effect on Billy who now knows how he is going to die (since he has already jumped forward to witness that event) but will do nothing to stop it.

It was slightly disjointing to read as each chapter consists of small sections of the story, maybe a paragraph or two, then jumps to a different part of the story, giving you a sensation similar to how Billy Pilgrim must have felt as he jumped around in time. Plus, I was reading it in bits and pieces to begin with. So it goes.

Strange device + bridge = long commute home

On my way home via-275 South through Tampa yesterday afternoon traffic came to a sudden stop. Eventually I was able to see that a police officer was blocking the left two lanes that lead to the Howard Frankland bridge, one of the four bridges across the bay and the main portion of my commute home.

The officer was directing traffic onto the Veteran’s Expressway, which is backed up at that time of day normally, so now we had two additional lanes of traffic needing to merge into those two lanes. Finally I made it past the airport and onto the Courtney Campbell Causeway and finished my drive home.

So, what was the problem? Major accident? Structural collapse? No … it was a bomb scare. Apparently someone noticed a strange device attached to one of the pillars of the bridge and the bomb squad was called in.

The device turned out to be a gizmo being used by the Department of Transportation to measure saltwater levels and corrosion on the area bridges. Oops! This reminded me of the bomb scare in Boston a few years back that turned out to be a viral marketing campaign by the Cartoon Network.

Jumping onto the Jaunty Jackalope

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) was released this week and for the first time included a specific version for netbooks.

It took a long time to download (apparently everyone is trying to get it), but once I had the image I created a bootable USB stick and then used it to boot my EeePC into the new OS.

My first impression was that it’s really slick looking. My second impression was that the remix interface was slow. The mouse moved jerkily and the eye-candy like fades and animations were sluggish. It was only the remix interface that was affected though, as once I had Firefox or any other app running, performance was fine. I found a single post on the Ubuntu forums reporting the same thing, but it could’ve been related to running from the USB stick. I did find another article that blamed it on the combination of a new version of the X Server and a new Intel driver in the distribution and finally this one that contained instructions on how to revert to a slightly earlier kernel to fix the problem.

Despite these warning signs (I like being on the cutting edge!) I took the plunge and did a full fresh install on my Eee. Since the 701 has an SSD in it, I used some of tips in this article to not create a swap partition and selected the ext2 (non-journaling) file system during partitioning for less wear-and-tear (you can find some other tweaks for running Linux on SSD drives here).

I’m happy so far! I haven’t noticed the GUI performance problems I saw when running the “live USB” version. The installer also detected my little Bluetooth dongle and I had no problems re-pairing it to my Treo (though I still need to test using that as a data connection).

Now I’ve got to put everything back the way I like it, just like when I switched from Xandros to Ubuntu EEE and then to Easy Peasy (which just had their 1.1 release). In a month or so, I’ll also upgrade my server to this new release.