Lighten-up

I just took delivery this weekend of three Asus EEE-PC machines.
These little Celeron based machines have a four gigabyte flash memory instead of a hard drive drive and a wireless adapter for mobile connectivity.
They come with a Linux system pre-installed and are ideal for simple internet and mail / news tasks but they really shine with a copy of a Windows operating system. Unfortunately Vista requires a minimym of seven gigabytes to install but XP Pro will go onto a 4 gig flash drive with some jiggery pokery.

I have used nLite to create a cutdown version of XP and got the machine up and running with XP on board. Another 4 gig SD card plugged into the machine serves as a second drive, to which I have moved the documents, local application settings, in short-anything that needs lots of writing. Flash drives have a long lifetime but a finite number of writes so I am trying to increase the life of the mainboard soldered components as much as possible. I may try a big fat SD card as the maindrive later and see how that goes.

I have installed the first machine but it's at the limit of space for the flash drive so I'm going to try even more optimisation. I know a guy who has XP and Visual Studio Express installed and does WPF development on the machine.

I will post back here if I have anything interesting to impart.