About a year ago I purchased a nice little machine from ASUS.
It is an Atom N270:

When I opened the box, the machine was preloaded with Windows XP. It performs well with XP, and has 1 GB ram, and a 160 GB hard drive. A big mistake I made was installing Vista on it – Very slow.

It only took about a week of pain before I switched back.

So, after hearing all of the big excitement over Windows 7, I wanted to see if it was any better, or faster on this less than powerful machine.

A problem with that is that I do not have a USB DVD/CDROM drive right now, and as you can see from the picture – there are no drives built into that machine.

This means I need to install from a bootable USB memory stick.

I was able to do it, and while I was at it I wrote down what I did so you can too.

What you need:

Copy of Windows 7, and A running version of Vista, Windows 7, or 2008, and a Memory Stick that is at least 4GB in size.

Preparing the USB Memory stick

First, the memory stick needs to be prepared. Make sure you don’t have anything important on it since it will be totally erased.

Put your USB disk in the computer, and wait for it to be recognized. Then get to a command line (Make sure you run that as an administrator)

Type:

DISKPART <ENTER>

This will launch the disk partition program. You need to be real careful here since you can blow away partitions and drives of any drive on your system. Start out by listing the current drives on your system

LIST DISK <ENTER>

You should be able to identify your drive from this list:

So looking at the list, I know that DISK 1 is my flash drive. Make sure you properly identify your drive, or risk destroying important data.

Next, lets run the commands that will prepare your drive.

Note that disk1 is what we determined before. If by chance you have a nice fat USB hard drive sitting on your desk and it happens to be disk 1, and not your flash drive – you will erase everything!

Be careful!

Type this into DISKPART:

select disk1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

Now your flash drive is bootable.

Copying the Install Disk

Now the disk is bootable. Get your Windows 7 Install disk and copy the entire disk to your flash drive. With my computer, F: was the flash drive, and G: was the DVD ROM drive with the install disk. Copy the files from the command line like this:

xcopy g:\ f:\ /s/e/f e:\

Installing From Flash

Now, reboot and go into your BIOS and make sure it is set to boot from flash devices. I wish I could create a nice tutorial for this but there are so many different BIOS menus it would be difficult. Here is what mine looks like:

So make sure it is the first boot option, and you should be ready to install Windows 7 right from a flash drive. Save your changes, reboot…and install goodness will commence.

So you may be asking. How fast is it? Is it slow as Vista or Better than XP? I will let you know next time

One of the better Windows Vista features I’ve seen is ReadyBoost. Despite contrary misinformation you will read on other sites, this does not add more memory to your system. The flash memory used is nowhere as fast as RAM, but it is sometimes faster than hard drives. Readyboost works by caching your pagefile on the drive. It does not replace the pagefile, it is just a cache. A faster than hard drive but slower than RAM cache. But this speed can make a difference, especially consider the slowness of many peoples hard drives.

How do I use it?: (more…)

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