14 DAY TRIAL // Asustek's Eee PC sold millions of units in the first months since it hit the market. Its low price and the eye-candy aspect have made it the most wanted present for the holidays to come. Currently, there are only a few units left on the retailers' shelves and consider yourself lucky if you can grab your Eee PC.
The sub-notebook is functionally limited and comes with a Linux-based operating system. As for the hardware, the Eee is built with low-performing components, to save space and, most important, money. Although it may seem difficult to believe it, there are reports that the Eee sub-notebook can run even Windows XP and, more recently Windows Vista.
While Microsoft is attempting to make Windows XP run on Negroponte's XO ultra-mobile PC, some enthusiast users managed to adapt Vista to work with the Eee. The performance was achieved using an Asus Eee PC with 4GB of storage in the original configuration.
The winner is Paul O'Brien, founder of the Modaco network, who used vLite to customize the Vista Premium distribution before the installation process. Removing unnecessary files is a vital operation when you are dealing with only 4 GB of storage. Paul is reported to have copied the custom disk image onto a 1 GB USB flash drive, which was used as a boot device.
The video shows an Eee sub-notebook running pretty well under Vista, although the Microsoft operating system delivers more than the Eee user needs. Meanwhile, other community members are trying to get Mac OS X Leopard on the Eee, since the Tiger has already been successfully installed.
Eee users are not expected to "upgrade" to any of the newly ported operating systems, but it is just great to know that such things are possible and you can run any operating system on your Eee machine whenever you want.