Just bought me an old netbook!!!!

[ScarbSaab]

You would need to boot with a utilities disk that understands NTFS, delete the unused partition then grow the NTFS partition. It's a long time since I last did this so can't remember what I used. EDIT: A quick look shows that sysresccd includes ntfsresize, but you will probably need to use the command line!

The easy way is to delete all the partitions and start over installing Windows.

You might get some space back if you delete restore points you will never use (like before the Asus drivers).

[Steve McF]

Well as I couldn't be bothered to mess with partition software etc, last night I spent ages with uLite trimming down Win XP again! I put it on the USB stick to start installing all over again - this time with a much smaller installation

Today I booted up from the USB stick, and this time, there was 1.7Gb free afterwards!!! And it seemed to run OK!! However, it then spent a couple of hours downloading Windows security updates, rebooting, downloading more etc etc. In the end, there is now only about 500Mb free space on the hard drive.

I have turned off automatic updates, and cleared a load of temp files, but is there anything else I can do to ensure the hard drive doesn't fill up whilst I'm not looking?

In Disk Cleanup, there is the option to compress files on the drive - is this advisable? And will it free up a lot of space without affecting the running of the netbook? Or will it improve the running of the drive?

Despite all that, I have just been out with Netbook and Opcom and tried it on the Zafira, and it works

[ScarbSaab]

Turn off System Restore.
Reduce the browser cache size.

[Steve McF]

Done that successfully...I think!!

It seems to be running OK at the moment....but I keep looking at those 2Gb RAM upgrades for 18 quid Running 1Gb at the moment.....

Is that worth a punt?

[Geoff1951]

IMHO XP needs the extra, I ran an MSI Wind 10"  netbook (branded Advent, from PCW) and putting an extra gb in made a big difference. Same for the Acer 10" I've just bought - useless running W7 with just 1 gb. But you can get a 2gb stick for around £12 - try Crucial.com. I've had several bits of memory, desktop, laptop and netbook.

[ScarbSaab]

I second for Crucial.

[MartinMc711]

If the SSD takes up the same spaces as a 2.5" HDD I'd stick a normal hard disk in for the extra space, although startup would be particularly slower you 'd be able to get much more on it.

I've also found Windows 7 quicker than XP on lower spec machines...

[James]

This is making me miss my old MSI Wind - ended up running Mac OS X on it, lovely little machine!

[Geoff1951]

MSI Wind - mine developed unfixable problems - after it'd warmed up it started to open and close in rapid succession random windows and programs, shorts in the trackpad area and connectors. I should have anticipated it, the only major computer disaster I've had (not self-inflicted!) was an MSI motherboard that died in my desktop a few years previously. Replacing that was like open heart surgery. On the Wind it'd be the same but wearing mittens. And a blindfold.

[Steve McF]

I've bitten the bullet and ordered the 2Gb ram card Will update you when I manage to install it!! I've never done such a lot of PC techy stuff ha ha ha

This little Eee PC will end up working better than our desktop, which seems to have slowed right down to a snails pace

[Guyver1]

I also bought myself a second hand laptop as a Christmas present

A great little Panasonic Toughbook CF-50, It came with a few upgrades and Windows 7 OS

Its got 1.5mhz CPU and 1.25gb of ram

As its not really fast enough for Windows 7, I reinstalled XP which it was originally sold with. All went great with the installation, except, I had no drivers for Sound, Graphics, WiFi and a couple of other things. I searched online but couldnt find anything that would work.

Panasonic.com was useless, they list every driver known to man, except the ones I needed. I emailed them and got pointed in the wrong direction....TWICE.

I found a site online that repair and rebuild the Toughbook range, so I tried them, Lo and behold they make a drivers disc for £5, it contains all the drivers I could ever need.

1 week later and the disc arrived, I run the disc and found LOADS of drivers. I tried installing each one but couldnt get them to work, I gave the website a call and they said I need to unzip each file and double click on everything on the disc.

I spent a whole day and only got the pointing device driver to work, which was no use as XP had newer drivers already installed.

I called the website again and was told, we're very busy and we shall call you back within the hour, That was last Friday at 9am. No call yet.

I took the laptop and disc to my local computer shop. They had it for 2 hours, they got the required drivers for me, and also checked the disc......................

NOT A DRIVER IN SIGHT

So much for going direct to the specialists

My local shop charged me £30 for getting the drivers, installing the drivers, doing a full check of the laptop and searching the disc for me.

Ive got to get in touch with trading standards about the disc though, If they are up for ripping people off for £5, it makes you think how much their ripping people off when they sell laptops.

[Steve McF]

Guyver1,

that's terrible - so if there were drivers on that disc, exactly what was on it? Strange that you couldn't track down drivers on the net. I found loads for this Eee PC. Trouble is, there are various different variants of the same model, and I was never sure which drivers I needed - I ended up getting them from the Asus website, and they seem to have worked!!

I was worried when I got this Asus that I'd spend more on trying to get it to work, than on what I spent on the netbook in the first place!!!

Actually, I have ordered the 2Gb ram stick which was 18 quid, and the 16Gb SD card which I think was 8 or 9 quid, so I hven't spent too much on it.....yet.

Just played a couple of clips from the BBC news website and they played fine, but on YouTube, some clips were running slow, with the sound out of sync. I'm hoping the ram upgrade may fix that.

Any other suggestions on what one can do, as ever, gratefully received

[Guyver1]

The disc just contained random rubbish, had a schematic of the motherboard too. Not much use to man nor beast..

My computer shop guy did suck his teeth when I mentioned it being a Panasonic, possibly cos its a nightmare to get drivers for.

[Steve McF]

Mmmmm, well my 2Gb ram stick arrived from MrMemory and I have just installed it.

I went to YouTube to the same Two Ronnies clip that I looked at the other night where the sound was out of sync. It still was a bit, and the picture kept jumping. It was better if I paused it and allowed it to download more of the file before carrying on playing, but still not perfect.

I started messing with the display settings and it seemed slightly better, but not much.

Any thoughts? IPlayer seems to play pretty well, but YouTube not that good....let me try a different clip........

[Steve McF]

Thought I better give you an update on this!!

I'd been running the cut down version of WinXP on the Eee PC and it was doing OK. Then I don't know what happened, but despite me having automatic updates turned off, one day it downloaded SP2 (I think) for Microsoft Silverlight. Then I found I only had about 70Mb free space left on the hard drive and was constantly reminded of the space "running very low".

I couldn't do a system restore as I'd turned that feature off to save space and improve performance. The only alternative was to reinstall my nLite version of WinXP which was still on my USB stick. However, despite tweaking the BIOS to boot off the USB stick, it wouldn't reinstall - just booted up WinXP as normal, and wouldn't overwrite the installation.

After trying that several times, I tried to create an even smaller version of XP using nLite - spent ages going through and stripping out things I didn't need, created a new USB version, only to find that it was larger than my earlier attempt!!!!!!

By now I was right hacked off with the whole thing, so decided to reinstall the original Linux Xandros OS, and then try to install XP from that point. However, i couldn't figure out how to do it from the various disks and files that I had, and I recalled Xandros was rather clunky with loads of bits obsolete and un-update-able. So I started to search for other Linux distros (or whatever they are called!!).

I stumbled upon something called EasyPeasy, which is a version of Ubuntu - most of the reveiews seemed to be from 2010, so it probably isn't the newest OS available, but the website said that once I had downloaded the ISO file of the OS, and the installer file that would allow me to transfer the installation files to a USB stick, it ought to be fairly quick to install on the netbook.

This wasn't even an Asus Eee PC specific installation, but I thought I'd give it a go. The old Dell desktop chuntered along taking a while to download the iso file, and then not very long to download the installer file. Then I ran the installer, selected the ISO, put the USB in, and it wrote it onto the memory stick in no time.

So I messed about with the BIOS on the Eee, plugged the USB stick in and let her go........ never mind the 2 hours or whatever it took to install WinXP from the USB, this thing was finished in minutes!!! And what a fresh looking interface it is - looks very modern and clean, unlike the original Xandros OS which looked very dated. What's more, I didn't even have to install the separate ASUS drivers, because everything worked from the outset!!

The best bit came when I selected that Two Ronnies clip on Youtube via Mozilla Firefox. With WinXP, this clip always stuttered and the sound was out of sync with the picture. In Firefox on EasyPeasy, it was smooth and no stuttering or buffering issues.

So impressed am I, that I might not bother trying to put XP back on it - I mainly wanted it to be able to run my Opcom Vauxhall diagnostic software....but I can use still my works laptop for that if I need to