I’ve recently acquired a Netbook (Asus EeePC 1005HA to be precise) and in common with many such devices it came preloaded with XP. Now up until 6 months ago I’d probably have left it at that but having used Windows 7 for those last months I really didn’t want to go back. So I decided to look at installing Windows 7. Now as many people have pointed out, there is no direct upgrade from XP to 7 so the install has to be a “clean” one. The issue with the Netbook of course being that there is no optical drive to install from.
The way around this is to boot from USB and take it from there. Now at this stage I will issue YMMV in extra tall letters because my experience of trying to get USB thumb drives booting is a little random to say the least. There are a whole range of techniques out there and some will work with one brand of USB and not another. The information below I know works with several brands and capacities as I’ve used it to create bootable USBs for a number of projects but if it doesn’t work, try a different USB drive. I’ve found Kingston DataTravelers pretty good, 1Gb for bootable CD type apps and 4Gb for DVD which is what I used for this. Continue reading Installing Windows 7 on a Netbook Using USB