The only issue I had was that, after installing the BIOS update, I got a piracy notice when I restarted.  Of course, this copy of Windows 7 came from MSDN, so I’m pretty confident it’s legit.  However, I rebooted and I haven’t seen the message since.

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1. I had to re-enter the BitLocker key each time the computer booted or resumed from standby or hibernate, and
2. It was no longer activated and wouldn’t activate, with error 80072f8f.

The activation issue turned out to be simple – the clock on the MB was completely wrong, which causes activation to automatically fail.  Setting the clock (manually or via internet update) solved the problem.

The BitLocker problem sucks a bit more, though.  The only “fix” I could find is to decrypt the drive and re-encrypt it.  BitLocker would prefer that you take the following route:

1. Anticipate catastrophic failure
2. Temporarily disable BitLocker
3. Fix the error
4. Re-enable BitLocker

I skipped step #1, so I was SOL.  My bad.

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Well, it can.  It even supports full Aero, which is a pretty impressive feat by both ASUS and Microsoft.

In fact, out of the box, everything except ACPI and the advanced touchpad features (and, of course, ASUS’s proprietary key shortcuts), but the XP drivers work for both.  However, it doesn’t have an optical drive, and none of the instructions out there for installing from a USB drive are complete.  This (I believe) is complete.

1. Get the beta
2. Create a bootable USB drive with the beta.  A few notes:
   1. Use a USB hard drive, not a SD reader and SD card.  The latter cannot be marked as active, so you can’t boot from it.  I didn’t try putting the SD card in the memory card slot in the 1000HE to see if that way works, though.
   2. The partition must be formatted FAT32, which is limited to 128GB.  If your drive is larger, you need to either resize the existing partition and create a smaller one (~15GB is more than enough), or nuke the whole thing, create a small partition.  If it’s not FAT32, you will get a boot error and the helpful option of “Ctrl-Alt-Del to continue”.
   3. If you don’t make the partition with the Win7 files active, you will just get a flashing cursor.
3. Install Windows 7 from the USB drive
   1. Turn the 1000HE off
   2. Plug it into the LEFT USB port (as in, not the ports on the right side)
   3. Turn the 1000HE on
   4. Immediately start pressing F2 to get into the BIOS.  Press it about 2 times per second until you see the EEE screen come up.
   5. Once you are in the BIOS, go to the Boot menu (press the right arrow key)
   6. Select “Hard Disk Drives” and press enter
   7. Select “1st Drive” and press enter
   8. Select the USB:xxxxxxxx option and press enter
   9. Press Escape
   10. Select “Boot Device Priority” and press enter
   11. Select “1st Boot Device” and press enter
   12. Select the USB:xxxxxxxx option and press enter
   13. Press F10 to save and restart
4. When the Win7 installer reboots, you need to either unplug the USB drive or switch the BIOS back to the HDD
5. NOTE: There now appear to be Windows 7 drivers available – just select Windows 7 as the OS.  I haven’t verified this, but it’s worth a shot.
   Download the following drivers (select Eee Family | Eee PC | 1000HE – then, when the box pops up, select WinXP as the OS)
   1. ATK | Advanced Configuration ans Power Interface Drive for WIN XP (currently v4.00.0010)
   2. Utilities | ASUS Instant Key Utility for Windows XP (currently v1.08)
   3. TouchPad | Touchpad Driver Version 7.0.4.3 (this enables multi-touch support)
      
6. Install the LAN drivers

Done.

A few points:

1. Right-click on the taskbar, select Properties, and check the “Use small icons” box.  The few extra pixels really do make a difference.
2. For some reason, ASUS’s hotkey utility throws an error on startup sometimes.  You can ignore it.  It’s saying that you can’t use ASUS’s hotkey program to switch resolutions.
3. Also, you can set the two hotkeys at the top by running EeeInstantKey from the start menu.

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I have no idea what changed from Vista to XP, but I can no longer login using Outlook 2007.  It has something to do with Active Directory, but even using the correct credentials format (DOMAIN\AD_USERNAME) I get an error.  (If you are interested, the correct domain for GroupSpark is “MAIL”).

If you find yourself in this situation, Outlook 2003 works fine.  Plus, it reminds you of how much better Outlook 2007 is.

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Plus one they don’t have listed:

Windows + B: Navigate the system tray with the keyboard.

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• Virtual Clone Drive – double-click an ISO to automatically mount it as a drive.  Double-click a different ISO and it replaces the first.  Much easier than MS’s tool.
• ISORecorder – burn an ISO to a CD/DVD.  Very simple and reliable tool.
• TreeSize – find the large files on your hard drive

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One other hiccup: if you are running Vista Enterprise, the installer says there is no upgrade path to Windows 7 Ultimate (which is the only version you can download right now) – this does not appear to be true.  You can “trick” the installer into thinking you are running Vista Business, and then it will let you upgrade.  Via MSFN Forums:

Before inserting the Windows [7] Ultimate CD
Go to, Start, Run: and type: regedit.exe
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
Change the key : ProductName from “Windows Vista ™ Enterprise” to “Windows Vista ™ Business”
Change the key: EditionID from “Enterprise” to “Business”

Do not restart

The instructions are for going to Vista Ultimate, but it worked fine for me going to Windows 7 Ultimate.

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This post clued me into the C:\System Volume Information directory as the hiding place for large files.  I had to modify the permissions to view the contents of the directory, but, sure enough, there was over 80GB in files in there.  However, none of them were index files (*.WCI) like the post I found – mine were all CLSID files.

A little searching revealed that I had 80GB of System Restore points.  To get rid of them, I had to turn off System Restore on the C: drive, which deleted all of the restore points.  I’m not sure how it happened, but the problem seems to have been resolved by that.

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I jumped ship from Vista Media Center almost 6 months ago, and one of the biggest reasons was a  persistent bug with an identified cause resulted in many of my recordings having an incorrect duration, which made it difficult (although not impossible) to use the files.  To date, the problem has still not been resolved, because Media Center updates are tied to the OS release schedule, which does not permit quick release patches for non-critical bugs.  If they get it wrong, it’s a whole new cycle before they can send out another patch.

Microsoft already realizes that baking everything into the OS is not always the best idea, because it creates a bloated OS and reduces flexibility and limits the options for the individual apps (see here, here, and here).  Given the much richer experience I have had with SageTV since August, I think that applies to Media Center, as well.

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%~1 - expands %1 removing any surrounding quotes (")
%~f1 - expands %1 to a fully qualified path name
%~d1 - expands %1 to a drive letter only
%~p1 - expands %1 to a path only
%~n1 - expands %1 to a file name only
%~x1 - expands %1 to a file extension only
%~s1 - expanded path contains short names only
%~a1 - expands %1 to file attributes
%~t1 - expands %1 to date/time of file
%~z1 - expands %1 to size of file

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