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Since windows 7 was released I couldn’t wait to install it on my computer. I have suffered with vista since it came out, and I wanted to get rid of it ASAP. So, I’ve installed it on my main computer (which is one year old) and I’m enjoying using it every day.

About two months ago I also bought a netbook – Asus Eee 1005HA. It is very portable and a joy to use. But it had XP installed. So I missed the good things, I had on my main computer with Vista – Especially the search in the start menu… Last week I stumbled upon a review which compared windows 7 vs. windows XP on my netbook. It look promising, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

In my installation I used Windows 7 Home Premium Edition. My netbook is Asus Eee 1005HA with 2 GB of memory.

How to install?

1. Creating  an installation on a DoK: My netbook has no DVD drive, so I needed to install from a Disk On Key. In order to do that, you need one with at least 4 GB. I used these instructions in order to format the DoK into a bootable drive, so I can install from it. IMPORTENT: Don’t do these instructions when an iPod is connected to you computer. For some reason, entering the diskpart utility screws up the iPod, and you’ll have to reformat it (I learned that the hard way…).
2. Now, in order to boot from the DoK you need to do the following:
1. Plug the DoK into the netbook.
2. Turn the netbook on.
3. Press F2 on the boot so you can enter the BIOS configuration.
4. DON”T CHANGE ANYTHING!
5. Press F10 to quit and save.
6. Press ESC rapidly and you will get a boot screen.
7. In this screen select the DoK and start the installation.
3. Follow the wizard, and in less then an hour, Windows 7 will be installed and updated.
4. Install the Asus Utilities from the asus support site (which has already windows 7 drivers):
1. ATK –> Hotkey: Installs the keyboard shortcuts, like volume, brightness, etc..
2. Touchpad: This one surprised me. One of the reasons I bought this netbook is because of it’s multi-touch mouse pad, which allowed scrolling using two fingers, right click using three fingers tap, etc… When I got it I was disappointed because they replaced the driver and in the new one these finger gestures didn’t work. To my surprise, the windows 7 touchpad driver allowed them! So I got an extra bonus.
3. VGA: display driver.
4. Utilities:
1. Super Hybrid Engine (SHE): allows better utilization of the battery life.
2. Eee Storage: For using the network storage that asus gives you.
5. Install an AntiVirus. I am using Avast.

And that’s it! Your netbook is installed – and apparently works faster (Just my feeling).

In conclusion, I have another recommendation: DO NOT update the bios after installing the OS. Asus allows you to download a utility that updates the bios to newer versions. After I did that, the netbook crashed and was not able to restart the OS again. I tried to recover it, and restore it, but it was no use. I had to reinstall it again (Although in the second time, the installation took me an half an hour).