This is yet another example of where these mini notebooks are missing the mark. Can an average user really go through all these steps? My eeepc came with 20 gigs, 10gigs per partition. Like a dummy, I installed sp3, only to run out of space on the main drive. I started getting a popup every 30 seconds telling me I was short on disk space. It then said I needed 340mb to uninstall. I had 40mb left. I uninstallled all the apps on c drive outside the base OS and then still only had 120mb. So I went out, paid $100 for an external USB dvd to wipe the system. Yeah, these are not for technical lightweights. Intel is now saying these “Netbooks are compact mobile devices for children.” I cant imagine some kid dealing with sp3. Intel Atom is a loser.

Just to make something clear – I didn’t install XP on the C: drive, Asus did. I bought the XP model of the Eee. If I had installed XP myself, I most certainly put it on the D: drive, regardless of performance considerations.

Michael

Very true Ricky; I was looking at this from the perspective of drive capacity management, not drive performance. I’m also trying to see it from the viewpoint of the consumers. Although arguable, I suspect that many “mainstream” folks might buy such a device and not have the smarts to put XP on the second drive or use nLite; that would put them in the position that Michael found himself in. Again, that’s arguable. I’m basing it on netbook projections. If the market expects to move millions of these types of devices, it won’t be all geeks buying them. Even though I’d like to see the world made up of millions of geeks.

How would a single merged drive help, Kevin? A combined drive would be as slow as its slowest part. There’s no reason for Asus to limit hardware for Linux to meet with the shortcomings of Windows, and even ignoring that, as you said, there are ways to slim down XP.

There is nothing stopping people from just putting XP on the second, larger drive as is, with performance that would be identical to a “combined drive” case.