If you have an ASUS Eee PC 1000HE
For starters, I’m going to recommend you upgrade to 2GB of RAM, Crucial Technology DDR2 PC2-6400 Memory
Have I mentioned how easy it is? Because it is, totally. There are a lot of instructions out there on the internets that talk about installing it from an SD card, but I tried that, and it sucked, so I found a way better way. What are you waiting for? The EEE’s roomy 160GB hard drive is already partitioned for your dual booting pleasure – for that is what I am recommending, dual booting. You’ll get the choice of which OS every time you start up.
Step 1: Get Windows 7. You’ll also need to get a license code, make sure you write that down (won’t do too much good saved on your hard drive while you’re in the middle of an install). Save the ISO file to your downloads folder (or anywhere on your C drive you can navigate to easily).
Good news everyone! Amazon is selling the three license family pack of Windows 7 Home Premium for $149!
Step 2: Get MagicDisc. Install this on your C drive as well. When you’re ready (and there is nothing on your D drive that you want to keep), click the MagicISO icon in your notification area, go to Mount ISO, and navigate to where you saved the downloaded Windows.
Step 3: You will immediately get an installation window, offering to upgrade or ‘custom’ install. There’s no upgrade path from XP (note: you DO qualify for upgrade pricing, you just can’t install Win 7 as an upgrade in place of XP), so just click ‘custom’. It will say something about you’re going to lose all your stuff, don’t worry, it’s only for that D drive you already cleared off, right? NOTE: if for some reason you are not connected to the internet wirelessly, you’ll want to download the LAN drivers before you start, as of this writing the Win7 install will disable your plug-in internet. Oh, and you’ll want to tell it not to download updates while installing.
So, you start the install, and you’ll get to a screen showing you options on where to install, pick drive D, and let ‘er rip. It’ll reboot a couple of times, no need for any intervention on your part until it gets to the ‘set up your copy of windows’ bit.
Step 4: after you have done your Windows setting-up, everything will basically be running, but there will still be a few things wonky. You will want to get the following from EEE’s downloads page:
Under ATK, get Advanced Configuration and Power Interface Driver
Under Touchpad, get the Touchpad Drivers (currently Touchpad Driver Version 7.0.4.3), this is your Elantech software.
Under Utilities, get Asus InstantKey and Super Hybrid Engine. do NOT get the EEE storage utility, as of this writing, it will cause Windows Explorer to crash.
Unzip and install – there will be a ‘setup.exe’ in most folders, don’t use that, look for an install file with a more descriptive sort of name. You may or may not have compatibility issues (I forget) but if you do, right click and use the compatibility wizard.
After all this, you’ll do some rebooting, it’s very likely you’ll start getting the weird little errors about igfxext.exe not running on startup described here. I solved this using the ‘install the older driver in compatibility mode’ fix, and it’s working fine, but YMMV. It should be noted this is a harmless annoyance if you were to decide not to hassle with it.
At this point, you will have a near-perfect installation of Windows 7, and the option to boot up either way when you start. But once you’ve experienced the shiny, sexy glory that is 7, it’ll be damn hard to go back to that old-timey clunky XP. I would go off on a tangent about the wonders of 7, but honestly, I’ve been typing this long enough, back to playing with my new OS 
P.S. If you have the pretty blue EEE like me, you’ll very likely want the gorgeous, sexy, awesome Logitech V470 Bluetooth Cordless Laser Mouse for Notebooks (Blue)
Sell me that in a year or so? I’m gonna need it.
i love it so much it would be hard as hell to let go. unless they come out with something even shinier in a year’s time. which is somewhat likely, i must admit
So, how is it working out for you? What are the experiences, impressions – does everything work well? have you encountered any problems that seem to be absolutely bothering? I am asking these as am about to make a decision to install w7 on my 1000H model, and would like to get as many reports as possible to decide whether it is worth it, or I would be better off with staying on xp.
Very, very well. I’ve used it exclusively since installing, and it is very stable and quite fast, even with all the pretty Aero interface.
I did run into some major lagging at first, but a little research helped me pinpoint some of the unnecessary services that were causing the problem – in general, the worst offender is Windows Media sharing, which is a giant resource-sucking monster. By using the System Resources monitor (Start / All Programs / Accessories / System Tools) to identify and kill off (disable) processes you don’t need, you end up with a much faster computer
By carefully configuring what is on the bottom toolbar (and auto-hiding it), and installing Object Dock (also auto-hiding), I have a clean desktop and access to everything I need, and can run everything completely maximized. Of course I suppose you can do this in XP too, but, it just looks a lot more beautiful in Win7 and the taskbar functionality is far, far better.
I will definitely keep this OS until the RC1 time limit is up, and then, yes, I’m going to buy it. I know it’s not cheap, but it’s by far the best user experience I’ve ever had. I also installed 7 on my main computer (which had been running Vista), so even though they say “don’t use in production environment”, I am totally doing that.
Wow, thank you for sharing your thoughts – and especially for the tips that identify the potential problems!
Seems like w7 really does what it says 
Oh, just one more practical question: so you can actually auto-hide the taskbar? (This is important because of the screen real-estate of a netbook)
Yes, definitely. And, by its very nature, the taskbar is far, far more useful than any previous version. With that on the bottom and the Object Dock on the left side, I have very easy access to everything, and nothing in the way of fully maximized windows.
There is a bit of optimization necessary to get best performance, and as I recall there was one weird error that I had to chase down (wish I could remember more details on that) but all in all, a totally worthwhile upgrade to the Asus.
(I hear that they’ll be selling Win7 from this Friday until July 11 for a very, very lovely price, $49 for Home Premium (I think) — I’ll be pre-ordering three copies!)
I found this a few months ago and did exacly what you have decribed and im pretty happy with the result. I was wondering however if you knew anything about removing the Windows 7 partition and restoring the bootloader so it will boot XP normaly again. just asking here because you had the easiest method of installing windows 7 and i am having trouble finding a easy way of removing it. After all this copy will expire eventualy.
I have not done that, in fact, what I have done is pre-ordered the upgrade version from Amazon (Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade
) — I ordered early and got two copies for $50 each 
I have no intention to ever suffer through XP again. Couldn’t imagine it.
They may even come out with a family pack of three licenses for a very good deal – that’s the rumor. But, the RC1 is good until spring next year, no rush to get rid of it!
My eventual plan is to lose XP entirely, the way I’ll do that is when I make the switch to a 320 GB 7200 RPM hard drive
— because faster hard drives, you just have no idea till you switch from 5400 to 7200, how much difference it makes. Anyway, I’ll just make a full copy everything over to that drive, starting with the Win7 partition, and see how that goes.
I could be wrong, but, if you *reallyreally* want to revert to that annoying, old, slow OS, just format your D drive. Pretty sure the bootloader will realize it’s gone? Every time I’ve been dual (or even triple) boot, it’s always detected bootable partitions (however many there were), and when I wiped them, they no longer showed up in the boot options. I know you can change boot *order* in the bios/setup, but, those options you see are based on how many bootable partitions are detected at startup.
Again, not guaranteeing it, but I’ve never had a problem getting rid of an OS by formatting.
I just cannot imagine going back to XP. From time to time I have to help someone with XP, and I experience such horrible annoyance the minute I set eyes on it. Ugly, slow, yuck.
Good luck! Let me know how it goes
I grabbed an OEM release online and can confirm this works. thanks
Just installed Windows 7 Ultimate on my Asus 1000HE netbook, your guide came in very handy. Thanks a bunch dude.
Guys, have you experienced (I mean those who have already been using win7) any performance weakening compared to xp? I am reading a lot of reviews and almost everyone notes that the battery run is seriously effected: if you made 6hrs with xp, it will get down to 4.5 hrs on win7 (not that it would be such a serious thing – but my xp runs around 4hrs, which I really need, and if it goes down to 2.5-3hrs, it’s a problem for me…)
Thanx in advance!
Dragon Z.´s last blog ..Dráma a Holdon, avagy a klónok nem háborúznak
I never ran XP for more than a day or so, but I get awesome battery life with Win7.
There are very good tools to manage your processes — go see what’s running, shut down the stuff that’s trying to share media (windows media is a big resource hog, for one). You don’t need to keep the sharing open in most cases, and anything that runs the processor is going to drain the battery.
I use one of those little widgets to show me processor usage, and if it’s high, you know it’s sucking up battery juice, so go into your accessories / system tools / resource monitor, see what’s going on.
There’s a way to tell those processes not to start unless asked, I forget exactly where but I know that made a huge difference when I shut down the unnecessary stuff.
dude, i have problems with windows 7 on eeepc 1000he, first, I can’t have the 1024 x 768 screen resolution anymore, second, i can’t set the aspect ratio setting to “maintain aspect ratio”. Do you know how to fix it? please..
It sounds like you need the video drivers, but, I don’t recall there being a problem with them? But … ok, the 1024 x 768 setting is where the whole screen scrolls up and down to fit, right? I don’t know that I ever used that, it seemed a little disorienting to me.
Anyway, they have all kinds of actual Win7 drivers now on the Asus website. go to http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us, select “EEE family” from the first dropdown, “EEE PC” from the second, and 1000HE from the third dropdown. Then select Win7 as the OS and there’s a whole bunch of drivers.
I’d do all the possible updates, and see if that helps.
The Elantech touchpad driver is making me go nuts.
I’ve installed it, and it would appear to work… but the instant I wake up from sleep or restart, it decides to disable the touchpad on startup.
I don’t know what’s going on here, but when I called Asus, the tech support monkey informed me that “We do not support Windows 7″
Which made me furious because if they don’t “support” Windows 7, why have they placed a manual on their website containing instructions for the installation of the appropriate drivers?
Indeed, why is there a Windows 7 section at all?
When I asked this, the woman told me that “This is only for those models which come installed with Windows 7 already on it.”
Me: “Your 1000he does not ship with Windows 7. It hasn’t and, since it’s nearing the end of its shelflife, it never will. So explain to me again how your website does not constitute support of Windows 7? Better, tell me where on your website (and more specifically, the Windows 7 installation guide the website provided me with) I was informed that upgrading results in a loss of tech support?
Needless to say, there was no response. I can’t tell you how much I used to love this netbook, and I do love windows 7, too. I hate tap-to-click though, because it moves my cursor all over the place when I’m in the midst of typing and irritates me to no end.
I’m going to give Asus another call sometime soon, but if I may issue a warning: Asus has some of the worst tech support I have ever seen in my entire life. For me personally, this is the last Asus computer I will ever purchase.
What you describe is unfortunately fairly common, I have been an early adopter of operating systems and I *never* get support from the manufacturer. It’s unusual that they actually offer drivers then refuse to support them, but at least they’re offering the drivers.
I’m actually considering converting the EEE to ChromeOS. I have the OS on a bootable thumb drive but haven’t had time to play with it yet
Anyone got the 1000HE running with 1024×768 screen resolution? I am stuck with 1024×600, but some programs don’t even fit… Thanks for any hints and Merry Christmas!
Gernot´s last blog ..19.12.2009: Neues Bild im Bereich Objekte
Try this:
Access to these modes:
1) Run regedit
1a) If you are not on higest tree level, go to him (by click on “Computer” from key tree)
2) Search and modify all values “Display1_DownScalingSupported” from “0″ to “1″. (Remember search for ALL values! I found approx 6-7 where I had to change).
3) Restart.
4) Enjoy with the two new resolutions 1024×768 i 1152×864.
Thanks! That’s totally awesome!