Google: Chrome OS will be free, with major PC vendors on board

In a follow-up post this afternoon, Google confirmed that its upcoming Chrome OS will be available free of charge. The company also listed some of the partners it has lined up to work with the new operating system -- including some well-known PC vendors.

The details further illustrate the potential for the new Google operating system to alter the competitive landscape for Microsoft Windows. Google said Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments are among the early partners.

Google had previously hinted that Chrome OS would be available for free, and even before the confirmation this afternoon, that's what analysts were assuming. The idea isn't to make money off the operating system, but rather to help Google improve the Internet experience and deliver targeted ads, said analyst Mark Mahaney, a director at Citi Investment Research, in a note to clients earlier today:

"We neither expect the Chrome OS to generate material revenue near-term, nor do we expect Google's Chrome OS investments to materially impact its current cost structure. We wouldn't be surprised if Google gave the Chrome OS to OEMs for free, as they currently do with Android and their mobile partners. To be successful in selling an OS to full-powered PCs, Google would potentially need many large OEM partners, as well as a robust after-market support and services network, which would take significant manpower, $'s and possibly years to build out, in our opinion. This doesn't seem like Google's playbook."

Microsoft isn't commenting on the Google announcement. Google says Chrome OS will initially be targeted at netbooks when it debuts next year, but there's nothing to stop it from spreading to all sorts of computers. At the very least, the introduction of a high-profile, alternative operating system promises to give new Windows president Steven Sinofsky a major new competitor to wrestle with.

Installing Windows XP on the Asus EEE 1000HE

Installing Windows XP on the Asus EEE pc using a single USB flash drive.


Please note this tutorial works on all computers not just the Asus EEE PC.
To complete this tutorial you need a 32bit version of Windows XP or Windows Vista installed on your home PC.

What you'll need:
USB_PREP8 (alternative download)
PeToUSB (alternative download)
Bootsect.exe (alternative download)
Special Note: If you use the program Nlite be sure to keep the manual installation files as the USB_prep8 script relies on these files.

Extract the files in Bootsect.zip
The next step is to extract USB_prep8 and PeToUSB.
Next copy the PeToUSB executable into the USB_prep8 folder.
Inside of the USB_prep8 folder double click the executable named usb_prep8.cmd.

The window that opens will look like this:

Press any key to continue

You next window will look like this:These settings are preconfigured for you all you need to do now is click start.
Click Yes and go on ...
Once the format is complete DO NOT close the window just leave everything as it is and open a command prompt from your start menu (type cmd in the search bar or run box depending on your version of windows.).

Inside of the command windows go to the directory you have bootsect.exe saved.
(use the cd directoryname command to switch folders)

Now type "bootsect.exe /nt52 F:" NOTE F: is the drive letter for my USB stick if yours is different you need to change it accordingly. What this part does is write the correct boot sector to your USB stick, this allows your PC to boot from the USB stick without it nothing works.
Please note: When running the bootsect.exe command you cannot have any windows open displaying the content of your USB stick, if you have a window open bootsect.exe will be unable to lock the drive and write the bootsector correctly.

If all went well you should see "Bootcode was successfully updated on all targeted volumes."(screen shot below)
Now you can close this command prompt (don't close the usbprep8 one by mistake) and the petousb window.

You window you see now should look like this:

Mine looked like this : (T: as temp drive, F: as my USB and the XP directory as I:\, which was a virtual drive)If it doesn't try pressing enter.

Now you need to enter the correct information for numbers 1-3.
Press 1 and then enter. A folder browse window will open for you to browse to the location of you XP setup files (aka your cdrom drive with xp cd in)
Press 2 and enter a letter not currently assigned to a drive on your PC
Press 3 and enter the drive letter of your USB stick
Press 4 to start the process.

The script will ask you if its ok to format drive T:. This is just a temp drive the program creates to cache the windows installation files. Press Y then enter.
Once it's done formating press enter to continue again
You can now see the program copying files to the temp drive it created. Once this is done press enter to continue again.
Next you will see a box pop up asking you to copy the files to USB drive yes/no you want to click yes.
and then you will observe copying operation ...
Once the script has completed copy files a popup window asking if you would like to USB drive to be preferred boot drive U: select YES on this window.
Now select yes to unmount the virtual drive.
Ok we are done the hard part, close the usbprep8 window.
Now make sure your EEE pc is configured with USB as the primary boot device.
Insert your USB drive and boot up the EEE.

On the startup menu you have two options, select option number 2 for text mode setup.

From this point on it is just like any other windows XP installation delete/recreate the primary partition on your EEE pc and format it using NTFS. Make sure you delete ALL partitions and recreate a single partition or you will get the hal.dll error message.

Once the text mode portion of setup is complete it will boot into the GUI mode (you can press enter after the reboot if your too excited to wait the 30 seconds)

Once the GUI portion of setup is complete you will again have to boot into GUI mode this will complete the XP installation and you will end up at you XP desktop. It is very important that you DO NOT REMOVE THE USB STICK before this point. Once you can see your start menu it is safe to remove the usb stick and reboot your pc to make sure everything worked.

This method has advantages over all current no cdrom methods of installing XP to the EEE. You do not have to copy setup files in DOS to the SSD and install from there. It gives you access to the recovery console by booting into text mode setup, and it gives you the ability to run repair installations of XP if you have problems later on.

I hope this worked out for you and please post feedback to the comments section.
Please note due to the amount of comments this article has received you must now click on "Post a Comment" below the existing comments to view the most recent feedback in a popup window.

Learnt at this Source but implemented for 1000HE with extera notes that you should take care of for this version by ME

My Review, Eee style ...

My review of my new brand Asus Eee 1000HE ...

The Asus Eee 1000HE comes in dimensions of 266mm(W) x 191.2mm(D) x 28.5mm~ 38mm(H) and weights 1.45 kg. You can find it in black, white, blue, pink and silver but I have not heard anyone ever seen that silver out of picture. The computer's design can make every single person confess to its beauty and stately at the same time. The shining black lid gives her a gorgeous look and at the same time can be counted as one of its cons(-). Although the shining black is fascinatingly beautiful, it can get easily the fat from your fingerprints very easily on her and it is not the best thing you want to see on a black beauty. But you don't need to worry as it comes with a cool soft handkerchief to clean it.

The screen is a 10” LED Backlight WSVGA screen (1024x600) and I really liked it. The best resolution you get 1024x600 while actually you can have 1024x768 but don't bother it doesn't fit the screen. I mean the resolution is good enough for Windows but not for Linux. For Linux it actually is a little bit too small ... Specially for the terminal, you dont get to see all the info on the screen by default unless you change the fonts size.

The most fascinating part of this pc is its battery. It does have a 6-Cell Li-ion Battery which is being advertised to last 9.5 hrs, and of course it is mentioned that operation lifetime subject to product model, normal usage conditions and configurations. Learn more about battery life >> My experience showed around 7-8 hours battery life which is lovely to go around with a charger free laptop and enjoy it :-) I should mention battery life under Linux OS is less than Windows.

If I want to keep talking about the stuffs around this black beauty I would have to talk about the I/O devices which can be mentioned as followed :
1 x VGA Port (D-sub 15-pin for external monitor)
3 x USB 2.0 => (2 on the right and one on the left side)
1 x LAN RJ-45
2 x Audio Jack (Head Phone / Mic-in)
Card Reader: MMC/ SD(SDHC)

On the top, the keyboard is not the best keyboard I have had(IBM) but it is okay I guess. With a double Fn buttons which the extera one is not placed well enough. Also another negative point of this keyboard is a replaced and smaller shift button beside the new Fn one that makes things worse and takes its time to get used to it. The keyboard also suffers from lack of direct Page up,Page down, Home and End button ... I do doubt the good quality and solid built of it as well. It just doesnt look very stable and a quality keyboard ... But come on the whole damns thing is very cheap and even the keyboard is not that bad ...

The touchpad is the other pros of this machine. It is kind of an Apple touchpad with poorer quality. You can scroll with 2 fingers and this will mostly prevent a lot of bugs that nearly every single other brand notebook suffers from. They all mix up Zooming in and out in the browsers and it is really bothersome ...

And the last and not the least is a tiny little 1.3M pixel webcamera which is just okay and will never reach Apple webcam quality(IT IS CHEAP :-D).

Now that we covered the outfit, lets get in the beautiful box then ;-)

The CPU is a Intel® Atom N280, the memorry is by default a 1 GB DDR2(which I made it 2 GB) and finally the H.D.D which is a 160GB HDD plus 10GB Eee online Storage. The Eee Storage service is complimentary for the first 18 months. You can register account information for 6 months extension (depend on country). The computer also has very good Wifi and Bluetooth units. The device enjoys having WLAN 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth2.1 + EDR.

The worst part of the computer was a very NOT STANDART Bios which took me 2 hours to find out how to boot my computer from USB. The complicated non standard BIOS configuration does not recogonize USB memorry as a removable device but a H.D.D !!! So it leads to this that you should first choose the USB as the first Hard Disk and then choose to boot from this hard disk from the boot menu.

My computer in Norway came out with Win XP Home edition. My problem with it was that it did not have an English version and I had to choose between Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Samisk !!! Well I formatted the whole disk and installed a XP pro on it from USB(Tutorial comes in the next post) for emergency use and a nice Fedora Linux as my first O.S. :-)

That's it and I can come to conclusion here ... Although I underlined all the negetaive points I found but this is my dream pc after my IBM crashed last November(3 years old). Since then I had changed 4 different computers and was not sattisfied with any of them and thansk to a very good customer service of an IT shop here in Norway, I could give them back in 30 days trying period :-) The machine is small, light, good looking and has nearly everything I need.