The ASUS EEE 1000H comes with Windows XP Home edition. People have often asked me, if Vista would work nicely on it. I was pretty sure it would be able to run it, but I never thought that it would be able to run the Vista so nicely!
Installation
I went for the best version of Vista. Vista Ultimate. I installed it from the DVD and everything went fine. Just as I expected.
Wait, what about the drivers?
True, Vista drivers are not made available to the end users. Fortunately, the drivers for the XP work just fine. After reading this article, you will be running Vista on your EEE 1000H with Aero on! So, read on.
Can it Multitask without any hiccups?
As one would think that the Vista would make the EEE 1000H crawl. Well, it does not. In fact, the overall experience is better than the XP. Folks at ASUS should have made a Vista version of the ASUS 1000H and I bet, the would have loved it.
Vista Experience Index
This is not a core 2 due machine with 4GB of RAM. It is a Intel Atom machine. But, it manages to provide the user a decent Vista experience. Keep in mind that I have not changed anything on the 1000H hardware-wise. It still has the factory fitted 80GB HDD with 1GB RAM.
At first, you will get a shabby 1.0 experience index. This is due to the fact that the Video drivers have not been installed. You can click on the images to see the full screenshot
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You can download the Video drivers from this link
After the installation of the Vista drivers, you should tell the Vista to recalculate the Vista experience Index. Here is my updated Experience Index
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Ok, so what is not working?
Sound works without loading any drivers. Also, do not install the VGA driver from the CD. Use the updated Intel driver I mentioned above. This will enable Aero on Vista and much better performance too.
Install the drivers from the DVD that came with the ASUS 1000H. Go to the drivers folder. Whatever setup you run, make sure you run it in the XP mode unless I have pointed out not to do so in case of specific component. To do this, right click on the setup and choose properties. Go to the properties(tab) and choose “XP service pack 2”. The setup should then run fine.
For bluetooth driver, go to drivers>bluetooth>win32 and run Inst.exe. No compatibility mode required here. For the LAN, Vista drivers have been included on the CD. It is not a setup file and you will have to do it manually. Otherwise, you can just run the setup file in the compatibility mode and everything will go just fine.
But, any hacks to make them work?
At first, it will say that the BT hardware is not detected. Just cancel it and proceed. 
Install the ACPI driver then in compatibility mode and it will detect the BT driver automatically. Note that the ACPI driver will give you errors everytime you restart you restart the 1000H. To overcome this problem, Slevin, a coder has come up with a fix. Just download these files (acpi fix) and follow the instructions. It will cure the problem.
Battery life
I was able to get nearly 5.5 hours of battery life with WiFi and BT off. With Wifi on, I was able to get nearly 4.5 hours with light surfing via Firefox. This is impressive.
You may be able to get a lot more as I was using the default “balanced power plan”. I am sure, you can get more battery life if you use “power saver power plan”
Any recommended upgrades?
Well, it is not a hidden truth that the Vista loves RAM. RAM is quite cheap days. Upgrade the RAM to 2GB and you will make vista more comfortable as it eats nearly 400MB after the bootup. But still, I didn’t face any problems even after opening several tabs in firefox; running music via WMP 11 and running Photoshop CS3 all at the same time.
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Click here to know about its performance in Windows 7.
CLICK here to read 1000H’s review.
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