First off a few weeks ago I started getting our data backed up via Humyo. Seems pretty competitive on space/price. £5 per month for 100GB. Works in a fairly windows-centric way, and so far all our photos and non-music files are now ‘safely’ synced into the cloud. 10GB for free.

Also trying out Dropbox. Much simpler than Humyo, and nicer interfacing: very web2.0 unlike Humyo which is quite windows-like. $10 per month for 50GB, $20 for 100GB. Is it worth twice the price? 2GB for free as a taster (or 2.25GB if you use my referral link above).

Also enjoying very much Evernote. Much like OneNote in approach, but nicer media options (include audio, images, etc). Works off the web, or via an installed desktop client. A client is also available for many mobiles and the version on my HTC Touch HD works great. Also it OCRs any text it can see in screengrabs or uploaded images – including handwriting! Syncs across all instances and ‘just works’. 40MB upload per month for free.

So, to get this Netbook working – I’m going to install F-Secure, and then see if these various apps will play with Windows 7.

1. Ask via Twitter whether or not this would be a good idea!

Ben was kind enough to suggest that he would willingly let me try first… He was also kind enough  to point me at this helpful starting point

2. Step 1: formatting

Couldn’t find a USB stick with 4GB or more, so decided to use one of our new iomega eGo portable drives. It needed to be formatted as a bootable drive, which requires a quick formatting first. The drive is 320GB, so this has taken up most of the day! I’m following the steps on this article (via the first one).

2. Step 2: making boot

Make the drive bootable. The above article suggests I use bootsect from my Vista disk. Oh dear, I don’t have that to hand.

A quick google suggests using: Virtual Clone Drive with which I can mount the Windows 7 ISO I have already downloaded. Have downloaded and installed Virtual Clone Drive (didn’t require a restart, and does seem to just work).

Now back to Step 2. I did what the article said, and got the following:

f:\boot>bootsect /nt60 d:

Target volumes will be updated with BOOTMGR compatible bootcode.

D: (\\?\Volume{c67ac67a-4b61-11de-bcbb-bc67a65cb956})

Updated NTFS filesystem bootcode.  The update may be unreliable since the
volume could not be locked during the update:
Access is denied.

Bootcode was successfully updated on all targeted volumes.
f:\boot>


hmmm. so was that successful or not?

2. Step 3

All copied across OK.

2. Step 4

Get the Netbook to boot off the USB disk. Another quick google says I don’t need to amend the bios, just hold F2 down on a restart. Oh, hang on. That just brought up the bios settings screen. OK – so USB drive goes second after ‘USB CD’ and before the main HD.

Having re-checked I’ve got no data of importance on there… 

3. Here goes with a restart…

Clicking through the various options and warnings, the main choice seemed to be Upgrade or Custom? The ‘help me choose’ link advised me that there was no upgrade from XP, so I’ve gone for the full monty. 

The installer tells me this will take a while, and involve some reboots. Its now 8.25pm…

8.43pm. OK, this would have been about ten to fifteen minutes quicker if I hadn’t been side-tracked. The install got to a point where it wanted to reboot. But, after it came back from the reboot it wanted to start the installation again (as the external USB drive booted first and setup the install again). 

So, I suspected I should just cancel and reboot without the USB drive in the way, but I wasn’t sure and googled around a bit before figuring that, yes, you do need to get back in the bios, move the USB drive to lower down in the pecking order, and let it restart from the hard drive. 

It’s now “completing installation…”

8.54pm. into the setup screens

9.14pm. oh dear – it wanted my procut key. Dutifuly entered from the label underneath the netbook. I now have a spinning circle of animated lovliness which has been going for about ten minutes.

Maybe I should have un-checked the ‘Automatically activate Windows when I’m online’ box?  

[pause for sustanence & present wrapping!]

11pm. I’m writing this in Windows 7. In answer to the above, it was something wrong with the activation, and leaving this blank made it all work.

Success…

• Touch InCall Screen Tweak (makes the screen light up during a call if you take it away from vertical – i.e. away from your ear)
• BsB G-Config (adds G-sensor options to apps that don’t support it natively. not sure this works – or at least it doesn’t help google maps).
• CeTwit – small twitter client. Ok, but could do with better finger-scrolling
• QuakkSetup – just about to try this
• .NET compact framework 3.5 (needed for some of these apps)
• Diamond Saber (yes, a lightsaber application)
• GoogleMaps itself (did I install this? did it not come with the phone? I seem to have the .cab file lying around)
• SkypeForPocketPC (this actually works, but doesn’t do video yet AFAICT)