When I received my Eee PC I was quite dissatisfied with the Linux it came with. Quite honestly, while it was nice for basic tasks, it didn’t feel very responsive and the OS took up a lot of space.

After some days of usage, I decided to install a nLited version of Windows XP. By removing drivers, some languages support and many other things the final installation media wasn’t over 200 MB.

The OS alone isn’t exactly useful, so I had to install programs, but they had to be lightweight and serve the purpose well at the same time. Today we are infested with bloatware, but being a software junkie myself I think I made some good choices when installing stuff on the tiny machine, which I want to share with you:

Web Browser - Opera

I use Opera Browser since 1998, and it keeps managing to surprise me with every release. This program simply has a lot of functionality for the amount of resources it takes. Heck, it’s even faster than Firefox 3. It’s not only a web browser, but a mail client, feed reader, BitTorrent downloader and IRC chat client. Opera also has unique things such as the Speed Dial, total indexing of bookmarks and history (so you can find pages based on its content, not only the URL), notes, widgets, synchronization through Opera Link, voice recognition, etc.

Media Player - The KMPlayer

While many use Videolan as their favorite player, I think KMPlayer deserves more attention. KMPlayer supports many video and audio formats right away, since it includes all the needed codecs. It has lots of postprocessing options for video and audio (with more possibilities through Winamp Plugins and Directshow Filters), supports playlists, subtitles, video containers such as MKV or OGM, watching DVDs, etc. It also has 3 different presets of CPU usage. By selecting the lightest setting you should be able to play some HD movies on the Eee with no problems.

Photo Management - Xnview

Xnview is similar to Picasa, but much more powerful and less resource intensive. You can browse your pictures through its configurable browser, and also crop, correct red-eye, adjust, retouch and convert them. It opens a ton of formats and allows you to save in many as well. It also has a lot of filters, even supporting Photoshop plugins. My installation only takes up 3 MB, and it works very fast. Be sure to check this one out.

Instant Messaging - Pidgin/Miranda

Pidgin and Miranda IM clients are not resource intensive like the official ones (that is, for us users of proprietary services like MSN), since they are just focused on text, emoticons and file transfers, rather than annoying and unnecesary things such as nudges, games, full screen animations, etc.

Both serve really well the purpose and are very economical screen real estate-wise, which is a bless for the tiny 7″ screen of the original Eee. Miranda is the lightest one, taking up little more than 1.5 MB. Pidgin supports plugins and has more options, but it needs more space and also requires the GTK Runtime to be installed.

Others I’m too lazy to write about

From PDF reading without Adobe’s bloatware to a nice program launcher to speed up your tasks, here are the rest of the programs I’ve installed on my Eee.

Notepad Replacement: Notepad++

Compressor: 7-Zip

PDF Reading: FoxIt Reader

Drive and Registry Cleaning: Ccleaner

Dock: Rocketdock

Program Launcher: Launchy

Calculator: Microsoft PowerCalculator

Finally, after installing all these wonders and tweaking XP a little bit more, everything I had on disk didn’t take up more than 1 GB. Now I have plenty of room to store more documents and some music without needing an extra SD card sucking up extra battery time.