Installing Windows 7 on the Eee PC 1000H - The Epic Struggle

So I finally decided to convert my Eee 1000H from XP to Win7, which looked like a seemingly easy task now that it even has Win7 compatible drivers. Oh, how mistaken I was.

Installing went fairly easy (except for errors completely of my own, but those are outside the scope of this post). I mounted the ISO I got from MSDNAA (yes, it's legit), went through the installer, five reboots later and I was in a shiny new Win7 world, complete with sound and partial hotkey functionality.

Then I went to get my fancy new drivers, to get all the functionality working. I started with the my usual driver install order: chipset, VGA, ACPI (called hotkeys on the Asus page), reboot. This is when the problems started. Up flashed a few dialog boxes on bootup, "Can't get WMI AsusManagement object" among others. A little googling later and I find out this means the ACPI driver doesn't recognize the BIOS, and I remember that I saw a BIOS update that said "supports Windows 7", so I thought "Oh, just have to update the BIOS."

Asus has a tool called Asus Update, that allows you to update the BIOS from Windows, so I went to install that, only to find that it didn't recognize my machine as an Eee PC, because the ACPI driver wasn't installed (or, in this case, not working properly). Uh, wait a minute, so you're telling me I can't update my BIOS because the ACPI isn't working, but the ACPI won't work before I update my BIOS? Oh dear...

Usually at this point you find a boot floppy and use a DOS-based BIOS updater, and indeed Asus has one called AfuDOS, but as you well know the Eee has no floppy, and Windows refuses to make an USB Pen an MS-DOS boot disk.

The rescue comes in the form of a very poorly documented feature of the Eee PC BIOS. If you press Alt+F2 at the grey screen when booting, it will go into a mode called EZ-Flash, and look for a BIOS ROM file from an USB device, named after your model ("1000H.ROM" in my case)!

Now, it is VERY important that you format the USB device as FAT16, otherwise it will not work. It will detect the file, but freeze while trying to read it. I have also seen the recommendation that the BIOS file be the only file on the device, but I don't think that should matter too much. However, as you most likely will have to reformat it to make it FAT16 anyway, that is most likely going to be the case.

So, to summarize, if you're getting the "Can't get WMI AsusManagement object" error, do the following:

• Download the newest BIOS update, rename it "1000H.ROM" (or whatever model your Eee is)
• Find an USB Device, format it to FAT16 (if it isn't already), and copy the BIOS file to the device
• Reboot your machine with the device plugged in, and hold Alt+F2 on bootup.
• If all went well, it should beep a little, and show some messages indicating it's installing the new BIOS, and when you're done, it should tell you to power down. Do so, and when you start back up into Win7, the error should be gone!

And if you're just planning on installing Win7 over XP, but haven't done so yet, update the BIOS before you start the install! You'll save yourself a load of trouble, and be able to install drivers with no problems.