XP Pro on the Eee

I finally managed to get my bargain 4GB Asus701 Eee to run with XP professional and for there to be still about 1GB of spare space after installing all my must have programmes for travelling and suffering the SP3 upgrade.

Various points of hard earned wisdom are:-

Use nLite to shrink your XP but be careful what you take out and leave in. I used substanially these notes from i64X

However, make sure you leave the Internet explorer box ticked at the compatability screen and to untick the window sound drivers in the Drivers option. (The windows default drivers seem to screw up the installation of the Asus sound stuff).

Asos Eee in Paramo Taiga fleece

Programmes I’ve installed so far are:-

• Skype for contacting Sally on!
• Firefox with Extensions – Adblock Plus, Delicious, Foxmarks, Scribefire (for blogging),
• avast antivrus
• Foxit reader
• GPicSync for geotagging my camera pictures.
• GPS Trackmaker for downloading my Garmin traces.
• Flickr uploader
• Garmin Mapsource
• Filezilla ftp client for maintaing and setting up blogs for folks I meet.

So of the 3.71GB available I now have 722MB left (although I’m pretty certain Garmin will be getting deleted as its very bloatware like at 200MB).

Now to check out the battery life etc and to find WiFi connections.

And for you Linux geeks out there, I did so try to get GPSBabel running on the Asus Xandros OS but totally failed, although I did manage to get the full Linux desktop installed for a time.

All the above has probably taken about 3 solid days in time although the final nLite creation and installation was about 2 hours! Cold boot time is about 1minute.

Some of you may say what about the iPhone? My answers are:-
Its terribly fragile and as Euan knows not very water resistant!
You can only use its internal GPS / Camera.
Mine is still locked = hideous O2 roaming charges

So the trusty unlocked Treo680 will get another outing!

Finally, one week later, I can publish our trail and photographs for our Cumbrian Way weekend. Sally and I are both quite proud that we managed over 60 miles and 8400ft of ascent in three days walking. The weather was in our favour being cool and sunny most of the time.

The reason for the delay in updating is that I had a big struggle getting Everytrail to accept 3 days of walking in one trail. Finally cracked it by using Garmin Mapsource on XP to bring in all the various gpx files in from the Garmin, edit out all the oddments and connect the three days together. The output from this worked fine in Google Earth but Everytrail insisted that at the end of each day we moved in a straight line back to the end of the first day! Finally cracked that by importing the file into Ascent on the iMac then re-saving it, before finally posting to Everytrail.

The Cumbrian Way is an excellent walk through stunning scenery the waymarking is sporadic in parts and I can well imagine the  section over Caldbeck Fell would be very hairy in poor visibility. We stayed near Skelwith in the Elterwater Park Guest House which at £84.49 for the night we felt was over priced. (The proprietors obviously are followers of Stelios and his business model of charging extra’s eg one night stay, debit credit card charges) The night in Keswick was at the Abacourt House B&B , £62, Clean & very central.

Many thanks must go to to George & Jacqui, friends since I did the Duke of Edinburgh award in the 60′s, for putting as up and taxiing us to the  start and finish

Here is the walk (warts and all) :-

Cumbria Way walk

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and the profile:-

Cumbria Way profile

Another great short walk of 13miles , this time ably led by Chris of Newmarket Ramblers. Here is the track with photographs:-



Newmarket Ramblers – Stetchworth Walk

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

For anyone interested I’m using the Garmin Etrex Legend HCx. Reading the track stored on the Garmins datacard by using its USB interface attached to XP (I’m using Parallels on the iMac as the Garmin software is PC only)

with the Garmin Mapsource software (6.14.1).

The software allows you to edit the track and shows the track as a crude map to make the editing easier.I then export the file as a gpx file to the HoudahGeo software on the iMac  where I can import any pictures previous captured from the camera using iPhoto. Before setting out I have carefully set the camera date and time to the GPS!

HoudahGeo can then embed geotags into the photos and export them to Flickr.

I can then upload the gpx file to Evertrail and import the geotagged images from Flickr to give the trail shown above. A bit tedious but it does incorporate three of my interests, Internet, walking & photography. Today was also my second anniversary of meeting Sally on one of her walks so I guess that four interests!!!

Interestingly HoudahGeo also allows direct export to google earth so maybe Evertrail and wikiloc will get crushed under the google juggernaut.