Last week I purchased an EeePC 900Xp. This is a sub-notebook (maybe, though I would not call it, a Ultra Mobile PC, UMPC for short) made by Asus. The 900Xp features a 900MHz intel centrino processor (I know, AMD rocks but I did not get an AMD system!) 1Gb of ram and a 12Gb SSD (Solid State Drive, think hard drive) and shipped with Windows Xp. Though these are not the greatest specs but for the price, just over $500 USD, in a package no larger than a hard bound book who is going to complain. My concerns, which are the reason for this entry, was the ability to use MasterCam on the Eee. Would these lower specs be able to run such a complex program? How about Vegas, the video editor?

Yes and Yes!

First I installed Vegas, one thing to note the Eee does not have a CD or DVD drive, these drives have to be plugged in via the USB ports. Not having an external drive at the time avaiable I took the following approach.
1. On another system, a desktop in my case, I made an ISO image of the Sony Vegas install CD and copied it onto my USB thumb drive. Once copied I plugged the USB drive into the Eee
2. A program I really like is called Daemon Tools It allows you to "mount" an ISO image as a local drive.f
3. Using Daemon tools (dowloaded and installed on the Eee) to mount the ISO of the Vegas Install CD, as soon as I said OK the auto run on the "Virtual CD" kicked in and the install went smoothly.

Note. Due to the limited SSD space of the Eee you may find it advantages to install to an external hard drive or SD card. In the situation of Vegas I installed it onto the same portable external hard drive that I keep the raw video that I will be editing in Vegas. The concern about this process slowing down the entire system or just Vegas is nominal.

For MasterCam Version 9.1 I did the exact same process as above with the exception of, just for novilty sake, I installed it to an SDHC card. Honestly I can say that the Eee runs MasterCam better than many "low end" Desk Top PC's and even many "Mid range" PC's that cost twice as much.

Side note. The Eee has a native screen resoultion of 1024 X 600, it's a wide screen. The standard for most users of MasterCam or Vegas are 1024 X 768 or higher. The Eee has VGA output that does support the 1024 X 768 resoluton. Inside MasterCam there is little to no adjusting needed to see everything, vegas on the other hand does feel a bit cramped and the video preview is just a little postage stamp unless you pull it off. Oh well, that is the sacrifice that you make for extreme portability.

Now about MasterCam X2 MR2...
This was a true bugger to install and in the process I learned a lot about the Windows operating system.
Note! you will need a lot of free space on the C:\ drive. I acutally had to remove some of the larger programs on the C drive just to install MCamX, I did put them back after I was done. It was because of this need to have some space that I learned about windows internals. One is that the Fonts folder, more so after installing Vegas, is huge.

Side Note 1. Did you know that you do not have to have a font for installed for windows to use it? That's right. To use a fontv(not installed, consider you just downloaded it) in an applicaton, preview the font by doubble clicking on it. While the preview window is open you can use that font in your application.

So I grabbed a big bunch of the fonts I knew I would not use every day and placed them in a folder on the D:\ drive where I had space. Another space killer is the folder C:\windows\Downloaded Instalations. This folder is where Windows keeps the entire instalation files for incomplete installations. The other is the folder where all the windows updates are kept, EVEN AFTER they were installed! Why? the folder is c:\windows\installer. Oy!

Side Note 2. When a program is installed usualy it is extracted to the system temp directory which is usualy in the root hard drive ie. C:\. In the case of MasterCam X there was not enough room to complete the installation once it had completed the extraction. Easy fix, right click on the My Computer Icon on the desktop and select properties. the system properties dialog will open up and you will want to select the tab that labled "advanced". At the bottom of the window there is a button labled "enviroment Variables" click it. At the top there is the display of where the TMP and TEMP variables point to, for the install just change them to somewhere with a Whole lot of room, like an external drive of a 4Gb SD card.

Once you have everything with plenty of space the install should go as normal, I used the .EXE for MCamX off the Mastercam website and just copied it over to my external hard drive. To note though is that I made serveral attempts to install MCamX to either SSD partition and to the SD card and all failed. The only place I was able to install to was my external HD, go figure.

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BTW the system is now a dual boot of Ubuntu for the Eee. This install was way too easy and did not involve any partitioning or the not. This time around I decided to install Ubuntu from inside of windows. Honestly I used the tequniques above to accomplish this goal. First I dowloaded Ubuntu for the Eee ISO image. Mounted it using daemon tools. When the auto run pops up it asks if you would like to do a Windows Install. By selecting this option Ubuntu will install into a folder of your choice, in my case onto an SDHC card, and will use the MS boot loader to load into grub/Ubuntu. If you decide that you do not want Ubuntu on you PC any more then it is uninstallable via the Add/Remove programs inside the widows control panel.

The nice thing about using Daemon Tools to install software (or in this case also Ubuntu) is that it is "Green" because you are not using a CD-R or DVD-R once and then disposing of it like an old AOL disk.