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Dare i say it? Well here goes nothing... my little Eee Seashell became instantly more lovable as soon as it got its eyes... and having just gotten Windows 7 installed and totally working on it... it suddenly feels like its growing up so quickly!

You've seen the Eee 1008HA get unboxed - then another one of it (not mine!) get gutted... and next it got EYES!!!

Here's the minor backstory ~ these kids in Brooklyn (the Googly Eye Cru) have taken the googly moving eyes of our childhood and turned them into stickers and throw pillows and spread them around... i happened to find this particular pair of eyes in a capsule toy machine (you know the type - insert a few quarters, turn the knob, and out pops a plastic capsule filled with goodies?) in a culver city art gallery/cafe... ANYHOW, i had bought them, and they lived on my desk for a while, awaiting the perfect place to stick. And when the Seashell arrived... well the logo was driving me nuts, it was just so silver, and cursivey, and blech... SO trying out the eyes, the diameter perfectly covered the logo! And thus my seashell needed eyes. and makes people look twice and think is some bizarre clutch versus an adorable little laptop. A laptop that was moments ago running WinXP...

So here you can see today's kitchen set up... my current mbp front and center... the little seashell alongside it looking curious... and my old mbp covered with stickers from vinyl cutter experimentation, waiting for a new sense of purpose!

So today's lazy saturday experiment was figuring out Windows 7... rumor has it, it's awesome for netbooks, and people are actually saying the words "love" and "windows" in the same sentence... so i had to try it. Having no dvd drive, had to look into booting it from USB though... so my Rayd8 Mimobot was sacrificed and reformatted for the cause... minor complications in that i dl-ed Windows 7 img to my mac, but then reformatted RayD8 wouldn't let the mac write to it... so it went from the mac to the LaCie Key... then to RayD8 through Seashell on WinXP...

But how cute (and huge?) do both drives look relative to the tiny seashell? (Sidenote: regarding usb keys... on your keys... well while transferring i had to get something from my car, and certainly felt a bit silly having to keep the keys in the netbook and beep my car open and run out before it locked itself again...)

Anyhow, once that was all transferred over and ready to go... Windows 7 install went pretty smoothly (make sure you update your Asus bios first though!)

I've been on mac's without many PCs in my life for so long... i totally forgot what the hunt for drivers was like... luckily, most of the Asus drivers work, and then you can grab the touchpad one from the manufacturer and get your scrolling back too... pretty much far less painless than i would have expected, and easing into Win7 was actually a pretty pleasant experience. Some bizarre UI issues, but overall my little seashell sure does feel a lot more grown up than it did on XP...