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Installation - Software

Software installation is another area we touch on with the EA65. It is not as straightforward as just installing Windows because of the Instant On features. The Instant On capability is like a seperate operating system; in fact it is an Intervideo solution based off of Linux. It requires 100MB on a blank HD and must be installed before Windows. For those that are looking to migrate an existing hard drive from another system to the EA65, be prepared to back up your disk before hand. With that said, installation on the Instant On software went without a hitch. Basically put the disc in like with a Windows installation, and go through the prompts and voila, done.

At this point an installation of Windows can be done normally. Something that may irk users however is that the primary partition somehow gets relegated to drive I: with 7 of the drive letters being taken up by the multimedia card reader and the 8th taken by the CDROM. Drivers for the MMC reader are not installed till after Windows is up and running so I assume that this is somehow the result of the Instant On software. It does not really affect the functionality of the computer however but it is worth pointing out.

A bright spot is the driver installation software for the EA65. It is much more friendly than the usual driver disks found packed into motherboards. Click a button and everything is installed automatically and the installation software gives visual prompts at the same time so that the end user is not left wondering whether or not the install process has frozen up.

The final piece of software to complete the EA65 is Intervideo's Home Theater software suite which manages pretty much all multimedia functions inside of Windows. The Home Theater software suite takes a design cue from Microsoft's XP Media Center with graphically heavy menus and step by step set up guides. One extremely annoying feature with the Home Theater Software Installation is the country select. Users must manually scroll through the country list one by one. To make matters worse, it takes about five seconds to move to the next country. I tried to get from United States to Canada but gave up at Bolivia after the GUI failed to respond. Hello? McFly? What happened to drop boxes or a more standard GUI item?

We had a blonde moment when we realized where the CD key was for the Home Theater software. We colored it differently in this photo to highlight where it is