By Todd Ogasawara on November 12, 2009 3:20 AM

Recovering Free Space on the Eee PC T91MT’s 30GB SSD: Touch Screen is Great, Small Drive is Not

The Asus Eee PC T91MT multi-touch convertible netbook comes with a relatively small (by today’s standards) 30GB Solid State Drive (SSD) instead of a hard drive. This is a good thing in many things. But, it does present a challenge when running Windows 7 Home Premium with a bunch of touchscreen apps pre-installed.

The T91MT comes with surprisingly little “crapware”. In fact, I would go as far as to say it doesn’t come with any. Despite this, only half of the 30GB SSD is left free “out of the box”. I found only 14.8GB free on mine after booting the netbook for the first time and letting Windows 7 initialize and configure itself. Here’s the blow-by-blow of my hard disk space recovery efforts.

1. 14.8GB free out of the box.
2. 12.8GB free after running Windows Update
3. 15.6GB free after uninstalling four Office 2007 Language Packs
4. 16.2GB free after removing Trend Micro installation files (the software was not pre-installed)
5. 16.4GB free after uninstalling Microsoft Works
6. 17.6GB free after uninstalling Microsoft Office 2007 Home & Student Edition 60-day trial
7. 17.9GB free after uninstalling Microsoft Office Activation Suite Assistant, Office Live Add-in 1.3, Office Compatibility Pack & PowerPoint 2007 Viewer

As you can see, I recovered about 10% of the total SSD drive space (3.1GB) after all this exercise. I tossed a 8GB SanDisk Ultra II SDHC card in the dedicated storage card slot (there’s a second SD card for your digital camera’s SD card) to give me about 26GB of available free space on the netbook. I think this is a workable amount of space if I don’t install a lot of big apps (Office 2010 preview may still get installed).