Now that I've got eeeXubuntu installed on my 4GB SD card, I figured I might as well try installing Windows XP on my Eee PC's main memory. After all, even if I royally mess things up, there's zero chance of ending up with an unbootable machine unless I lose my SD card.

But there are just two problems:

1. I don't want Windows XP to eat up more than half of my computer's solid state disk
2. I don't have a USB CD/DVD-ROM drive

Either one of these alone wouldn't pose much of a problem. You can slim down your Windows XP installation using nLite. Or if you want to install a full system by copying data from your XP DVD to a USB flash drive, you can follow some relatively simple instructions from Eee PC Tutorials. But try using those instructions to install an nLited copy of XP and you could be in for a world of headache.