Netbook and Win CE 6

I had the terrible idea of buying a $125 7" netbook for my son who is mentally ill and homeless in California. It was advertised as working with Skype - so I thought we could communicate that way. I also wanted him to be able to do emails, web searches, some word documents (he likes to write), and YouTube - and save it all in a DropBox.

Well the cute little netbook arrived and immediately I discovered you could not install much of anything on it. There was no Skype (even though it was advertised as a part of the software), YouTube did not work, and it was painfully slow. The keyboard was tiny, the screen was tiny, and the battery did not last very long. With my son's poor vision and difficulty finding electricity I knew pretty quickly it was probably a bad choice.

After a few hours of working with it - using Internet Explorer and my home wireless - I got this nasty error message "IESAMPLE has encountered an error and must shut down" which made Internet Explorer impossible to use. If I clicked OK, it shut down IE. If I did not, the message covered the tiny screen. I researched high and low and could not find a way to get another browser on it.

Finally I contacted the Chinese company I bought it from. No one could speak much English so the only option was to mail it back to them. I did - asking to swap it for a Linux model - but they were "out" of them. It cost $30 to mail it to China! When it came back, it was the same netbook - but the IESAMPLE error was gone. About 3 hours later it was back!!! Grrrrrr...

I contacted them again and they wanted me to send it back again! This time I asked them to send me the files so I could reload the OS. They agreed - it took several tries over several days - but I finally got it.

But I could not get the darned thing to load. It kept erasing all of my programs and most of my settings. I figured out I could copy the folders back one at a time and get it going again (with the IESAMPLE error still there).

After many long impossible "chats" with Chinese tech support people named Lily and Sara (?) I started searching for a solution. Finally I found a Linux forum talking about the same subject on the same netbook - an ARM VT8500. I put the question of how to reload the OS there - and the next day had the answer!!! Hooray!!! Here was the trick:

Get a SD card and make a folder in the root of it named \script.
Put the autorun.exe and four other files in this folder
Put the \system disk folder in this folder
Turn the netbook off
Put in the SD card
Turn the netbook on

It booted to the SD card and installed the OS!! It's the best it's ever run - even better than when it first arrived!

I'm thinking of contacting the Chinese company and offering to rewrite their manual... It is completely butchered.

I ended up buying a different netbook for my son. He's not using Skype - but he's using email and enjoying the netbook.