150 owner with questions

Hi,
I really like my Aspire One 150 with XP and 1GB of ram. I'm thinking about wiping the hard drive and reinstalling XP nice and fresh without any of this trial software. I'm downloading the 150 xp drivers now from Acer's site, and have some questions:

1. Is the RAM on the 1GB models upgradeable? If so, what's the max RAM and what speed/type of RAM should I get?

2. If I wipe the hard drive completely and want to install XP from a bootable CD I have, should I copy the CD over to a flash drive with PEBuilder? If so, what BIOS option is for booting from USB flash drive - USB Floppy or USB HardDisk?

3. Is it possible to boot from a USB CD drive with a fresh hard drive wipe? I mean, if there are no external CD drive drivers how will the bios know how to handle the external drive, or is this basic readability built into the bios/external drive?

4. I'm noticing flickering on low (lowest maybe?) brightness settings... is there anything I can do to take care of this?

5. I disabled D2D in the bios but my HD still only shows 100GB - is there a way to get the other 20GB, or will a complete harddrive wipe of all partitions take care of that?

I'm getting used to the smaller keyboard pretty quickly! It's not nearly as small as my blackberry keyboard so I think I'll do fine. Thanks everyone for your help and patience with my questions. :]

-Bill

 

1. Yes, it is, you can remove the 512MB module and install a 1GB module
2. you can boot from USB flash drive or USB optical or pretty much whatever USB you like.
3. It just works, that's all there is needed to know
4. Are you on battery when this is happening?
5. A complete wipe/repartition of the drives will take care of that.

 

Thank you for your help! Yes it is happening when on battery power. Is it typical to get about 2 hours of battery life with the standard battery?

 

The Hitachi drive used draws quite a bit of power, you may notice that it does this when accessing the hard drive. I swapped to a 320GB Seagate 5400.5 which, if the specs are correct, uses only 451ma of +5v power. Hitachi label showed it used 700ma! I haven't seen it happening with the Seagate installed.

It's hard to say what is "typical" use. I have gotten close to 3 hours constantly web surfing with the wifi turned off, screen brightness set to lowest, and with Ralf's AA1 Fan control app (extremely useful app, you should look into it! Link available on this forum). I can see with screen brightness on high, and wifi on, and if you use usb devices as well, along with the Hitachi drive, how 2hr is completely possible.

 

The "missing" hard drive space you're noticing is simply a restorable image on a hidden partition which can revert the computer to factory fresh state.

Cleaning my One and getting rid of software was actually easier than most other computers I have done it on as there was simply less crapware preinstalled. You can tell most of the useless tray icons to not show themselves either.

 

I will look into getting another hard drive - what size and type should I get? And also what speed/type ram should I get to upgrade my current 1gb - does it have 512 soldered on and another 512 in the one user-accessible slot?
One other thing, I tried to wipe the hard drive with a program called DBAN and compared to my last computer it was ridiculously slow - zeroing out the hd was gonna take around 30 hours. What's up with that?