AAO 8GB SSD, Linux vs XP

Hi there,

Ive been lurking on these forums for a while and have finally decided to get myself an AAO. It will come with an 8GB SSD and will have Linpus preinstalled.

I did some research on SSDs and understand that while it has fast read times, it has lousy write times (especially so with SSDs that come with the AAO).

I also think the general consensus is that Linux has better speeds on SSDs than XP.

So my question is, how bad is XP on the 8GB SSD? Is the difference between Linux and XP that great? I prefer XP personally, but would go for Linux if Linux speeds are much greater.

If XP is not that bad, can anyone post some links to the tweaks I should do to get the best experience? (I have been lurking on the forum, and read a LOT of threads, that I dont know which threads are good and which are not anymore @_@)

If XP is really that bad, can anyone post some links for a complete Linux newb (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, whats the difference etc)

Any help is very much appreciated.

 

In general perormance, Linux better than XP especially on lower spec machine.

For SSD, XP generate too many writes even doing nothing, unless you install EWF
viewtopic.php?f=54&t=9076&p=58527&hilit=ewf#p58527

With EWF installed, the XP performance over Linux, but you need Ram at least 1GB. I perfer XP because I am used to the setting and tweaking, and some program just don't work in Linux.

 

Thanks for your reply. I will try XP with the EWF tweak then. AFAIK, the EWF tweak causes the background work of XP to write to the RAM instead of the SSD, speeding up the system while extending the life of the SSD. However, what's the flip side of it?

The cons I have seen are:

1) windows crashes if the amount of data written to the RAM exceeds the allocated quota
2) slower reboot times (?)

Can anyone verify if these cons are substantial, or any other cons I should know about?

Thanks much again, appreciated.

 

I run XP on my SSD formatted as FAT32 with no paging file. With the full complement of 1.5GB RAM it is mostly useable. Every now and again the system appears to freeze whilst a bunch of small files are written back to disk but I can live with this.

I cannot live with a Linux distribution with an old kernel and old versions of essential applications that cannot be easily updated. Nor can I live with a more modern Linux distribution that does not have full hardware compatibility with the Aspire One. Pretty soon now someone will probably have a fully working Ubuntu Netbook Remix distro for the Aspire One and I will gladly abandon XP when this happens.

IMHO, as it is at the moment my Aspire One is fine for web browsing, IM, email and Office 2003 apps. For the price that I paid (£155 GBP) I wouldn't really expect it to do much more. A new full sized laptop would cost almost twice as much as this in the UK (as would some of the better netbooks - a Samsung NC10 typically costs £311 GBP).

If you are one of these crazy people that insists on running stuff like Adobe Premiere on an Atom-based netbook with a 1024x600 screen then I would recommend the hard disk model instead.

 

1) Speed, you only read from SSD with EWF, all write goes directly to RAM, so even boot time is fast.
2) You have a ReadOnly C:\ even on web browsing or under spyware/virus attack, reboot and good as new.
3) EWF only cache upto 512MB in size
4) If you need to write change to C:\, you have to remember to flash the memory with command.

 

Ronime, I assume you chose not to use EWF? Why not?

hoyin007, so if EWF caches more than 512 MB of data, then windows will crash? What sort of data does windows normally write to the hard drive (that is now being redirected to the RAM due to EWF)? For example, if I do a lot of video streaming, would my EWF cache explode really quickly?

Thanks a lot for the answers.

 

1. Limitations on write cache size (RAM disk)
2. Possible system corruption if battery runs out whilst committing write cache on shutdown
3. I have just bought a new A150 with a WDC 160GB HD for less than I paid for the A110 with 8GB SSD

 

When XP start, it generate about in toal 50MB of cache data with EWF on. EWF only cache the write for HD to Ram instead, so video streaming should be OK.

In terms of web browser cache, you can install RamDisk with part of your RAM (anything under 50MB will be fine) and mount as a separate drive. Set you browser temp folder to there, so it won't eat up the web junk into EWF.