Installed TinyVista on my Aspire One

So i bought my Aspire One (1gb ram, 120gb HDD version) the other day. last night i installed TinyVista Rev02 (its a cut-down copy of Vista, and it seems to run faster than a full copy of XP).

its 2.44gb installed, and the install is unattended (set it and forget it). it includes SP1, Aero theme, IE7, WMP11, and some drivers. it runs really well, id say better than Acer's included copy of XP (which i wasnt thrilled with, too much trash included). booting up from Hibernation is FAST. seriously, you press the power button, and its 2-3 seconds before your at an idle desktop. the only thing ive ran on it so far is World of Warcraft (which actually gets more FPS than when it ran on the Aspire's XP copy), and Project64 (N64 emulator) with Goldeneye, which runs great.

i did the install using a USB Thumbdrive (prepped the USB thumbdrive using this tutorial http://www.otgnet.com/Content/Default.aspx?Cat=all,Title=3764 scroll down to step 2 and 3). the install took 15 minutes or so. the only thing you should be advised on, is that to get it to boot from a USB, you need to change the Boot Order in the bios, put USB-HDD first in the list. the only problem is that, the 2nd step of the Vista install is to reboot the computer. when the install does its FIRST REBOOT, REMOVE THE USB DRIVE. if you dont, when the computer reboots, the install will start all over again. after this first reboot, the USB drive is no longer needed.

after installing, i needed to install the Lan, VGA, and Wifi drivers. however the Wifi drivers didnt seem to take, so i went to Device Manager, right click on "Ethernet Controller" (this is what Vista called the Wifi adapter, lol) and choose Update Driver Software. from there click "Browse My Computer for Driver Software", and set the directory to the "Drivers" folder inside the Un-Zipped directory you got from downloading the driver (which is called WLAN_Atheros_v7.6.0.224, by the way)

if any has any questions, id be happy to answer. i might even put up a Youtube video, if i find time to clean my desk area (its messy, covered in Pocky wrappers, and computer parts)

 

Don't change the boot order in BIOS, press F12 and choose USB boot whenever you want to boot from USB instead.

I tried TinyVista on my 8GB SSD One, that sucked *ss. I was actually a bit surprised since a slimmed down version of XP runs not perfect but ok and this was NOT runnable on the P1800 SSD.

Gonna get a 1,8" HDD and try again.

 

yes i just noticed that F12 feature after posting that.

does your 8gb model have only 512mb ram? interesting that yours didnt run well. mine runs TinyVista better than it runs XP.

the only thing i dont like about TinyVista, is that ReadyBoost has been removed. im not sure how useful it is, but i want to try it. im going to try to look for a way to add it back, just to try it out.

 

Tried tinyvista. Works well indeed. However, after driver install (VGA) Aero was still not an option I can activate, since I could not re-run Vista Performance Rating....so....

I Installed Full Blown Vista Ultimate from external HDD. Went well. All drivers working. There no undetected devices after VGA, WLAN, and Cardreader driver installs.
System runs very smooth.

Now the sad part. Aero is not working. Speed Index Rating is 1.0

[attachment=0znkz8xl]rating.jpg[/attachmentznkz8xl]

I don't think I am doing someting wrong. I guess Aero not an option on this Hardware

 

something seems to be wrong with the driver, as i reports "not detected" on 3D. I get 2,7 points.

 

Well, I stand corrected.

I Installed 945G Graphics driver from Intel, Ver:15.8.3.1504 Date:6/26/2008
Aero is now enabled, and performance index much better.
[attachment=0:rq6c7jj2]vista.jpg[/attachment:rq6c7jj2]

 

I'm running TinyVista on my Aspire one with 512mb ram and it runs surprisingly well!
I downloaded the VGA Driver for Vista 32bit from here:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Note ... uctID=2835
Using this driver allows aero to run if you want it.
Also to enable ReadyBoost, go to start, run, type services.msc
On the service list right click ReadyBoost, click Properties, change startup type to Automatic and click Start under service status. Then you can enable ReadyBoost on an SD card or USB drive by right clicking it in my computer, choosing properties and clicking on the ReadyBoost tab.

 

The driver, which is provided by windows update, is also able to handle aero ;-)

 

I was ecstatic when I installed vista on my aa1 (120gb, 1GB) and got a WEI of 2.7. My last laptop was just over 3.0 (replaced it with one that now scores 4.5).

 

are you guys doing a fresh install of this tinyvista, or are you doing an upgrade???? i would like to see how vista runs. but i haven't figured out how to recover the hard drive when i have to reload. the way i see it. the hidden partition is untouchable. the only way i know of to restore the hard drive is to use the recover program. but if you do a fresh install. you lose that program and everything else. so how do you access that hidden partition to restore to specs???? in other words, if i knock out the drive. how do i bring it back to factory install?

 

I tried TinyVista as well, but found that they disabled too many things. Sure it works fast, but I couldn't install the Synaptics drivers for example because they disabled just too many security options. So I made my own version with VLite and set the security options myself and it works as fast, but no more problems with the Synaptics driver for example.

 

Just for sh*t's and giggle's I had a go installing tiny vista. I didn't think I'd be so impressed, it works fine and I've even managed to get Half-Life one working in perfectly good detail! Haven't even done the memory upgrade yet

Stunning Thanks for guide!

 

Have anyone compared the performance against tinyXP? Usually the default XP is too full of junk to qualify for a benchmark.

 

not sure by what you mean as "qualify", or what junk in xp you are talking about.

in my case, the added mobile functionality that vista has over xp outweigh the performance loss.

 

the 'junk' refered in the default winXP install are the bloatware such as the mcafee av that expires after 30 days (i think), the ms office that also expires eventually and other stuff that's taking up space and will be useless in a few days anyway.

for my AA1, i just deleted the recovery partition, installed a vLited Vista and manually installed all the drivers. for vista though, some XP drivers really wont work (such as the synaptics software for the touchpad and the graphics driver) but weren't really a problem since vista drivers for these devices are readily available in thier respective websites anyway. also, i tried the tinyVista rev02.

as comparison goes, tinyVista is stripped down too much. as the previous post said, i cant even install the synaptics driver because too many security options have been completely removed (not just disabled).

right now, my vLited vista works great. all i removed were the unnecessary components and left much of the security options and services intact (just had to disable some, not remove). clean install of my vlite vista is 5GB (as compared with the 1GB for tinyVista, but i'm pretty much ok with the 5GB versus the 15GB normal Vista install). all this i managed without having to disassemble my AA1 to put in more memory. contrary to what some posts will lead you to believe, Vista in AA1 is very usable with just the 1GB memory that came with the unit. might as well keep my warranty intact

 

i misunderstood evi1d33d then. yes, the default aa1 xp install does include some crapware, I was talking about a fresh install of winxp. i always had a good chuckle when people would start removing base windows components to "save space and cpu", only to find out that their system wouldn't boot because a dependancy was missing.

 

Hmm my tinyVista installation doesn't even have winsat.exe, and the performane menu doesn't work, is there any way to get Aero working on this?

Or should i just install a vlited vista.

 

Hi,

I'm not able to boot tiny vista from my USB-device. It's a Cruzer Micro 4GB. When i'm in cmd.exe this errors is what i'm having:

1. diskpart - OK
2. list disk - OK
3. find the drive you want and then type: select drive # (so if it’s disk 1, you type disk 1) - FAIL
4. clean - N/A
5. create partition primary - N/A
6. select partition 1 - N/A
7. active - N/A
8. assign - N/A
9. exit


So, when i'm typing "list disk", The C:-disk is the only one that's showing. 149GB - number 0.
My USB device is number 3, but when i'm looking at the properties in "My Computer", it says number 0, and the C:-disk is number 0 (0). What to do? I can't get passed this point! And please, don't post a link with a crappy guide. I'm a noob at this "Install OS from a USB thing"

 

Hows the "freezing" on the 8gb version with 512mb ram?

Can anyone compare it's performance against the tiny xp version?

 

comparing the performance of TinyVista to TinyXP is really a stretch. they are miles apart in terms of system demands.

TinyXP performs similar to Windows 98 on most computers ive ran it on (4 of my own computers)

TinyVista performs similar to a regular copy of XP Home.

with TinyVista, I dont have any of the problems other people are having with Aero or installing drivers. i have the 120gb 1gb-ram version of the AA1.