Installing new OS.

Hey Everyone, admittingly I'm a noob with regards to Acer Aspire one.
I was hoping someone can help me out.

Currently I have the windows xp installed that my Aspireone A0A150 came with.

I tried to backup my stuff on an external hd and use the recovery software which is currently patitioned to D:/ and when I run the app, it just restarts my computer and does nothing.

So I decided, maybe I should just format my PC, delete the partition (that way I get that space back) and then re-install a new OS.

I was thinking maybe The modified Aspireone version of the MAC OS or even Linpus Linux that Acer packs with some Aspireones.

What are some suggestions and do I really need to buy an external usb optical drive in order to install and format my pc?

 

Don't go with Linpus. It's old and unsupported. If you're going to learn a new way of doing things on your AA1 with Linux, go with a modern, well-supported distro. The mainline distros I've run (Fedora, Mandriva, and Ubuntu) and their derivatives (Crunchbang, Kuki, Mint, etc...) are pretty much all alike; all run well, and any tweaking to get things working is minor. It'll be the little things that lead you to one chose distro over another.

You don't need an optical drive - all of the above are installable from a USB flash drive. In fact, they're all runnable from the flash drive - much more slowly than when installed, but fast enough for you to try before you install.