My experience: WinXP on 8GB SSD A110

Hi all, just wanna share my experience and hopefully will be useful esp to those thinking about installing winxp on the 8GB SSD model. Mods, if necessary, please move or merge as you see fit. Thanks.

I wanted to put WinXP on my A110 (1GB RAM with Linpus) as I need to use some Win apps and more importantly, connect to the net via Bluetooth mobile phone, 3G connection. I could connect like this in Ubuntu but I read that with Ubuntu, the LAN doesn't work so I chose WinXP instead even though I was warned it would be extremely slow!

Anyway, first try, I don't have a USB CD drive so I did some googling and found a website which provides some simple steps to installing from a flash disk. Initial try, I reformatted the disk in the NTFS format as I was following the directions for the Asus EEEpc and had not read the forums about FAT32 on the A110. The installation took about 2 hours to finish and the whole system was extremely SLOW! So slow I really couldn't do anything productive at all. here is the guide I used:
http://www.eeeguides.com/2007/11/instal ... thumb.html

So, I reinstalled WinXP and reformatted the disk in the FAT32 format. This time it took only about 1 hour, maybe 50 minutes? Much faster. Boot up speed is quite fast but I often have to wait about a half minute before I could click on anything on the desktop. This is fine with me. With the SSD now in the FAT32 format, everything is much smoother and faster. I mean it is much faster than I had expected with a few seconds lag between opening successive windows or tasks (as opposed to an eternity when on the NTSF format).

I have D2D turned off in the BIOS and pagefile off. I have not turned off prefetch and probably won't as I find the speed to be good enough as it is and allows me to do what I need to do on this thing. I use it for mostly surfing, uploading photos, simple photo and video editing, blogging, chatting and some document work such as in MS Excel and Word. I bought it to take on holiday and on the road and I'm glad it can handle some photo editing well and even some basic video editing for I will most surely be taking lots of photos and videos while on holiday.

Software that I have installed are: Kaspersky Internet Security, all of Acer's drivers except the touchpad and Webcamera software (WinXP recognizes it without Acer's drivers), Office, ACDSEE, Opera and Flock web browsers, Google Earth (got a warning about screen resolution upon initial start up but it seems to work perfectly anyway), Orbit downloader, Photoshop CS2 (this took the longest time to install about 30-40 minutes), VideoSpin video editor and Macrium Reflect (free version), Yahoo Messenger and a disk imaging software.

Installing software like Adobe and VideoSpin is slow and tedious but is expected because of the slow SSD but once everything's done, you should be fine. After everything was installed (about 4GB of free space left), I imaged the whole thing and saved the image file to a removeable drive.

Other than the slow SSD, my only other gripe is the touchpad which appears to be coated with the same paint and color as the wrist rest instead of the normal surface on most touchpads. This makes it difficult to track as it isn't as smooth as it should be.

Overall, I am pleased with it and am able to do what I need to without too much lag. This is NOT my primary laptop as I have another dual core one but for taking on the road, it is perfect for me. WinXP works much better than I expected just remember to format the SSD in FAT32 format because with NTFS, it was practically unuseable for me!

 

I completely agree.
I just finished this process tonight, and I am completely happy with the results.

The installation of programs and updates takes a while, but the performance under general usage is more than adequate.

-J

 

mine is running smooth as well although i did get another 8gb sdhc card and then transferred all my documents there to minimize the writing on the ssd. i tried to make the fbwh.sys hack that was being discussed in the other section but it won't work for me. nevertheless, my a1 is performing as expected.

 

It really isn't that bad once it's been formatted to FAT32. I was even able to create two videos on this thing.

Here are the two video files which gives an idea of how the A110 with WinXP responds and performs while editing and creating video files and while editing photos in Picasa.

Editing and Creating a video file using VideoSpin:
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/1/21/ ... diting.mp4

Editing photos in Picasa:
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/1/21/ ... a_edit.mp4

I didn't add any sound but left all the clicks in to give an idea of how the response time between closing apps and between clicks. I started the VideoSpin app right after exiting Picasa so you can actually see the lag when I clicked on the Start button/All Programs menu. In the VideoSpin video, what I was doing was importing a 44MB AVI file. VS then processes it into smaller chunks called scenes. I then split up the video file randomly and then moved about the split parts and then reencode a new video file in the mp4 format.

While encoding the mp4 file, I was able to start Internet Explorer and go to google as well as continue chatting on YM.

Overall, I am happy with its performance given what it is. To be able to put WinXP on a cheap netbook like this AND do some light video editing for uploading and sharing with family and friends while on holiday is a great bonus! Don't expect smooth performance of course, like I said, one must always keep in mind what these things are, they're basically internet tools but they have enough juice for some extra tasks too!

My next test will be to install some games and see if I can while away time waiting at airports by playing Dota or some other simple non demanding game.

Hope this has been useful for those who are interested in installing WinXp on your A110s! I bought the 8GB SSD model as I wanted the durability of the SSD, you know, to be able to just chuck it into your bag and go and not worry about the hard disk drive too much.

 

Hi pdox.
That's a really interesting article and description of using your Acer One. I wonder if you can help me? I want to use mine to record short training sessions at the keyboard using the in built web cam and mic. I wonder if you have tried this with your XP enabled machine? I have a Linpus version in which the OS will not recognise the mic. It captures video from the web cam, but ignores the audio, which is pretty useless to me. I talked to Acer about it - their software people say that there are no plans to address this known problem and they just couldn't (or wouldn't) say whether it would work in an XP environment. Hence my question to you. I'd be happy enough to convert it to XP if I can get some confirmation that XP will capture video and audio simultaneously.

 

The 50-60 min install time jives with what I got. Boot times are in the vicinity of 70-80 seconds.

I agree that XP is useable on the 8GB SSD. It's just that Linpus is so much faster.