Pondering buying an A110X, some questions before I do

I'm thinking of replacing my EeePC 701 with a netbook with a bigger screen and better battery life; at first I thought I'd get the successor EeePC 901, or even a 1000, but their prices have been a surprise, and not in a positive way. In contrast, Acer's offerings seem to have much better bang-per-buck, so if you don't mind, I'd like to ask some questions to decide whether a 110 is what I really want.

First of all: I'm a Linux user and do not want any trace of Windows on my Netbook; however, the linux-native A110L has inferior specs to the A110X, which comes with WinXP installed.

1) I assume there is no problem in wiping the drive and installing Linux from scratch on a 110X; is this correct?

2) Provided it is: what should I install - Linpus as comes on the 110L (which I'd modify to remove the Fisher Price "My First OS" interface) or one of the customized linux distros? Wikipedia recommends Ubuntu Netbook Remix or Linux4One - which is better? Also, I'm worried that they might be less optimized than official Linpus and thus might cause the netbook to be slower and/or suck more energy and last less on its battery; is this the case?

3) I've read comparative reviews that say the 110 is more responsive than its direct competitor EeePC 901. This would be an extremely good thing, since my existing 701 (which I understand is close in performance to the 901) is irritatingly laggy in many situations. Do you confirm this? And if this is true, how is it possible? It's my understanding they use very similar hardware, which shouldn't really differ much in performance.

4) Finally, a question on battery life. I understand that the many reviews saying Acer netbooks have inferior battery life refer to the standard, stock three-cell battery, when most competitors have six-cell ones; having some experience in the field of battery modding on netbooks, all it'd take me to improve this would be $20 worth of bare LiIon cells and some soldering, neither of which scare me; the result would be equivalent to an after-market six-cell battery. What sort of battery life can I expect with a six-cell battery? I'd like a figure for the everything-turned-to-eleven worst-case-scenario and one for just normal use, if at all possible.

And yes, I did briefly consider an A150, but the HDD is a deal-breaker - I want my netbook to be as shock-proof as possible, and that means SSD. I could replace the HD with a 2.5" SSD, but that would raise prices to the levels of 10" SSD-native netbooks, so it doesn't make economical sense.

Thanks

 

AFAIK:

1. Shouldn't be a problem. note that it has a hidden partition from which Windows is being installed. it would be easy to just let it stay there if you can handle the loss of around 5gb.

2. Check out 'Kuki linux'. It's an AAO-specific distro. I installed it (in addition to XP), and it seemed real nice.


gl.

 

No, this is unacceptable. One of the main features of the 110X over the 110L is that the flash drive is twice as big; I absolutely don't want to lose five of the additional eight gigs. Can the hidden partition be un-hidden and/or used for the installation of the Linux system and/or for normal data storage?

 

My bad. I didn't realize you were talking of the XP+SSD version.

I'm not sure if the windows installation works the same way there. I can't imagine how you are supposed to run XP on a 16gb drive which also holds the XP installation files.

It must be possible to remove it, but I've read it might not be trivial. Nevertheless, I'd advise you to boot your preferred Linux distro, and go from there. I see no reason for it to NOT see the partition.