Steps to a happy XP experience

As has been posted earlier in this thread. I take it you have not read the previous 20 pages :? , use the method shown at
http://www.eeeguides.com/2007/11/instal ... thumb.html and follow peoples comments in those 20 pages in altering the AA1 bios, format style and keeping the usb stick bootable until the start menu appears

 

Yes, I had read all 20 pages and have used all the relevant guides mentioned. Unfortunately, I and other contributors are still having problems and I was hoping that z6joker9 could throw some new light on the process. It's strange that some people are having problems and some are not - it's obviously not straight-forward, hence the 20+ pages on this topic.

QUOTE : "As has been posted earlier in this thread. I take it you have not read the previous 20 pages :? , use the method shown at http://www.eeeguides.com/2007/11/instal ... thumb.html and follow peoples comments in those 20 pages in altering the AA1 bios, format style and keeping the usb stick bootable until the start menu appears"

 

For me this one works great:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=4900

 

What are the problems?

 

Here's what I did that worked very well:

1. Do a search for a program called 'bootsect'. It's a very small, command-line program.

2. Do a quick format of your flash drive, using fat or fat32.

3. Open up a command prompt and go to the directory you saved bootsect into. Run this command:

bootsect /nt60 g:

In the above example, 'g:' is the drive letter assigned to your usb drive.

4. Now, this is where it gets a little more complicated: you'll need an XPLite or Tiny Vista CD, or at least an image of one mounted via a program like Daemon Tools. Simply copy the entire contents of the CD to your now-prepared USB drive. I found that it sometimes doesn't copy desktop.ini from the source CD, so you may need to go back and copy it manually.

Anyway, the above steps allowed for a fairly quick and painless install of Tiny Vista on my Aspire One. Also, after you do teh above, you can still put files on your USB stick if desired, (just don't erase any of the files put on in the above steps, and don't rename any of the files/folders).

 

Would this method work if there is no 'Winnt.exe on the original CD (Which can be booted no problems from CD) but tends to not work via usb method.

Would the Bootsect program boot the system in the same way as it would via booting from cd after desktop/laptop power off?

 

The problem is getting XP onto the One.
I've got XP Pro on an installation disk and I used nlite to reduce it's size, rememberingto retain 'Manual Install and upgrade'.
This gave me an ISO file 'WinLite' which I copied onto a USB stick, having previously formatted the drive with the FAT system using HP USB Disk Storage Tool and having copied over boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.
I then inserted the USB stick into the One and changed the boot order to 'USB HDD - USB Flash Memory'.
Starting up with this configuration, the USB stick seems to be accessed (as indicated by its flashing LED) but the One stills boots up with Linux.
Any help would be appreciated <grin>.

 

Think that may be your problem - a quick google shows comments like "You can use the BartPE utility and the PeToUsb.exe program to make a USB bootable memory stick that can run many Windows programs and utilities. ..." A bit more complex that copying three files. Certainly the eee install method uses utilities to compile a bootable USB stick. A scan of messages here also show that problems can be traced to the USB stick itself, and using a different one resolved the issue. Lots more comments on USB boots at http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2 ... -driv.html

 

Any file ending in '.ISO' is a CD-ROM image. You need to either use a cd-burning program to put it to a disc, or use a program like daemon tools or alcohol 120% to mount the image to a virtual drive, then you can access the actual files you need. Think of the .ISO as a "container" that holds the files until you "open the container" by burning it to disc or mounting it.

Either way, you need to copy *those* files to the usb drive.

 

The bootsect program puts the necessary boot sectors onto your USB device so it is recognized as bootable. Frankly, I did not inspect the contents of the Tiny Vista CD I burned, other than to check that the same number of files were on the usb as the original cd.

I should also note that I have not, as of yet, tested w/ XPLite, only Tiny Vista.

 

I have made a video on installing via USB (check my posts)

anyway, I have found that n-liting my SP3 install to my taste, making a 2GB FAT16 Partition for XP (and basic apps) and a 5GB Partition for data has caused a significant increase in speed than with just one FAT32 drive

Paging is disabled (though it was snappy with it on), System Restore Removed, D2D off.

Make sure that you format as fat and if the c: partition is under 2GB it will format as FAT and not FAT32. Works for me with 512mb RAM. Won't be upgrading this puppy

 

Just thought i'd post with my expereinces of XP.

Bought the machine last night, 512mb with Linux from PC World, then this morning

turned of D2D
installed tinyxp V9 with option 2 - no drivers.
did the install then installed all the newest drivers from ACER
installed office 2003.
no page file
no caching etc

this thing is great, everything just works.

have benchmarked this against my Tosh Satellite Pro with 2Gb ram
this boots quicker, this loads WORD quicker and this comes out of standby quicker.

i bought more RAM but really don't see the need to open the machine.

originally bought this for the wife but I want want now and so does everyone in the Tech department at work.

now to get a case and some 16Gb SDHC cards

 

Very good video which is a great help to me but I can't get past the hal.dll problem. When I reboot as you suggest, it just goes back to the same selections - then option 2 brings up the "missing hal.dll" error.
Any ideas?
Brian

 

well i tried a neat program that prepares USB for windows installation automatically and it's just great because i was well daunted by the tutorials floating round this forum. The program is called winsetupfromusb, I was recommended to use DPs Base to make sure the right hard disk drivers were included. I've done a test run on one of the secondary hard disks on my desktop and it's ok. So I'll give it a shot on my Linux AA1 tomorrow.

One question first. Fat 32 is being strongly recommended for SSD to help windows work faster. Everyone always seems to refer to the SSD, Does is make any difference whether fat 32 or ntfs is used for the 120 GB HDD? A nice clear answer would be fantastic!

Thanks,
Stoche

 

Feel free to use NTFS on the regular hdd; the fat32 thing is for the SSD, which seems to take much longer to be written to than it should...

 

Hi, I recieved my One yesterday (8gb Linpus version) and decided to give XP a chance on it. I installed XP Home SP1 and though I was expecting a snail's performance, I was happily surprised to see XP running flawlessly. No random boot delay, no extended periods of inacivity, just a great responsive system. Im using completely unmodded windows, even with page filing and system restore on, Ive had no probs. World of Warcraft runs nicely!

So basically I was wondering if anyone else noticed better performace with SP1 rather than Sp2 or Sp3?

From a happy One-User,
Dafox

 

Hi,

And thank you for the tips. I have created a light version of my XP CD with completely unattended install, SP3, updates and patches and IE7 integrated for my AA1. I am testing it on a virtual machine before I install it on the AA1. I am a bit concerned about the idea of dismantling my laptop to add a memory module: I believe that XP was created ages ago, at a time when a top spec PC had a max. of 512mb of RAM. If XP was doing fine 8 years ago on 512mb of RAM, why not now as long as I make sure I have disabled everything that might slow down the SSD (I don't intend to play games, process video or do a lot of multitasking with my AA1...!)

Please give your comments and opinions,

cheers.

 

512 MB RAM will do fine with XP. Enough for surfing, office and watching videos.

 

Do you get any random mini freezes? regardless of what I do I get this :evil:

 

For those who are still experiencing random "mini" freezes, I'd like to propose a possible cause. First of all, download SysInternals' FileMon (free). It shows what files are being accessed, and which accesses are likely the cause of the mini freezes. If you're worth your salt, then of course you're using Firefox as opposed to IE. Alas, this may be your problem. SSDs dislike writes to disk, but in my experience, they detest lots of small writes. Firefox every few minutes saves your browser's state down to disk, that way it can restore all your tabs, etc. in case of a browser crash or whatever. Especially if you have a lot of tabs open, as I always do, this causes lots of little writes to the disk every few minutes, causing a mini-freeze, even when you've done all the suggestions above. If you can handle it, disabling Firefox's ability to keep cache, browser history, and especially disabling saving your session state reduces the amount of writes down to near zero, which may eliminate the mini freezes you're still seeing.

For the record, I’ve disabled D2D, installed non-Acer chipset and VGA drivers (the ones for the MSI Wind, actually), installed on FAT32, and disabled paging.

I noticed this problem before, when using portableapps on my USB thumb drive, which has the same limitations of the SSD. Unfortunately, my solution was to reformat the thumb drive to NTFS. That worked great, and Firefox became real speedy even with all the history, session state, etc. stuff turned on. Unfortunately, that's the polar opposite solution to fixing general Windows usage with the AA1.

Any word from anyone on how to make the AA1 perform better with NTFS? I noticed on another board that someone thought that it wasn't really NTFS that was at fault, it was the small block sizes, and that you should increase the block sizes to 32k or 64k and that would fix the problem. I checked my FAT32 partition, and chkdsk reports 4k block sizes for FAT32, so I don't think that's it. But the same poster also suggested setting NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate in the registry, which, without being disabled, creates lots of writes by constantly updating files' last access time. Anyone tried that?