Steps to a happy XP experience

Been lurking here for a month or so and learned a lot....... thanks all........BUT...........

I have the AOA with 16 Gb SSD and have loaded XP and it is working Okay.

The XP suspend function, presumeably, keeps battery on the RAM so it can come alive when the user wants it.

The SSD does not need battery to keep it's memory, does it?

That suggests that one might modify the suspend function to shut off battery to the RAM, doesn't it?

That would be the equivalent of Hibernate without all the activity and delay.

Anybody out there that knows more than I care to comment?

 

What a monster of a thread to read! [must admit to having skipped huge chunks]

Have a couple of questions ...

If using EWF, would it make any difference if the HDD was formatted as NTFS, or FAT32?

Also, is it possible to have a smaller one page thread with some commonly agreed ways of speeding up the machines running SSD's, cause reading this is a pig of a job?


Thanks,

Stephen

 

How did you originally get XP on - I am trying and having problems ??

Is there a basic XP version to use (I have a full version with Key) and an easy application to put it on the USB stick which doesn't cause a Blue screen ?

Thanks.

:shock:

 

This has been discussed numerous times before... You can use any flavor of XP you want. But the versions with the least problems are XP SP3(home or pro). The easiest way is to just use an external USB CD/DVD drive. Get one, theyre cheap. If not, go borrow one. The steps to put the XP setup on a USB stick is burried within the pages on this thread. You can do a search, cheers.

 

or get from somewhere ron's tinyxp for aa1, that works perfect (atleast for me)

 

after 2 months starts use this AAO, is latest the best i've adjust support all acer driver and read all the function of xp from microsoft before disable or adjust it...

I've Disable D2D in Bios
already have 1 GB of RAM
Windows XP Proffesional Service Pack 2 DELL VERSION
ALL Acer Chipset, Card Reader, Audio Driver, VGA Driver, Lan Driver
Acer Webcam Driver, Wifi Driver...
Thats all for driver and all running smoothly without any bug.
Install XP, formatting the SSD 8GB to FAT32

Turn Off The XP Security Center
Press the Windows and R keys > in the resulting window type services.msc > in the resulting window scroll down to Security Center and double-click on it > In the "Startup type:" box use the arrow to scroll down to choose "Disabled" click Apply and reboot, or, click Apply and click the button that says Stop.

Disable Error Reporting
This “feature” calls home to Microsoft and sends info about system errors. Click on the Error Reporting button on the bottom of the window > check the box that says Disable Error Reporting > uncheck the box that says But notify me when critical errors occur. click OK to close the window. Close out of these windows by choosing Apply/OK but leave the System Properties window open.

Turn Off System Restore
Click on the System Restore tab and place a check mark in the Turn off System Restore on all drives box. Click Apply. ***If you do not use a backup program, DO NOT use this tweak!!! System Restore while using resources is a useful feature.

Remove Old Restore Points
If you keep System Restore active: To remove old system restore points go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup > select the drive XP is installed on and click OK > click the More Options tab > in the System Restore section, click the Clean up… button and Yes in the resulting screen.

Turn Off Remote Assistance
Click on the Remote tab. Uncheck both check boxes and click Apply and then OK .

Turn Off Automatic Updates (or make a set schedule)
Click on the Automatic Updates tab…
Now, before you do anything here you need to consider a few things. Windows Update is an essential step in protecting your machine. Geeks know that MS used to release their updates on Wednesday. This allowed you to schedule Windows Update for late Wed. night or early Thur. morning. Since MS, in its infinite wisdom, decided to change their weekly updates to a monthly semi-schedule, we can’t do that anymore. If you are the type of person who keeps track of techie news, you’ll know the minute updates are released. With this in mind, we’ll disable Automatic Updating…
Click on the Automatic Updates tab > uncheck the box next to “Keep my computer up to date…”
A better option may be to schedule it to check for updates once a week:
Click on the Automatic Updates tab > check the box next to Automatic > pick a day and time. I would recommend sometime Wednesday morning.

Open each folder in a separate part of memory (recommended for 512MB memory and higher) Levels 2 , 3 , 4 (w/512MB memory or more)
Open My Computer ( press the Windows & E keys) > go to Tools > Folder Options > View and check the box in "Launch folder windows in a separate process". Reboot now.
***This IS NOT a performance tweak it is a stability tweak. Quote from Microsoft: “When you open each folder window in a separate part of memory, the stability of Windows can be increased. However, this process uses more memory, and may cause your computer to run more slowly.”

Turn Off System Sounds Levels 2 , 3 , 4
What this does is disable the Sound Scheme. The sound scheme contains things like the sound you hear when you click on something.
Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices. Click on the Sounds tab. First save your current scheme, click on the Save As... button, enter a name, I used "1", and click OK. Next, in the upper most box, click on the arrow on the right side and choose No Sounds and click Apply at the bottom, right. While you are here, click back on the Volume tab. You can enable/disable the system tray volume icon here by checking/unchecking the box Place volume icon in taskbar. When you are finished, click OK to exit.

The Page File
There is a lot of bad advice and misunderstanding on the web of how virtual memory (and thus the page file) works in XP. For those interested in further reading check out Understanding Virtual Memory , Virtual Memory in Windows XP, and How to configure paging files for optimization and recovery in Windows XP. The following recommendations are based on research, information gathered around the web, and personal experience dealing in a variety of configurations.

1. The average user is best served by LEAVING THE PAGE FILE ALONE. XP does an excellent job of managing the page file settings for most people.

2. For 99.999% of the configurations on the planet you need a page file. XP itself wants one and a number of programs out there do too. (Please don’t email me to argue this, I won’t respond. Find a forum to argue about it.)

3. The recommendations below are not designed to give you the highest scores on a synthetic benchmark but to give you the best overall performance for your system (including stability). The size of hard drives today are huge and making the page file a little larger than it "needs" to be hurts nothing and you’re covered if you’re ever doing something that requires more.

-Speed up start menu

Start -> Run -> regedit

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop and then right click on ""MenuShowDelay" and click on "Modify", the figure you have here is in milliseconds. The standard is 400, I have mine set to 50, 0 is instant.
Take your pick

Set your L2 cache

It was on 0 kb after my windows installation.

1. Go to run -> type Regedit

2. Go to _> hkey_local_machine\system\currentcontrolset\contro l\session manager\memory management.

3. At 'secondleveldatacache' set it to
'200' for a Level2 Cache of 512 Kb

this what im happy now enjoyed... :lol:

 

Got the 110-1698: 16GB SSD, 1GB Ram model

- Ron's AA1 Ghost Image
- L2 Cache Registry Fix
- Install EWF
- Install VLC
- Add Sandisk Ultra II for critical writes (My Documents, development code)

Still can't get over how fast this little thing is. Never thought I'd be able to do development work on it but it works without a hitch. I typically run Live Messenger, Firefox, Eclipse, MySQL Server, GWT Hosted Web Server & GWT Hosted Browser (IE7) all simultaneously with no problems. Incredible.

 

Check a torrent site for Ron's TinyXP image. It will save you loads of time installing drivers, tweaking, etc. It's got very easy instructions on booting from USB and imaging the drive. You can google how to change the product key to use your own.

 

I cannot seem to get the quick launch toolbar to work on the start menu, just a "toolbar cannot be created" error message,

any ideas?

 

Hi guys, thanks to this site I have installed ron's tinyxp onto my new Acer Aspire.... However before it is perfect I would like to try and get Windows Updates working so I can install other things.... Anyone been able to solve this issue yet with it? It keeps giving the failed to install WGA message.... thanks.....

 

No help to you of course but I can not get auto updates working either I think because the xp version is not validated. Also I am unable to change the keyboard layout to United Kingdom as no other languages are included other than United States.

 

Hi there, you can change to UK keyboard by following Ron's method from his website:

I made it easy for you all to install UK keyboard layout. I downloaded the neede DLL and made a REG file:

Steps:
1) download: http://www.megaupload.com/nl/?d=FIBI5JBQ
2) put “KBDUK.DLL” in C:\windows\system32\
3) double click UKLayout.reg -> OK (this put keyboard in registry)
4) now install/configure it using the “regional and language options.

Voila!

Just need to see if I can install Windows Media Player 11 and possibly IE8 onto it now....

 

twe


You dont know how much hassle Ive been through to get this keyboard setup for UK, Ive trawled the web for an eon

Thanks for the link now it is sorted and it only took 2 minutes! Ive got Opera and Firefox along with Google Chrome and they are all running fine, Ive installed Office 2007 too! everything is running very nicely apart from Windows update not being able to connect to the Microsoft site for some reason. Very nice setup now.

 

no worries djtilko, that was annoying me as well....

I installed windows media player 11 last night by following the instructions below, downloading it from softpedia or similar:

Google ‘Download Media Player 11' and download it.

Download Winrar
http://www.rarlab.com/rar/wrar380.exe
- during the install make sure you tick the ‘Intergrate Winrar into shell’ box.

Extract the Windows Media Player 11 Installation file ‘wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu.exe’ to a folder of your choice. You can do this easily by right clicking on the file and click ‘Extract To …’

Go to the folder you just extracted everything to
Run ‘wmfdist11.exe’ Do Not Restart if it asks.
Run ‘wmp11.exe’ and restart the computer.

Now goto
C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player
Look for the file named ‘LegitLibM.dll’
Right click and re-name it to ‘LegitLib.dll’.

Open Windows Media Player 11 and click the ‘Validate’ button.
Click the ‘Finish’ button.
Click the ‘Accept’ button
Chose the install type etc etc

This was mainly due to my sony mp3 player requiring it for syncing, etc....

 

Something strange is going on with my xp setups!! I am starting to think I have a virus on the systems but it is affecting all my xp setups in the house not just the netbook, the problem being that I can not connect to Microsoft web sites either for updates sor whatever.

I can however connect through my dual boot linux setup that connects to microsoft.com no problem so it looks like a virus perhaps has spread through all my xp setups? I have tried adjusting the mtu settings below 1500 with no effect this is a common thing apparently after googling for an answer there seems to be lots of people that cant connect to microsoft.com

How about you ? is your machine still able to reach microsoft.com?

sidux is fortunately running as dual boot with as I said no problems, which brings me to believe its a virus

 

Has anybody had any luck removing the Webcam shortcut from Ron's Xp?
Also i've tried to install Xp games but its asking for the cd any way round this?
I'm after simple games like tetris pac man solitaire etc

 

Well Ive sorted the virus out I downloaded Trojan Remover and sure enough it said there was some dodgy file on there preventing Internet Explorer doing its thing so it removed it and I can access Microsoft sites again. However the Validation would not accept so still not able to download Widows Updates :cry:

 

Post 153 on Ron's very fine blog

To remove the webcam icon on desktop do the following:

1) Right click on “My Computer” choose “Registry Editor”

2) Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\

3) Below NameSpace you see “Delegated Folders” click on this and you will see one entry.

4) Right click on “Delegated Folders” choose “Delete” -> say ok on the windows which ask if you want delete folder and subkey.

5) Right click on desktop and choose “refresh”

6) Voila Icon is gone.

 

(removed post as outdated, have posted info in another thread)

Cheers,

Olly

 

niceeee, thanks. im still waiting for this releases

http://aceraspireonexp.blogspot.com/