Steps to a happy XP experience

Disabling D2D caused Suspend to stop working for me. Enabling it again fixed the problem. Didn't really notice a performance increase disabling it...

 

Hi
I've Got a problem here,
I installed the drivers, but I installed the card-reader-driver last, and the computer wouldn't read SD cards with more storage than 2gb :S
then i saw in the forum that the card-reader-driver should be installed first... so i installed xp all over again and installed this driver first...
but still it won't read cards with higher storage than 2 gb (not in any of the two ports at left and right side)
the computer doesn't even react when i put the card into the reader :S:S
got some tip?

 

Thanks everyone for your help and experience and for posting it to help the rest of us out on getting our AA1's going with windows.

In the process of setting up my AA1 I had the typical issues that everyone else had. no battery Icon, wouldn't go into standby mode when i shut the laptop screen, had to manually push the button to turn off the computer after shutdown, and freakin ultra slow boot times. I found the solution to all these problems with one little change to my nlite windows xp install.

to let you know what I did I followed the nlite guide provided by http://www.i64x.com/eeexp.php. This nlite was for an eeepc but everything is pretty much perfect for the AA1. The changes that I made to this nlite were just that I made sure that when removing hardware support that I left multi-processor support available. and then later when specifying my CD key and admin name, I told it under computer type that it was a multi core acpi computer type.

The reason for doing this is that apparently the atom processor although not a multicore processeor does some type of hyper threading quit nicely and thus you are able to pull out its full potential when selecting these options.

This change takes care of all of the above problems speeding it up and allowing the computer to be recognized as a laptop thus allowing battery meter and proper laptop shutdown procedures.

The rest of the install i just followed the following post (thanks Verbl Kint)

The only changes from this are that I have not installed any additional ram thus I only have the 512 so far and my boot time is still between 10 and 15 seconds.

I hope this helps someone after all the tweaks my minute and a half boot time was pissing me off way too much and I was so happy to find this solution that I couldn't let it rot in my head alone

 

Thats an odd one! Did you use the Card Reader drivers from the Acer support site? Have you tried the card in anther machine/does it work as expected?

What service pack are you using with XP? I seem to recall XP didn't originally support SDHC cards (what with it coming out before they existed I guess ) Obviously vista does... maybe SDHC support was added in a service pack...

 

well... I actually had it all up and go some days ago... then, when i re-installed xp (with the same drivers) the card reader didn't work like earlier,
the cards works just fine in other computers.. I've got sp2
and I'm using the drivers from msi
the card reader driver from acer won't finish the installation, in the middle of the installation I'm just getting a message "Shif5.tmp got a problem and have to be closed..."
but for each time I'm trying to install it the number in the tmp file goes one step higher in value like: Shif5.tmp Shif6.tmp Shif7.tmp

 

Just found out what was wrong,
The card reader driver from acer won't be installed successfully if you install it from an external drive (usb-stick in my case)
i had to copy it over to the internal hard drive
so.. now it works just fine
but the driver from msi didn't work out for me..

 

Glad you got it sorted, and for letting us know how you fixed it

Enjoy!

 

So base on the 120GB model Aspire One, the speed and everything is it perfom well already? I do not need to do any changes or setup?

Do anyone use this model? Do the speed also giving problem?

 

im a total noob ..how do you : ?

1. disable write-caching for the SSD
2.Disable Prefetch
3.Disable indexing
4.Disable System Restore

tnx

 

I'm unsure wether this is the right topic to ask this in, but still...

When I put the One in sleep-mode (Fn+F4, or any other standby initiater) the power button blinks. It wakes up at any button-press..

I don't want this! It keeps blinking, so it goes out of my battery when travelling, and i only want it to wake up when i press the power button again....

 

The actual blinking of the LED will use 'bugger-all-to-nothing' in terms of power, however it does indicate that the battery is still supplying the computer with power (mainly the RAM, to maintain its state).

What you're after is hibernate. you need to go to Power Management and enable hibernation - it's the last tab in the Power Management window accessible through Control Panel.

 

Oh thanks! =D

 

after following all the steps found in this thread to a happy XP experience, I was never satisfied with the performance of my 8GB SSD A1 running Windows XP SP3. Therefore, sold my 8GB A1 and got the 120GB version instead.

Now everyting is REALLY running as it should:
-no more mini-freezes
-40sec boot time from pressing the Power button to the Windows desktop
-large amount of disk space, no need for an nLited XP
-4+ hours battery life from the bundled 6-cell battery

altough i do have a few rants with the HDD version:
-the extended battery barely fits in the leather pouch. it DOES fit (a very tight fit), but the battery still sticks out like a sore thumb
-no recovery CD for the OS. was hoping to try an nLited XP if i can coax more performance improvement from a minimal XP install. I'm still having second thoughts about removing the recovery partition and play around with other OS's, was also thinking about dual-booting this A1 to run XP and Linpus. I wouldn't be having this problem if there was a separate recovery DVD for the bundled XP OS.
-still have to access the RAM through the keyboard. Was hoping acer would change the internal structure of the HDD version to allow less intrusive method of upgrading the RAM

overall, i'm a lot more happy with the HDD version. but for those who were successful in tweaking your 8GB SDD A1's for WinXP, kudos to you guys!

If there are others out there who already have the 120GB version, please share your comments and experiences. I'm sure a lot of people are also curious about the HDD version.

 

@wpilgrim
Share your nLite config file, please?

 

Thank goodness for Press Releases though.

I have a 512mb/8gb Linpus Blue now and really like it. I carry it in the saddle bag of my Honda Goldwing. The solid state drive is what attracted it to me to the AA1 as motorcycles bounce around pretty good and no moving platter disk drive is a bonus to me. I just keep this AA1 plugged into the accessory plug in the Goldwings trunk and always have a handy fully charrged laptop with me.

But...I was just, within an hour, getting ready to head into Houston and pick up a 1gb/120gb XP for home and office use.

I just happen to check the Forum for any new posts and found this one with the press release and the notification of the new AA1's with bigger drives and 6 cell batteries.

I will just be a little patient and sit tight for a week or two or three and get the newest one at $399.

My thanks to the original poster, "wastedgnome", for the link !!!!

 

Hi All... I followed these instructions and then did some extras ... here are the steps:

Created a USB XP install thumb drive by using the following address: http://www.eeeguides.com/2007/11/instal ... thumb.html

Then began by following the instructions below:

I plugged in a new 8gig SD card into the storage expansion slot. This is where I have directed all files to be installed.

I installed Zone Alarm.

At this point, everything was working fine. I proceeded to install version 3 of Firefox Portable http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

I also recommend getting older version(s) of appz (oldversions.com) as they run faster on this machine. For example, i downloaded winamp v2.5, messenger 2.2, etc.

I also went ahead and installed office 2007... this was a pain because i continued to get an error about locked files that could not be altered. It happened that my stripped down version of XP was missing a file that needed to go into a bin folder. If you have this probelm, simply type the error message into Google and you'll get a link to the missing file from one of the websites provided (sorry I don't have the exact site).

I also installed Key Tweak to fix my (silly) bilingual keyboard.

Installed PowerIso. Also installed VLC media player to watch divx movies, etc.

Installed Paint.Net ... good photo editor (requires Microsoft .NET).

All-in-all, given other minor delays, this was a 8 hr project.

Would I recommend installing XP... yes. But if you can live with Linux, keep it.

Highly recommend you get a laptop mouse. I got a nice logitech one... corded!!!

 

I'm glad there are people here who successfully installed/ran xp on the SSD AA1 to their satisfaction. Wish it was the same for me, but it wasn't.

Yes, I too had the AA1 with 8 gb SSD (samsung model) to replace my existing eee pc, but I wasn't satisfied with XP performance neither.
And yes I spent several hours following recommendations here.
Upgraded ram to 1 gig, I had a 512 mb stick laying around. Also included experimenting with Tiny XP 09 (had sp3 in it already), acer xp drivers from Europe site, using fat 32, disabled system restore, swap, D2D, prefetch and even cache for SSD. Also flashed bios to 3114. While XP performance was improved, there was still noticeable lags when downloading or even loading up a small program to run. I didn't like waiting. Clearly, it was because the 8 gb SSD was too dam slow for write speed.
Even my EEE pc 701 4g's 4 gig SSD (2 gb RAM) kicked it's A$$ for performance. And that's a 4 gb NTFS partition on it too with some minor XP tweaks. I never experienced anywhere near the lags with my eee pc compared to this.
So, I returned the AA1 back to Staples after reloading the linux, taking out the ram.
Recently, I picked up a silver AA1 with 3 cell battery, 1 gb ram and 120 gb hd preloaded with XP.
I love it!!! Plus with a legit XP. I can live with the 3 cell battery.
No more bad lags. Also just installed Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 within windows. Working great.
I know it bites that we can't create recovery discs for this AA1, but I have a work around for that. It's called Norton Ghost or Acronis.

I know we all have complaints/issues with the AA1, but it comes down to 1 thing. You get what you pay for when you want to go cheap!! Acer obviously took shortcuts to keep the price down. All I know is, the AA1 with HD works for my needs perfectly. Now hopefully, it won't crap out on me shortly after warranty ends.

 

Thanks everyone for the excellent advice in this thread. I'm blown away at how well TinyXP runs on this A110/8Gb/1.5Gb.

It was extremely frustrating trying to install it without an external CD drive, and after spending way too many hours with BartPE, Flashboot, and just about every other utility only to run into a blocker at every turn, I finally sucked it up and bought the drive on the premise that I'll need it again to install software on this machine and the A150 that's somewhen in the future when the new colors come out.

That said, thanks again, and especially on the advice of disabling D2D and formatting with FAT32. I wasn't paying attention the first time and formatted NTFS and the difference is night and day between the two! The first time around I was wondering if I'd made a mistake in switching from Linpus. I no longer think that. This little thing rocks.

 

perhaps we'd be able to improve performance by somehow caching SSD writes to an SD card or RAM. it might be a silly idea, or it might have already been done - but does anybody know anything about it?

 

My config is the exact same as the one in http://www.i64x.com/eeexp.php. he goes through the whole process of nliting your windows copy. the only changes that I made were in the tab that allows you to select hardware support to keep or remove, rather than removing multi-core processor support like i64 does, leave it available. Your atom processor takes full advantage of this function.

Then later when entering in more information like your admin user name, CD ket etc, there is a box that allows you to select the type of computer you will be installing this copy of windows on. I selected mulit-core acpi computer instead of the default tab like i64 suggests.

From power on to workable windows screen it takes me no more than 20 seconds.

hope this helps