Steps to a happy XP experience

You know you can get Acer to give you an XP recovery disc if you pay for it. I haven't done it but I saw the option on their website:

the link is on the right side of this page:
http://www.acerpanam.com/flex/acer/bin/acer.html#

direct page where you enter your serial number:
https://secure3.tx.acer.com/RCD/Main.aspx

 

I'm confused.... wouldn't the first step to a happy XP experience be to buy the model that comes with XP and a 120GB hard drive? I've had zero problems with it, it runs great. In fact, I'm very pleased that I didn't get the EEE PC or some other SSD-based netbook. I thought this would be a toy, pretty much used for email and web surfing while traveling... but it's so versitile, it does everything my 17" Dell 1505 does. Games, mp3 compression, recording LPs to MP3, word processing, emulators, even coding. (I'm a C++ and C# developer). This little netbook has far exceeded my expectations.

Charles.

 

Some of us prefer the Solid State Drives simply because they don't contain a fragile hard drive. I know my college bag gets knocked around a bit traveling to and fro on the bus, and having a SSD in my netbook means peace of mind! Runs great with 1.5gb of ram and EWF running anyway!

 

This post was created a few weeks before an XP model was even available...hopefully the XP models perform well out of the box (give or take a few wifi problems)....

 

Over the last ~20 years I think I have had 4 or 5 hard drive pack in causing no end of misery. Personally I think that SSD's are the way to go (has has been the case with the ipod) although admittedly 8GB is a bit on the small side. In a year or two when 32GB SDs are commonplace we will wonder why we need to bother with old fashioned hard disks. To my mind they will go the same way as vacuum tubes and CRTs (at least for portable applications).

 

What wifi problems? I've noticed every now and then my wifi cannot find my network, and I have to reboot to get it to see it again. It only happens rarely though, usually after coming back from hibernate. Never (so far) when coming back on from sleep.

Also... is it just me, or is the wifi switch on the front useless? There's no way to see if the wifi is actually on or off unless there's a signal in range - if you can see the network, it's on, if you can't it's off. Useless when I'm somewhere with no wifi service and I want to prolong battery life by disabling the internal wifi card.

Charles.

 

how can I trim the fat of the XP that comes with the AA1? I don't want to go the route to reinstall XP.

 

Just made the jump to Xp. Followed the steps posted previously except for installing SP3 using nlite.
Seems that everything is working fine now. I installed XP Home SP2 and added 1 GB RAM(1.5 GB total). All my programs work with no apparent difference in speed than my other laptop (Acer travelmate 2 GHz centrino dualcore, 1GB ram with 120 GB HDD). Really glad for this forum. Thanks.

I'm kinda hesitant to install SP3, afraid that my stable working system will be thrashed by installing it.
Does anyone know if installing SP3 would really boost the performance? (My AA1 boots up in less than a minute)

 

Can anyone point me in the right direction (searching hasn't helped for me, maybe I'm searching the wrong things) how to install XP with a USB pen drive?

I have an IDE caddy that I tried connecting a CD drive to, but no CDs will boot from it - I select the drive by pressing F12, it thinks for a second, then continues to load Kubuntu from the SSD. I guess it just doesn't like my caddy - it was designed for hard drives, rather than CD drives after all.

USB pen drives boot fine (stuck Kubuntu on), but can't get it to actually boot Windows installer. I've nlited XP SP3, would just like to boot from this ISO somehow!

Thanks

 

flux, google install xp via usb key It is possible.

 

I've tried a few different ways, but no luck so far - do you have a link to one that definitely works? (I'm using Vista x64 at the moment btw)

EDIT: I have it booting from USB now (http://weblogzz.blogspot.com/2008/01/in ... drive.html helped a lot - it was working DOS boot files I was struggling to find... the ones I was trying were useless!)

But when I go into the I386 folder at the DOS prompt, there is no winnt executable - does nLite change the file I need to execute to something else?

Yep - definitely seems to be nLite removing the winnt.exe file I need - is there a specific option to stop it from removing this, or do I have to use a bloated non-nLited version? EDIT again - it's the manual installation option in components, I removed it and shouldn't have done, installing now. I'm sure more problems will pop up somehow...

 

Guys I did the tinyxp thing, I'm a mac guy but i have to check my sites i design on windoze anyhow so xp it is.

My question is I installed tinyxp but forgot to format the partition to fat32 first. Will I see a performance boost if I format to fat32 and reinstall? I am on the 8GB SSD model.

cheers,
-Brian

 

Grrr, this thing's still not working for me - now I get the dreaded hal.dll error.... anyone had this? None of the solutions I've found so far work - many of them talk about editing boot.ini, which I obviously can't do as I'm not in Windows yet - this only happens after formatting the drive and copying the installation files, then rebooting.... if I boot from the SSD at this point, I get the hal.dll error, then I have 2 options on the USB - one to get to the DOS prompt, the other to do the formatting and copying bit again! Grrr!

Any tips? My SSD has only 1 partition on it, I deleted the rest as suggested in a tutorial.

 

Yay, all installed. Ended up playing with boot.ini both on the USB and on the SSD when installed, working nicely, much better than I was expecting.

My only problem I can see is the power meter - when running on batteries, it says it's running on AC power, so I don't know how much battery life is left... anyone know what's wrong here? batt.dll is present in windows/system32

 

I had the same problem with mine. Did you nlite a copy of windows? I did and had this problem because my nlited copy had basically made me set the computer up as a desktop PC rather than a laptop, thus telling the computer it only had ac power even when not plugged in. I had to go and make a new Nlite install and made sure that I changed a couple things to let it be recognized as a multicore laptop. You can read all about my full install procedure from my post on page 15 of this thread, but below is the basic jist of the solution to this particular problem. hope it helps!

 

Thanks for that, I'll give it a try. I must've been searching the wrong things for help, because that sounds exactly the same problems as me - the not turning off on shutdown is odd, but bearable...good to see you had it though, as it probably means I've done the same things as you.

I'd heard about the hyperthreading, so left multi-processor support available - but I didn't change computer type to multi core ACPI - I bet (hope) this is the problem, so I'll give that a go.



EDIT: arrgh hal.dll again! Last time, I just added
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="SSD" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

to the boot.ini on the USB, and it allowed me to somehow boot from the SSD without the hal.dll error - no such luck this time though, I get the error whether booting from the SSD either directly or from the USB drive... what can I do to get around this? Can I point to a specific file on the SSD that will trigger the rest of the installation? (I've done the copying files bit, now onto the installation stage)

 

Thinking of xping mine due to problems with a particular driver under linux. Looking at the instructions for nlite it seems that you can build service pack 3 and all the required drivers for the AA1 into the nlited xp install as oppossed to adding them later - wondered if anyone had tried it.

 

I've tried it, it works well, I'm just reinstalling it now, but stuck with the above hal.dll error when installing from a USB key, so not having much fun at the moment!

 

Wow! I just installed WinXP SP2 on my AA1 and the AA1 works much, much better than I expected. I was reluctant to move away from Linpus and the "15-second boot" (see my comment below on why it really takes longer than that for Linpus to be fully usable) but after following all the advise here I was able to successfully install a slipstreamed version of WinXP SP2 from my flash drive onto the AA1 in a few hours. All peripherals are working fine (webcam, WLAN + indicator light, etc.)

Making the flash drive bootable and installing the slipstreamed XP files worked on the first try, but I had to go through the Windows install on the AA1 twice--the first time, the first reboot of the install process (i.e. after the text portion completed and the menu was supposed to reappear letting me choose the GUI step) it seems the AA1 reverted to hard disk boot instead of flash drive, and gave the "missing ha1.dll" error discussed in the comments on http://www.eeeguides.com/2007/11/installing-windows-xp-from-usb-thumb.html. To overcome that, all I did was reboot, set the boot drive and hard disk priorities in the BIOS to give the USB flash drive first priority, and everything went fine.

After WinXP was installed along with the various AA1 drivers, I performed the tweaks mentioned by several folks (no pagefile, prefetch, etc.). Now this little guy is smokin'!! When you consider Linpus really takes more like 25-40 seconds to boot and fully connect to a wireless hub (which is how I typically use it), my WinXP install actually boots faster than the Linpus version did!

Thanks to everyone who's posted tweak, tips, and tricks on the WinXP install!

So, if you're thinking about the switch from Linpus to Windows, my advise is go ahead and do it. It will consume 2-5 hours of your time depending on how well you follow the instructions and how much tweaking and app installing you do. Remember to read all the posts in this thread before installing! It made a world of difference for me. And if you're going to slipstream, don't forget two important tips--be sure to select the multicore settings as described in a few of the posts, and leave the manual set up files in place.

Again, awesome job guys, especially techie who got this whole thread kicked off and wpilgrim for the great slipstream tips. Thanks from Music City!

 

HELLO EVERYONE. IM NOT REALLY A TECHIE GUY . COULD ANYONE GIVE ME A DETAILED STEP BY STEP PROCEDURE ON HOW TO REFORMAT MY 8GB SDD ON MY ACER ASPIRE ONE . PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ANYONE