Transform XP performance on 8Gb with MojoPac: ITS BRILLIANT!

I have an 8Gb (Linux) Aspire One with 512k RAM and found I really needed an XP machine. As you know, you can install XP on the basic One without any problems. The serious issues emerge after installation in the form of slow speed, drive space for programs and insufficient RAM. So before long, I was reading up all the mods, and thinking about opening up the One to install extra memory, different HDDs, &c &c. I really did not want to do this, as I would invalidate warrenty, risk damage to the machine while doing the mods, and could also potentially reduce the second-user value of the machine if I wanted to sell it on.

Having given long thought to the kind of software that might be used as an alternative, I scanned the web and amazingly I stumbled across a program that I thought might be the solution to my problems. And so it has turned out to be !!

It has totally transformed my One as an XP platform. It is also entirely free (in its basic form) and the only hardware you need is a 4Gb SD card in your left hand SD slot.

The program is MojoPac and it is available for free download here:
http://www.mojopac.com/
Its free only in its basic mode. If you want all of the features, you have to pay a subscription. But for present purposes, you will only need the free version.

The process is this:
Disable D2D in the Bios
Install XP on your HDD leaving as much space as possible, load all the drivers, and do all of the updates. Turn off System Restore and leave off any Windows components you don't absolutely need. Do not install any programs other than virus protection.

Download the MojoPac install program (preferably on a different machine, so you don't clutter your SSD drive). Use this program to install MojoPac on a 4Gb (or greater) SD card. Name the SD card as PROGRAMS and Insert it into the left slot on your Aspire One. Then, if you like, put a link to the MojoPac program on the card into your Windows startup file, so it loads automatically after you have started Windows. You can also start MojoPac by clicking on the program file on the PROGRAMS SD card.

Now run MojoPac. It switches you into MojoPac mode, provides a clean desktop, hides the dreadfully slow SSD drive, and magically shows your SD card as your C: drive. Whooppee! Now you are in business. Now you can install all your favourite programs onto the SD card and run them normally in MojoPac mode. You can also set your page files within MojoPac mode to use the SD card. Everything will run brilliantly fast, because when you put the pagefiles onto the SD card it work just as fast as extra RAM. You will have bags of room on the SD card for all of your programs !

To install your programs within MojoPac mode, you will need to use Windows add programs from the Control Panel. Just download the programs as files, then go into Control Panel and use the install programs feature. The programs will show up only under MojoPac mode and you can run them from your SD card.

The above procedure has totally transformed my Aspire 1. Working in MojoPac mode I can run as many windows programs as I want at a very acceptable speed with 4Gb (and potentially 16Gb depending on the size of the SD card) of extra drive space for programs, and the equivalent of a lot of extra RAM.

Advantages:
Massively increases drive space for programs
Can use any spare space on SD card for page files
Your basic Linux machine will run XP fast and efficiently with all the drive space for programs you are likely to need
Very fast call up of programs within MojoPac mode. Often just 4 secs each for Word, Outlook, etc.
No need to open up the One to mess around with extra RAM or drive modifications
No need to spend money on these modifications
No need to restrict yourself to a crippled installation of XP or to have to alter registry files &c.
No need for your OS to be on an external HDD or on a USB drive sticking out of the side (with the increased risk of accidents &c).
Using this program also lies within the spirit of the Aspire One designers - keeping it as an ingenious all-flash machine - with an SD slot for expansion on the left, and another on the right for saving and transporting data files.

Disadvantages:
It can take up to 4 minutes to load up windows and then MojoPac. This is with Norton Antivirus & Firewall installed, which as you know seriously slows down boot time. Even my desktop Quad Core takes 2-3 minutes to boot with Norton installed. (You can of course reduce the time by using a different antivirus program, by keeping Windows small, and by switching off as many tasks as possible while windows is loading).
Even within MojoPac mode, Windows routines and programs are sometimes called up from the SSD. Again, this can slow everything down. My solution is to try to avoid using Windows programs. So instead of using Internet Explorer and Microsoft Media player, I have installed Firefox and Realplayer for use within MojoPac mode. One really good thing is that the drive light on the Aspire 1 only flashes when it accesses the SSD drive. This enables you to see when the machine is being slowed down by code being called up from Windows. It helps you to see how you might tailor your machine to work more efficiently.

I would be interested to know if anyone else is using MojoPac for this purpose. As far as I am concerned, it has transformed my "basic edition" Aspire One from being an almost fatally crippled XP machine to being a zappy fully functional XP machine with room for further expansion should I upgrade my 4Gb SD card to a 16Gb or greater.

Since I started this thread, about 100 people have read the above, but no one has replied. Guys you have just got to give this a try! Please try it out and let us know your experiences.

I really do think that Acer should be talking to MojoPac with a view to offering XP Home with this utility as an option for the 8Gb machine. Acer would then be able to offer the cheapest ever Windows netbook.

 

P.S.

I have been doing some further testing by mounting Photoshop CS3. Even this runs respectably fast. It loaded in 20 secs as compared to 5 secs on my Quad Cord desktop, with fast SATA drives. But 20 secs is still pretty impressive for a little netbook. Photoshop runs OK too. I have converted some RAW files and the only issue was that the screen is too small for Photoshop RAW converted. With an external screen, I think the One will work perfectly with Photoshop. Its quite incredible - given the machine's performance when I tried using XP off the SDD drive alone.

 

I can certainly see advantages of this approach, but the 4mins bootup time puts me off. I wonder if it could be combined with EWF ...

Next time I get a chance I'll experiment. It makes sense to me to install WinXP and all your core programs on the SSD, then apply EWF and then add this MojoPac. In theory, you'd get the benefits of EWF (really nippy bootup and operation, zero writes to the SSD) along with the ability to install progs easily and shift the page file and all temp stuff onto the SD card. It seems that with Mojo you could take the SD card out of the AA1, put it into another machine to install progs, and then have the installed progs available when you put the SD card back in the AA1. This would handy for me, as I don't have a portable optical drive, and installing progs from CD onto the AA1 is, frankly, a bit of a faff.

Will post back when I get a chance to experiment.

Ginga

 

Great, this is what is now needed: some other Geeks to start experimenting. Do let us know what you think.

I think boot time would be reduced to 3 mins without Norton Antivirus.

I am wondering how MojoPac deals with virus software. I am assuming it allows it to run along with Windows in the background. But perhaps not. Or perhaps one could install the virus software within MojoPac, with the SSD drive hidden by the software from intruders &c.

 

3min boot time will still not cut it at all... that's probably the reason you don't see enough replies to this thread. My previously tweaked XP Home Sp3 install on my slow SSD AAO booted to a working desktop by 40seconds. And have no problems loading any software. Had a 16gb SDHC for the program files, so basically also a more than enough space for software.

Most users use the AAO as netbooks, meaning on the go computing with lots of turning on and off..... 4min or 3min boot time is just way too much waiting time. Cheers.

 

More information on load time

I did say that the slow load was due in part to anti-virus software. I am running both Norton and a second spyware program to pick up what Norton often misses. A contributory reason for the slow load is that I have installed a (fairly) full version of XP Professional.

I need to do some experiments to see if it would be possible to run the Antivirus software from the MojoPac mode, where hopefully it will run much faster.

MojoPac takes 1.3 to 1.5 minutes to load, after the Windows desktop has completed loading. Once you are in MojoPac mode, programs will load much faster than from the SSD drive. For what I want, this level of performance is just fine. Even my Quad Core takes nearly 3 minutes to load Windows (with antivirus software). If you can load Windows in 40 secs. then you could load Windows and MojoPac in just over two minutes.

I use my Acer for library research and for giving Powerpoints. If you want to use the Acer just for quick Internet access, then you are better off using Linux (which I see is what you have done).

Another important point is that you can still use the Acer in ordinary Windows mode. If you want to check stock prices in a cafe, you boot in the normal way and use Internet Explorer. The beauty of MojoPac is that when you go into it, everything runs much faster and you have bags of space for all your programs. Its almost like sitting back at your desktop.

 

A lot of the arguments for this seem to revolve around accessing the SD card being quicker than accessing the SSD - I'm fairly sure that isn't the case, but I've not got any hard figures to back that up. Also haven't got a decent (class 6) sd card handy to give it a proper test.
Anyone tried doing any comparative tests?

 

More tests ...

I have been doing more trials. The results are mixed and I can now see where Tamrac is coming from.

I had not realised that when using Windows normally, some programs can be installed to a drive other than the C: drive. Here Tamrac is correct. However, Windows being Windows is not consistant. Some programs, such as Microsoft Office, can be loaded from the SD card. Others will default to C: and there is nothing you can do about it. So unless there is some tweak I have not yet learnt, it looks as though the SSD drive will still get too full if you start installing heavyweight programs. Because MojoPac hides the C: drive, this ensures that all new programs are installed on the SD drive.

Another interesting thing is that when you run updates within MojoPac mode, these are automatically written to the SD, whereas if you do the updates with your programs on the SD card, code still gets written to the SSD drive.

Comparisons between SD and SSD are difficult to make, but it is easy to see that call up from the SD card is faster than from the SSD. That said, it is also clear that MojoPac slows up the computer a little.

I am currently in the position where I see the benefits of MojoPac as 50:50. Once in MojoPac mode, programs definitely load up faster from the SD card than they would from the SSD card. However, in ordinary Windows, the computer runs slightly faster (unless it is accessing the disk), and some programs can still be installed on the SD card. The computer also freezes less in MojoPac mode.

Sorry if I got over excited, but I still think there are merits to running MojoPac on the One, and that it would be worth others experimenting. For some users, with heavy software use, I think MojoPac may offer a better solution than trying to install multiple programs onto the SD drive from within ordinary windows.

S.

 

CONCLUSIONS

Unless someone else wants to chip in, this is my last post. Apparently no one has been interested in the idea of using Mojopac, but having completed more tests and trials, its definitely going to stay on my One, and here is why:

I could not use Linux on my One, as I need my machine to be compatible with a range of peripherals, and the drivers for Linux were not so good. So there was no point in installing a crippled cut-down version of XP, without all the drivers, proper networking facilities, and so on, as it would defeat the object of using Windows.

As I had a spare XP Pro install disk, I used this to mount XP on the 8Gb SSD. I left off one or two programs such as Microsoft Mediaplayer, but with all the updates downloaded, the space on the SSD quickly filled up. I then installed Office, and a couple of other programs, and found that the drive was 90% full and was becoming very slow. This is why I searched for suitable software and eventually lighted upon MojoPac.

An alternative approach, supposedly used by a previous poster, was to mount a much reduced version of XP on the SSD, then to install the programs on an SD card. It may be that this poster knows some tricks that I do not, but when I tried to do this, I found that over half of the programs I wanted to install simply would not install to the SD card. I could get Office to install, but not much else. Again the SSD drive started to fill up, and the computer became slow as more programs went on.

The poster made the very good point that many people use Netbooks for quick access to their emails and the internet. With this in mind, I decided to install my communications programs on Windows in normal mode, and the more serious programs on an SD card for use in MojoPac mode. If you have not used MojoPac then you may not realise that once MojoPac is loaded, you can switch between modes as the press of an on-screen button.

With this aim in mind, I reinstalled Windows onto the SSD (using Ghost) and then installed just the programs I might need for quick internet access. These are namely Internet Explorer, Outlook, Skype and Word.

All of the other programs I will want to use were installed very cleanly on an SD card. If I had tried to instal them in the normal way without using MojoPac, some would have been on the SSD drive, some on the SD card, and some spread between both. By using MojoPac, the bulk of the programs are in one place, and I can remove the SD card and put it in a reader so I can use the same programs on any XP computer.

Another poster asked if I had done any tests to see if read-write functions using MojoPac are any faster. I can confirm that they are - for those programs that do not need to draw upon routines from within windows. These run about 30% faster. Of course, it takes time to load MojoPac from the SD card, so I could not argue in favour of MojoPac on grounds of speed alone.

By tweaking the spyware programs, I have managed to make Windows and MojoPac work a little faster. The load time for the XP Pro desktop with Norton Antivirus fully loaded is 88 secs. After this I can call up Outlook in 9 seconds, or Word in 4 or Skype in somewhere between 4 and 17 seconds.

From the desktop I can call up MojoPac in around 110 seconds. I have set Page files to work on my SD card under MojoPac and this helps with Photoshop and other heavyweight software. From within MojoPac I can load Outlook in 5 seconds, Word in 4 seconds and Skype in 4 seconds.

The big advantage of the desktop is not load speed, but the sense that the computer is a much bigger and more powerful beast. I have a full desktop of my favourite programs, with space for many more (which would not have been possible without MojoPac). The majority of these programs will also run slightly faster than they would from the SSD. The SSD will still occasionally slow things down, and the programs may at times run more slowly than they do on bare windows. But actually, the computer behaves as if it is a better-sorted machine in MojoPac mode. The machine hangs less abruptly, and it no longer feels so much as if the SSD is holding everything back and spoiling the machine's performance.

For all these reasons, I still think that MojoPac offers a great solution to the problem of the One's small SSD. My machine is running overall faster (in both modes), I have the space I need for programs, my programs are arranged tidily, I can get the communications programs up and running fast enough, and I can also switch to MojoPac mode to gain access to all the programs I can think of, and gain a sense that I am somehow back at my desktop computer, with a smoother, more satisfactory user experience.

That's it. I hope this will benefit some future user. If anyone else finds they like MojoPac, then please do let us know.

Stoker