upgrade for aspire 1

i have had this aspire 1 for a while but i have never been brave enough to tweak the machine for better performance, because of the topics that i have read about the upgrades messing up the workings of the machine, such as the web cam, loading time and freezing etc.
I am an avid skype user as I work away from home so has anybody got any good ideas for an upgrade that does not kill the system. And keeps skype and camera.
Also if possible could you give me step by step instructions to do the upgrade from step one to finish as I dont even know how to download stuff normally not mention upgrade the system.
cheers sooty

 

i forgot to mention that my aspire is running the linpus lite system.

 

My advice to you is simple, if what you have is working, don't mess with an upgrade. And if you decide to ignore this advice, I strongly advise you to back up your system and make sure you have a means of restoring it before attempting an upgrade. And if you decide to ignore both pieces of advice, all I can do is wish you good luck and hope that your upgrade works.

 

thanks for the advice i thought that would be the answer,but it is strange to make a system that when upgraded causes more probs than fixes
not to worry.
cheers for that

 

Upgrading doesn't really cause too many problems - if you know what you're doing (and, perhaps, a bit lucky).

Linpus was based on Fedora 8. Fedora, like Ubuntu, is a fast-moving distro, with two releases a year. Unlike Ubuntu, Fedora has no LTS (long-term support) releases. Releases are supported for approximately one year. This is by design, and was certainly known to the developers of Linpus. I use Fedora (and Ubuntu) on my AA1 because I like playing with the latest and greatest the Linux world has to offer. However, I always keep an older, known-good installation of one of these distros on my hard drive so that if anything should go wrong with an upgrade, I can get to my files. I can only justify the time I spend playing with / upgrading my AA1 because it's a hobby.

 

thank you for that reply it looked good but went right over my head, I dont get this ,kept a copy on my hard drive etc, does that mean that you can upgrade to another system but keep your old system too, then delete the new one if it goes wrong, and go back to the old way with no probs. and this unsupported after a year does that mean that my skype etc wont work

 

To answer your questions:
1. If you have the space, you can keep multiple working operating systems on your drive. Properly installed, you'll be presented with a screen at boot time that will allows you to choose which operating system to run. Search the forum for how to dual-boot; I'm sure somebody provided very explicit instructions on how to do it.

2. Even though the operating system may be unsupported, if your applications work now, they'll continue to work unless something changes. Consider the case of Windows. Just because Windows 95 and Windows 98 are unsupported, doesn't means they don't work anymore. You just can't run the latest and greatest Windows applications.

 

cheers for that