Very Unpleased with XP experience, What have I done wrong ?

Hello All,

I got my AA1 2 days ago and messed around a little with Linpus and I liked it, But what I really wanted was the XP on my AA1.
I Installed an nLited windows XP SP2 earlier today and after installation the system was freezing almost twice a minute and then it would run fast and then freeze again and so on, Installation of software takes forever too. So I thought that the nLited version Had something wrong so I used a full XP installation and I got the same Results, My AA1 is the 8gb SSD/Linux version, And if you're wondering, I formatted my SSD with the Quick NTFS format (First option If I remember correctly). What am I doing wrong that it's freezing so much ??

 

No offense mate, but what you did "wrong" was to purchase the AA1 SSD model instead of the HDD model specially if you intend to use Windows OS on it.

My first AA1 was the SSD model and sold it less than a week later to get the HDD model. I tried all the advice found in this forum for improving Windows XP performance on the SSD, but it still really sucks. the SSD for the AA1 clearly cannot match the performance of the HDD for Widnows OS purposes.

If you really intend to use the AA1 under a Windows OS, get the HDD model. The added cost is worth the performance and storage boost you'll get with the HDD model. Another plus side is you can upgrade the HDD later on if you decide to go for even bigger disk capacity

 

There are a few things you can do to improve the XP experience:

1. I would strongly recommend upgrading the ram; an extra 1GB can be gotten for only about $20, and if you follow the guide, it isn't too tough.

2. Provided you upgraded the RAM or are using a very light build of XP, disable the page file. The problem w/ the SSD is its slow write speed. By using RAM instead of constantly writing the page file to the SSD, it'll improve performance a lot.

3. Disable write caching - similar to a page file, write caching tries to put often accessed, or anticipated-to-be-accessed info to the "front" of the HDD - by turning this off, you reduce the number of writes to the SSD. The SSD excels at read operations, so you don't need all the stuff that was normally done to improve a regular hard drive's read performance.

4. Disable the D2D backup feature included as part of the Aspire One's bios - no need to write backup data to the other partition that was setup by the factory - you wiped out the drive anyway.

5. Limit what loads at startup and/or background operations - you can always load up programs as needed.

I currently have Tiny Vista on my Aspire One, and it runs quite well. Sure, it's not the powerhouse that my dual-core desktop is, but for $329 I can't complain. Also, from what I've read, there is some sort of driver conflict w/ the SSD, and so its performance is below what it should be. From what I understand, none of these SSD-related issues occur in Linux, (or at least, certain distributions of Linux).

 

@gAbS : This is the only available model over here right now

@Biostem: Thanks Buddy, I'll give these a shot and see what happens

 

You can try a full format in Fat32.

 

I would make a couple of suggestions:

1. Format FAT32, not NTFS. NTFS is not going to give you better performance and the added file security is not something that you need, so no point in slowing you down.
2. Disable System Restore, Page File, Write Caching, and use Black Viper's guide to disable other services you do not need.
3. Install autoruns and process manager from sysinternals and make sure that you have only what you need running at startup.

It would really depend on what you are trying to accomplish, but with 8GB of space I would consider making another V-Lite XP installation as this should give you the smallest installation possible.