Worth running XP on SSD?

Hi all,

I was really excited about the Aspire when I got it a week ago, but it has been nothing but real problems for me.

I don't think I've had an OS installed on it for more than a day due to constantly having to reformat and try to find an OS that'll suit my needs.

I purchased the aspire for its designed purpose; simple office task and webbrowsing, yet I have not even been able to achieve that.

I'm currently at Uni, so a lot of the lectures are in PDF format, so I wanted a tool to be able to annotate on the PDF files (as well as office suites and IMing/webbrowsing)

Here's how my experience has been so far:

Linpus Lite: extremely fast in terms of processing, lacks customability which was not so important, but in terms of being able to keep software up to date it was hard. I managed to unlock advanced mode and try change it to classic desktop but I just ended up breaking it. Plus, linpus's NetworkManager couldn't even connect to WPA2 Enterprise (which is what my Uni uses, defeating the purpose of the purchase) fortunately, IMSancho from these forums found a solution, but after a couple reboots, NetworkManager wouldn't work at home so I just gave up.

Ubuntu 8.04.1: Not so bad as I thought on resources, very good OS (I've been used Linux before and I like how they intergrate everything and how easy it is to keep software updated with like Package Managers). It required a lot of tinkering to get everything (that could) work but I eventually did. I even found a program called Xournal that allowed PDF annotation, but if I tried drawing a basic line would just crash. It may have been too resource heavy, as well as the whole OS.

Windows XP: The amount of times I tried installing it via USB... countless. Eventually I went out and bought an external DVD drive and put TinyXP rev09 on it. Being windows, all the hardware worked as should but the problem now is that the read/write LED is constantly on and for good reason. It took about 5 minutes from inserting to automount for when I plugged in an unrecognised USB. It took 10 minutes for me to log on to MSN, not because my connection is slow but because its just reading from the SSD. It constantly has little freezeups; not ones due to software crashing, but the SSD drive just trying to catch up with the computer.

All I'm trying to achieve is what this computer was made to do but it seems impossible, yet I read stories of people installing full versions of XP and even Vista and it running fine.

So my Question is should I:
a) Give this to my little sister and go with an Eee 901. I understand this too is a SSD, but if it comes preinstalled with XP on it, it must run faster than the aspire SSD. Does anyone have any formal comparison specs on this?

b)Upgrade the RAM: People on the forums that say XP is running fine generally have at least 1 gig. I'm wondering will the RAM upgrade solve the problem or does it all come down to the SSD.

Thanks all for your help and if any other alternatives you may have, please do share.

N.B. As per the prices on the newsfeed, I definitely would've paid the extra 50 or so bucks for the 1 gig + 120 gig HHD model (although I did opt for SSD as I do keep it in my school bag; I'm generally careful with my stuff, but still I don't know the extent of which a HDD can be shaken around). Unfortunately in Australia, the A110 is already 498 bucks (375 with Acer 99 bux cashback + 5% staff discount from Officeworks) and the A150 is another 200 bux more, so quite a significant difference, hence why opting for the A110.

 

Upgradeing the ram will not solve the problems, XP runs great with 512.

As you realized, the SSD is the Problem.
Install XP with D2D disabled in BIOS and use the FAT filesystem instead of NTFS.
When you installed XP that way an you can live with the performace - ok, otherwise get another Netbook.
If you are willing to live with some drawbacks:

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2177&p=15165&hilit=fbwf#p15114

you can use fbwf to get XP really fast:

http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/winnt-b ... p-pro.html

I swapped my A110 to a A150 which runs even Vista great, i used fbwf on my A110 but in the end i was not satisfied with only having 8 GB HD and switching between fbwf off/on all the time.
For example, if you install a software or Windows patches you have to disable fbwf.

 

Thanks for the info mate,

Yea, As per the "Happy XP experience" thread I opted for FAT and Disabled D2D and pagefile.

So would this problem be prevalent amongst all SSD based Netbooks then? The Eee 901 with the 20 or 12 SSD drive comes with XP pre-installed. Has anyone had any experience with this?

As per your suggestion, I read through the whole EWF thread, looks like an interesting concept and seems to have a lot of positive feedback. I'll have to research how to make some batch commands so that I can commit when I need to and may have to increase RAM due to more data being 'written' there. Also, I think I saw TweakUI mentioned somewhere as a way to make My Documents and things like that save to an SD card. Given I'll only turn on EWF once I've installed the essentials (Firefox, Office, MSN) the only 'writing' i'll be doing is saving documents.

Thanks for your suggestion though, I'm just trying to decide whether or not an extra 200 for the 901 with 6 cell, 1 gig ram & bigger SSD is worth it. Depending on whether or not the Eee has the same speed issues due to the drive being SSD will tip my decision.

Thanks again

 

FWIW - I've installed option 1 of TinyXP Rev09, disabled prefetch and all the other standard stuff and it works very well. Fast boot (about 45-60 seconds from start to useable), good battery with the 3 cell battery and all my standard windows apps work well.

I needed a truely mobile device and got tired of truing to work around Linux's bluetooth shortcomings so this XP install makes me a very happy camper. It's quite speedy - no real complaints other than high bitrate flash seems to bog a bit.

 

if you can sell yours and are willing to get another, I just got the 150 (XP home, 120GB hdd, 1GB ram) for $350 at Best Buy. Definitely worth the price for upgraded hardware alone.