WinXP on Aspire One

M

Matt

New Member
I have recently installed Windows XP on my wife's Acer Aspire One. Dispite having a very similar spec to mine, though, it runs really slowly. There is one major difference, however, and that is hers has an 8GB SSD (mine is a 160GB HDD). Am I right in assuming that the speed reduction is due to the limited space available rather than the type of drive? Or are SSDs in reality much slower than HDDs? Does anyone know?

Matt
 
The SSD's that come in those netbooks aren't meant to run Windows. You'd be better off running a small linux distro.
 
wolfeking said:
It has plenty of room to run XP or 2000. Being slow might be a RAM issue, do you know how much RAM it has?
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No believe me, it's one of those little RAM chip SSD's. I've worked with them before and they are basically unusable with XP.
 
oh. well I have never used one that size. I was more saying that it is big enough. I do not see how it could be that bad though, as XP is plenty usable on a 4200 RPM drive.
 
voyagerfan99 said:
No believe me, it's one of those little RAM chip SSD's. I've worked with them before and they are basically unusable with XP.
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Debatable. I have a asus 4g eee netbook, and it'll run xp fine, and plenty others with them do it as well. It's only got a 4gb SSD, though it does have a SD card slot to keep other media on.
 
NyxCharon said:
Debatable. I have a asus 4g eee netbook, and it'll run xp fine, and plenty others with them do it as well. It's only got a 4gb SSD, though it does have a SD card slot to keep other media on.
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Then please provide tips to allow it to run better.
 
voyagerfan99 said:
Then please provide tips to allow it to run better.
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Honestly there's not much to really say. I only ran it that way for a couple months then switched to a linux distro, but I just installed it and removed anything I didn't use. I didn't really have to tweak it all to get it to run fine.
 
The machine is an Acer Aspire One ZG5; Intel Atom CPU N270 @ 1.6GHz 798MH (unsure of the reason for the two figures); 500MB of RAM (all from the System Properties). Drive is SSD 8GB of which <6GB is used.

Matt
 
You must have a lot of apps added on.
XP takes about 2 gig on an install with updates.

Have you checked to see what all is running?

Edit: I just checked one of my comps and XP with Comodo Internet Security used 3.1 gigs of space with a couple of small apps.
 
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There is a program called flashfire which was made to speed up xp on small netbook ssd's which suffer from poor write speeds I have included a link for it should you be interested.

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,82815-order,4/description.html

Just a word of caution I did see one or two comments saying that it ****ed up their netbook I have never used this program and as such I can't say to you weather it's worth trying or not.

can your netbook take a standard sized hdd? if it can would it be worth buying a small second hand one from ebay or somewhere like that to use instead of the ssd?.
 
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It's running XP, Word and Excel, Avast free, and a couple of other small programs. I've even ditched several of the standard window components. There's very little downloaded, so that's not a concern.
 
phillyd1918 said:
Just a word of caution I did see one or two comments saying that it ****ed up their netbook I have never used this program and as such I can't say to you weather it's worth trying or not.
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Doesn't have very good write-ups, does it. Don't fancy trying that. Shame. Thanks though.
 
500mb of ram? That's one possibility why its slow. But I thought netbooks usually come with 1gb installed? Running an antivirus and other things that run at startup with only 500(512)mb ram sure would make it slow. What was on the machine before you installed XP and was it running ok before?
 
phillyd1918 said:
I read this article and thought it might be worth suggesting flashfire to you. I thought it would be best if I did not offer a opinion based on what I know.

http://domsyard.com/acer-aspire-one/how-speed-windows-xp-acer-aspire-one-ssd

There are other points in there that you might think are worth a go.
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Maybe I will give it a go if none of the other processes work. Thanks. What I could use is a small external program that allows me to make an image of the drive, so I can put it back if it screws up completely.

Matt
 
johnb35 said:
500mb of ram? That's one possibility why its slow. But I thought netbooks usually come with 1gb installed? Running an antivirus and other things that run at startup with only 500(512)mb ram sure would make it slow. What was on the machine before you installed XP and was it running ok before?
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It was running Linus Lite, but my wife needed Word and Excel for work, which is why I installed XP.

Matt
 
Matt said:
It was running Linus Lite, but my wife needed Word and Excel for work, which is why I installed XP.

Matt
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There is a programme called openoffice for linux and windows which is free to download and as far as I know it can read and create word and excel docs.
 
phillyd1918 said:
There is a programme called openoffice for linux and windows which is free to download and as far as I know it can read and create word and excel docs.
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You're right, and it does. I loaded it onto her machine initially, but it looks and feels different. As she is relatively new to computers, she wanted the same as she has at work. Who am I to argue?

Just installed Flashfire and it seems to work fine. Definitely seems to speed things up.

Thanks for your help everyone.

Matt
 
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