Speeding Up Windows XP
The SSD HD that comes in the Linux version of the Acer Aspire One has very fast read times, but very slow write times and because of this, some adjustments need to be made to speed up the system under Windows XP. All of these tweaks are very easy to make, and make a huge difference in performance. The key is to keep the system accessing the SSD as infrequently as possible.
As mentioned in a previous post, make sure you formatted the HD with the FAT32 file system and not NTFS. NTFS will be painfully slow on the SSD.
BIOS
The first thing you can do to speed up the system is to disable the “D2D recovery” system in the BIOS (Press F2 at startup to access the BIOS). This feature keeps an extra partition for recovery and takes up drive space and usage. Simply disable it, save and exit to boot back into Windows.
Turn off Paging File
If you’ve upgraded your memory (see below post) to the maximum 1.5GB, then you can turn off the paging file, which will greatly reduce startup time and speed up general usage. I do not recommend doing this though if you have less than 1GB of RAM. To disable the paging file, go to System Properties > Settings (under performance), select the “advanced” tab, then click the Change (under virtual memory) button. Click on the “No paging file” radio button and then click “set” and “apply”. You will have to restart your machine for the changes to take effect.
Turn off visual effects
Windows XP is pretty, but a lot of the shadowing and fading in and out that the system uses takes up a good deal of memory and resources. Turning off all or most of these effects will speed up the system. To adjust the effects, go to System Properties > Settings (under performance) and select the “Adjust for best performance” radio button. This will untick all of the visual effects. Personally, I like the blue bar at the bottom with the green start button, so I indulged and instead selected “custom” and ticked the last box, “Use visual styles on windows and buttons.”
Turn off Unnecessary Programs and Services
A lot of programs like to startup as soon as Windows loads so that they can be accessed more quickly. The problem is that these background programs are taking up memory and other resources, and unless you use these programs often, are usually best turned off to boost overall performance. Check the “Startup” folder in your programs list to make sure that nothing is loading that you don’t need started when Windows starts.
Similarly, you can turn off services that you don’t need. To access the services menu, go to Start > Run and type in “services.msc”. To disable a service, double click the service, and change the drop down menu under “startup type” to “disable.”
Here is a list of services that I’ve disabled on my Acer Aspire One that has increased the speed and doesn’t seem necessary in my instance of Windows:
Alerter
Background Intelligent Transfer Service
Clipbook
Computer Browser
Error Reporting Service
Help and Support
Human Interface Device Access
Indexing Service
IPSEC Services
Messenger
Network DDE
Network DDE DSDM
Performance Logs and Alerts
Portable Media Serial Number Service
Qos RSVP
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
Routing and Remote Access
Secondary Logon
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
Uninterruptible Power Supply
WebClient
Windows Time
WMI Performance Adapter
All of these services have a detailed description in the window so you can choose to disable more, or less services depending on how you use your machine. If you happen to disable a service that a program needs, it will just fail to load and usually mention that it needs a particular service that you can just re-enable in the services program.
With all of these tweaks, my cold-start time to ready-to-use time went from 65 seconds to 35 seconds which I’m more than happy with. General usage is also noticably improved and makes this a very nice Windows XP machine even with the slower SSD.
Category: Speed, Windows XP
December 19th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Thank you for the info, i needed that…
but what’s the big diffrence between FAT32 and NTFS?
Why is FAT32 faster than NTFS??? I like to Know…
Regards,
Harald van Eik
December 19th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Another tipe is that when instaling XP on the Aspire One with SSD, choose FAT not NTFS, as this is the single most slowing factor I found. The install itself speeds up exponentially, and XP runs a lot faster.
January 11th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
I have done all the above + even more stuff to get XP running smoothly. But I still have a startup time of 2 min 15 sek
And I can’t really play music because the sound gets all chopped up when I move around windows and stuff.
What can I bee doing wrong?
I used Nlite to remove things from XP before I installed. Mabye I took something away what was supposed to be there?
I have the Acer Aspire One A110 with SSD. Thanks for any advice.
/Thomas
January 14th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
I solved my problems by installing the full XP version instead of Nlite-version.
Now it works fine.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
You must have deleted something that you needed in your nlited version of XP. Glad to here that you got things running well. What is your current startup time?
January 19th, 2009 at 7:09 am
Great post. I have been running XP and Ubuntu Linux on my machine for 4 months and am quite pleased, although my machine is a HDD model. Have you done comparisons of the SSD and HDD models in terms of boot time?
ps. If anyone has set the BIOS password only to be later locked out, here is a fix:
http://www.stevenings.com/2009/01/how-to-unlock-the-bios-on-the-acer-aspire-one/
January 20th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
[...] Fan More QuietAnother Tip on Disabling the Paging File in WinXPNeoprene Case for the Acer Aspire OneSpeeding Up Windows XPUpgrading the MemoryHow to Install Windows XP on an Acer Aspire OneWelcome to the Acer Aspire One [...]
January 21st, 2009 at 10:49 am
definately use fat32 rather than ntfs, its a hell of a lot quicker, the SSD runs like a dog using ntfs
also, make sure when you are installing from usb, when you partion the drive, xp will give the usb stick the c: lettering, this will cause problems after install and you will get the hal.dll is missing error.
to rectify this, when you create the partition make sure the usb stick is removed so that your SSD is named C:, then plug the usb stick back in afterwards to continue
January 28th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
What is the downside to disabling the D2D recovery system in BIOS. Thanks!
February 6th, 2009 at 1:40 am
Heya how about installing ur Acer Aspire one without even having to open it, I got it running with a s-ATA 250Gb 7200 16Mb cache 2.5 inch HD. I put this all in a pink vento Asus casing. connected with 2 usb cables on the right side of the device.
I runs fine with 512Mb on Vista Ultimate.
Able to run movies (DVD) in a virtual DVD device setup (daemontools).
Ofcourse you set the SSD to second boot in Bios.
And let it boot with ur USB-HDD which works fine.
I recommend setting ur (usbHD) as plain sataHD on another Desktop pc just hook up ur S-ata install Vista (default without adding any drivers ofcourse) and run a small hack to bypass the BOD ( simply cus Vista wont setup on external drives )
To save u from the research use this string as an *.inf file
[version]
signature=”$CHICAGO$”
SetupClass=BASE
[DefaultInstall]
AddReg = usbservices.Addreg
CopyFiles = usbstordr
[SourceDisksNames]
1 = yourcdrive,,,\windows\system32\DriverStore\FileRepository\usbstor.inf_bb2778a0
[SourceDisksFiles]
usbstor.sys = 1,,
[DestinationDirs]
DefaultDestDir = 12; DIRID_DRIVERS
[usbstordr]
usbstor.sys
[usbservices.Addreg]
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbccgp”,”DisplayName”,0×00000000,”USB parent Driver”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbccgp”,”ErrorControl”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbccgp”,”Group”,0×00000000,”boot bus extender”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbccgp”,”ImagePath”,0×00020000,”system32\DRIVERS\usbccgp.sys”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbccgp”,”Start”,0×00010001,0
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbccgp”,”Type”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbstor”,”DisplayName”,0×00000000,”USB Mass Storage Driver”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbstor”,”ErrorControl”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbstor”,”Group”,0×00000000,”boot bus extender”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbstor”,”ImagePath”,0×00020000,”system32\DRIVERS\usbstor.sys”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbstor”,”Start”,0×00010001,0
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbstor”,”Type”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbehci”,”DisplayName”,0×00000000,”USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller Miniport Driver”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbehci”,”ErrorControl”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbehci”,”Group”,0×00000000,”boot bus extender”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbehci”,”ImagePath”,0×00020000,”system32\DRIVERS\usbehci.sys”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbehci”,”Start”,0×00010001,0
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbehci”,”Type”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbhub”,”DisplayName”,0×00000000,”USB2 Enabled Hub”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbhub”,”ErrorControl”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbhub”,”Group”,0×00000000,”boot bus extender”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbhub”,”ImagePath”,0×00020000,”system32\DRIVERS\usbhub.sys”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbhub”,”Start”,0×00010001,0
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbhub”,”Type”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbuhci”,”DisplayName”,0×00000000,”Microsoft USB Universal Host Controller Miniport Driver”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbuhci”,”ErrorControl”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbuhci”,”Group”,0×00000000,”boot bus extender”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbuhci”,”ImagePath”,0×00020000,”system32\DRIVERS\usbuhci.sys”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbuhci”,”Start”,0×00010001,0
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbuhci”,”Type”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbohci”,”DisplayName”,0×00000000,”Microsoft USB Open Host Controller Miniport Driver”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbohci”,”ErrorControl”,0×00010001,1
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbohci”,”Group”,0×00000000,”boot bus extender”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbohci”,”ImagePath”,0×00020000,”system32\DRIVERS\usbohci.sys”
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbohci”,”Start”,0×00010001,0
HKLM,”SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usbohci”,”Type”,0×00010001,1
Thats all you need to do to complete ur Vista install on an AcerAspire One ( I had the linux version to try the upgrade on)
ps. Dont forget before you finalize the USB disk & close it that u did pass the point that you installed SP1 and created a restore point with the bypass on the inf file I gave you above.
This to avoid the part were you get stuck on BOD with an update that changed the usb ‘hack’ and can simple redo the inf before you boot or have ur HD allready in the usb casing basically
Have a nice day.
March 7th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
in response to A2I:
You’ve shown aptitude in being able to do this, but if you have to boot a netbook (hate the term) from an external device, then it sort of defeats the point of having one in the first place. Might as well have paid a bit more for a netbook with a larger faster HD in the 1st place.
Tuyre
March 7th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
I have made my 110 much more quick now by upgrading the memory as suggested and turning off the “page file” sys. My wife has an HP Mininote, which was easy to upgrade the memory, but the Aspire 110 proved a bit more tricky, but still manageable. I followed these instructions:-
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/02/19/aa1_memory_upgrade/
Hope this helps someone.
Tuyre
March 19th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Haha ^^ nice, is there a section to follow the RSS feed
March 29th, 2009 at 11:35 am
I tried all of the usual tricks: upgrade ram, turn off pagefile, etc, but still found the computer would periodically freeze while accessing the SSD. Finally, I got a high speed SD card (133x, I tried a “normal” one and that proved too slow) and mounted it under the user directory (C:\Documents and Settings\Username), so essentially I have on SSD for the OS and programs and one for user access. This really helped speed things up. Now, even with Outlook and other heavy programs open, I don’t have any more freezeups.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:54 am
I found some maintenance and optimization freeware Advanced Systemcare 3 that has not helped boot up but has speed up browsing considerably.
download.cnet.com appears to give it the thumbs up.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Opera as my internet browser is considerable faster downloading text rich pages but photos and graphic’s seem slightly quicker on Firefox.
Opera overall is quicker, and makes XP browsing as fast as my Celeron 1.6 with 2gb laptop using Firefox. After this revelation I installed Opera on my Celeron Lappy and saw smaller text gains and larger image losses. So not as much to gain with Opera on a HDD full size lappy.
SSD seems to prefer Opera. HDD on Aspire One may or may not see a benefit, I dont have one so cannot time these applications against each other. SSD definitely is quicker
April 16th, 2009 at 8:33 am
Thank you much.
I bought Acer Aspire One 8,9″, 16GB SSD, 1GB RAM, Win XP home
This website much help me because my netbook was unusable.
(sorry for my english
April 26th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Regarding the comment:
“As mentioned in a previous post, make sure you formatted the HD with the FAT32 file system and not NTFS. NTFS will be painfully slow on the SSD.”
How do you format the HD?
Thanks!
April 27th, 2009 at 8:40 am
I have been experimenting with this XP driver: http://zflashpoint.blogspot.com/ on an Aspire One A110 and the difference is incredible. ATTO benchmark also show increased read and write speeds.
I did get a blue screen on the beta patch version but version 2 works great. They even have a removal tool if it does not work for you. It is still being developed but surely headed in the right direction.
May 15th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
the acer one with the 16gb ssd work lots better with fat32 then ntfs
May 20th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
My netbook was “special” XP version with 16GB (slow) SSD-it was originaly formated FAT 32 and indexind service was shuted down
(Sorry for my english :-))
June 2nd, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Hi,
I ‘ve just bought an Acer Netwbbok One with Win XP, 1GB with 16GB SDD… I took off McAfee (installed Avast), removed Google Desktop (was killing the SDD access time) and did the D2D disable in BIOS. Removed the Microsoft office trial and installed OpenOffice - runs a dream!
Thanks for the comments above.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:19 pm
I had installed Win XP in a Acer Aspire One (512 MB / 8 GB) doing the following: in the Bios, disabled D2D; FAT32 formatting and after upgrading with SP3 and installed the XP drives, I had installed “flashpoint2009b6” – this do memory cash to write on SSD – this improved a lot the performance.
July 24th, 2009 at 4:53 am
35 second boot up??? Are you timing it from the very exact moment when you press the power on button, till the wireless tray icon is shown?
My time is 40-41 seconds, having disabled all unneeded services, removed all startup programs (even the ones installed by drivers), and disabled the webcam and ethernet hardware. I’m having an AOA150, 1GB RAM, 160 GB HDD. What else can I do?
August 17th, 2009 at 9:51 am
XP SP3 takes 30 seconds from pressing power button to usable desktop (25 seconds to desktop icons displayed + add 5 seconds for NOD32 to finish loading and wifi to be logged in).
I did all the tweaks you suggested but only I have 512MB ram so I had to leave the paging file turned on. I did put it on its own partition however (1.8GB) and that seems to help.
I chose not to install the Acer driver for the touchpad, the built in Windows driver works fine. Also disabled the Intel Graphics hotkeys and system tray loader.
After all this I’m usually left with 260MB of RAM after boot, which keeps paging file use to a minimum as long as I don’t open too many tabs on IE7.
August 22nd, 2009 at 1:53 am
For those of us with an Aspire One SSD model, your best option… short of adding bulk to it and opening up the unit to replace the SSD inside of it… is to add a high speed SD card to the left slot. I did some heavy benchmarking (who knows how badly I wore the SSD in the process, heh) and the results were pretty depressing.
The SSD averaged out to UNDER 0.5MB/sec
A class 6 (minimum write speed of 6MB/sec) SD card in the left slot averaged out to 11MB/sec (Sandisk Branded)
A Sandisk Cruzer Titanium thumbdrive averaged out to 8MB/sec.
Any USB option is going to have additional overhead you don’t want. USB offloads onto the CPU and the Atom is fairly starved enough as-is. I can get Hulu standard streams to play somewhat well to justify watching it… but doing it on a browser that is loaded and caching to the thumbdrive will kill whatever you can get out the unit, for example.
The card readers inside the AAO are Parallel ATA connected. This will give you a higher overall throughput compared with any USB device.
Your best option, honestly, is to spring for a SD or SDHC card that is high speed rated… such as the Sandisk UltraII or ExtremeIII series of cards. Less CPU overhead, practically zero bulk since the SD slot on the left side is deep enough to let the card sit almost flush.
SuperTalent released a 32GB and 64GB version of the SSD inside the Aspire One, designed as a drop-in replacement part. While I considered this, I really did not want to go through the trouble of disassembling my AAO again. The write speeds on these are a substantial improvement over the one that came with the units. These are available on NewEgg if you’re curious.
In the end, despite my disappointment with the performance of the SSDs inside the Aspire One, I still would have gotten one had I known beforehand… as I explicitly wanted a netbook without moving parts. That rules out hard drives. The AAO is surprisingly forward thinking in regards to the dedicated flush set SD card slot… and with new SD cards coming out that do about 30MB/sec maximum writes, the compromise is easy to make.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:44 am
Hi, my acer one keeps on rebooting even if I log on. I do not have external CD drive how can I repair the XP
October 14th, 2009 at 10:57 am
I USE A EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE TO STORE HOME MOVIES AND PURCHASED DVD’S ON. WHEN I PLAY THE MOVIES ON MY HP LAPTOP THEY PLAY FINE, BUT WHEN I PLAY THEM THROUGH MY ACER NETBOOK I GET SKIPS AND BLURBS. I HAVE DOWNLOADED ALL UPDATES FOR MY WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER AND TRIED OTHER PLAYERS, BUT THEY ALL PLAY THE SAME. IS THERE A FIX FOR THIS? IT SEEMS TO BE RUNNING SLOW, HOW CAN I SPEED UP THE PLAYER?
November 21st, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Reply for Steve…dowload latest VLC media player and forget the Windows one. Choppy playback is a codec problem ie: DivX and Xvid (and many many others), not to mention many require anoying updates and take system resources. Worse still are the codec packs. VLC plays anything and nothing else to install or run in the background.
Thanks to this site for helping get my Aspire One working with XP. I followed the list of services and things to turn off and it runs great. It came to me as a cast off due to the small hard drive and I have come to enjoy it a lot. I REALLY appreciate the help.
December 15th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
I read somewhere that disabling prefetch and write caching can speed things up a bit too
December 20th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Found the above very useful, thanks for that. I am getting the impression that the aspire one with ssd is not fit for purpose as a windows machine without upgrading RAM and doing a lot of messing around. I bought the machine for my mother in law and it has sat virtually unused for a while now until I was able to get onto it today and take a proper look. Stopping the services listed above didn’t have a huge impact for me so after checking running processes I found the windows update client was running, stopping this process in task manager and then disabling automatic updates in “my computer”->properties I was finally able to use the machine properly after a restart.
This is a very unsafe and unrecommended thing to be doing but without it the machine was rendered completely unusable. I will probably end up installing the ubuntu netbook flavour on it in the next couple of weeks but hopefully this hint will help those who can’t get any use out of their netbooks at all. SSD & Windows XP does not seem to be a good mix….
January 8th, 2010 at 8:42 am
I recently bought one of these for my lil sis, and was having issues with the speed. This cleared it all up, damned good netbook for the web now!
Thanks!
January 31st, 2010 at 5:51 pm
I have been browsing for a while and haven’t found solid advice about formatting the HDD on my AOA 150 to FAT32 or NTFS. I realize that the SSD works better with FAT23. Does the 120 GB HDD require FAT32 as well?
Scott
February 2nd, 2010 at 7:22 am
No. A HDD doesn’t need the NTFS format function.
March 15th, 2010 at 11:14 am
PLEASE HELP!
I installed XP on aspire one 250 d but can’t listen music or netradio or watch even youtube clips without it jittering. it’s so slow.
I can’t even do my homework with this machine. And i can only listen music from an usb drive, because it’s so slow when playing from hard drive.
is this normal?
April 3rd, 2010 at 1:20 pm
I installed Flashfire SSD accelerator and it zips along.
June 4th, 2010 at 7:56 am
I’ve done this and it all adds to help the performance, very very good advise thanks!!
June 16th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Hi, just want to say - thank you , great work on your blog. Info found was very very helpfull.
June 23rd, 2010 at 2:14 pm
Great tahnks a lot, the bios thing did it for me, now i can use my netbook again, it kept stopping for seconds during use, now it runs really great!