Acer Aspire One Blog

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.

I picked up (actually I received it as an early Christmas present from my mother after sending her the link in my Christmas list) the Acer Aspire One A1101 (in white) from Newegg, where they had it on sale for $249 + free shipping during the Black Friday sales that were going on. This model came with Linux Linpus and the 8GB SSD HD.

While I know there’s a lot of people that think Linux is just swell, I’m just so much more familiar with Windows, the software and the environment, so the first install for this machine was to toss out the original OS and install Windows XP.

The first hurdle obviously in installing a new OS on the AAO is that it has no optical drive. This requires that you create a bootable USB memory stick with the installation files to complete the install. Any USB thumb drive should work, I used a Kingston Datatraveler 1GB for my install.

To create the bootable USB thumb drive, you’ll need the USB Multiboot Tool, available here:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=4900

Update
You can get download the multiboot tool directly from either here or here or here.

The Multiboot Tool is a batch file that will take you step-by-step on creating the bootable partition and then copying over the Windows files from your CD. You may also want to check out the N-Lite application to create a stream-lined version of windows that will be smaller and a bit faster on your AAO. N-Lite is a free application.

Once your USB thumb drive is ready to go, change the boot order in the bios (Press F2 on startup and move the USB port to the first bootable position), and then install Windows normally. Make sure not to remove the USB drive until the installation is complete (this will be after about 3 restarts).

*Note: During the Windows install, make sure that when you delete both existing partitions that come on the SSD HD and create a new single partition formatted in the FAT32 format and *NOT* NTFS. NTFS will be very slow on the SSD. I will post tips about speeding up Windows on the AAO in another post, however, it’s important that you format the drive in FAT2 during the installation.

I followed this youtube video and found it very helpful during the installation:

Once Windows has finished loading for the final time, you can remove the USB stick, and on your next restart can change the boot order so that the SSD HD comes first. You may want to keep the Windows copy on your thumb drive so that you can use it if you ever need to recover or repair your copy of Windows.