Getting Windows XP installed, however, does not. I do not have an external CD/DVD reader (I’m the world’s worst geek, I collect old, outdated computer peripherals, not new ones that would actually be useful), so I needed to install Windows XP using an USB stick. You’d think that in 2008 this would be trivial, but apparently, it’s not, for some mysterious reason. I like to think it’s that same reason that supposedly explains why Vista’s Mobile Device Center doesn’t sync Windows Mobile devices with Vista’s Contacts, Mail, and Calendar applications.
Creating a bootable Windows XP USB stick is tricky, but not impossible. The surge in popularity of netbooks has created a lot of attention on this subject, meaning there are a lot of guides out there. This one worked for me, but your mileage may vary. Once you’ve booted off the USB stick, be wary when you come to the step where you create and format the system partition, because you have to make sure the system partition is the c: one, or else the system will not boot. This may mean that you need to reboot into the text installation after creating the system partition just to be sure it’s mounted as the c: drive. And yes, it’s not you, it’s still 2008. Be sure to format the partition with fat32, as that greatly improves the speed of the system.
Full read up here @ osnews.com
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A couple of months ago, I started looking for an ultra-mobile notebook. I knew then that whatever I got, it likely would not have a CD/DVD drive. So I found a nice external slim USB-powered drive on ebay for $15. Then when I got my Aspire One this week, I was all set.
I often see mention that FAT32 is faster on SSD than NTFS. However, I really do think this is because the default cluster size for NTFS is much smaller than FAT32. Format the drive as NTFS with 32KB or even 64KB clusters and it should be OK.
Oh, and people also need to disable the NTFS last access update as this generates HUGE numbers of writes, which SSDs hate.
Google for NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate
Ian
[...] A1 References: - Memory upgrade - User forum - Hardware forum - How to ruin a perfectly good Aspire One [...]
I really don’t think it’s the cluster size. I’ve reformatted to FAT32, and noticed to my surprise that my “allocation unit” size (or cluster size) is only 4K, as returned by chkdsk, and everything seems to work fine. Not perfect, but very useable. I’ve disabled D2D, installed non-Acer chipset and VGA drivers (the ones for the MSI Wind, actually), installed FAT32, and disabled paging. I think that’s about it. For what it’s worth, I’ve not tried NTFS with a larger cluster size, but if 4K cluster sizes were the problem, then I ought to be seeing the problem, and I’m not.
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