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Duncan 'woody.cool' Woodward
22 March 2011
I was an early adopter of the Acer Aspire One series purchasing a model that came with an 8GB SSD (Solid-State Drive) and 512MB RAM. It had Linpus Linux Lite as the preloaded operating system.
I have to say, I was very disappointed with it. The included Linux distro was very restrictive and made life difficult for anything other than the most basic of tasks. It even has an interface with groups that are similar to the 'Program Manager' interface of Windows 3.1 which hasn't been around since 1993 LOL! Even after some 'modification' to the OS to remove the restrictions, it still seemed like it wasn't as compatible with other systems as I'd like and still seemed restrictive so I decided to get hold of the Windows XP drivers for this machine and go for the dreaded re-format and re-install with XP on it .... BIG MISTAKE!!!!
Having only got an SSD inside it (and quite an early generation of SSD might I add) I found that read speeds were blisteringly fast but write speed was soooooooooo slow which made using Windows as the OS almost impossible (bearing in mind that Windows is constantly writing to itself, especially when using the swap file) and found the only way around this was to ditch the far superior file system of NTFS for the older FAT32 file system (which is what Windows 95 & 98 used back in the day) and then on top of all that try and hack the 'Enhanced Write Filter' (preventing long delays whilst writing to the SSD) from Windows XP Embedded into a Windows XP Pro install .... this is no problem for an IT techy (like myself) but not an easy task at all for most end-users.
I also tried other Linux distros on this machine and found that Ubuntu ran well (although the versions that were about at the time I got my Acer Aspire One back in 2008 were a bit flaky with the Aspire's wireless adaptor)
Have a good think about this before you make the purchase. Later models have improved, but avoid models with an SSD if you want a more familiar Windows interface.
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Duncan 'woody.cool' Woodward
22 March 2011
I was an early adopter of the Acer Aspire One series purchasing a model that came with an 8GB SSD (Solid-State Drive) and 512MB RAM. It had Linpus Linux Lite as the preloaded operating system. I have to say, I was very disappointed with it. The included Linux distro was very restrictive and made life difficult for anything other than the most basic of tasks. It even has an interface with groups that are similar to the 'Program Manager' interface of Windows 3.1 which hasn't been around since 1993 LOL! Even after some 'modification' to the OS to remove the restrictions, it still seemed like it wasn't as compatible with other systems as I'd like and still seemed restrictive so I decided to get hold of the Windows XP drivers for this machine and go for the dreaded re-format and re-install with XP on it .... BIG MISTAKE!!!! Having only got an SSD inside it (and quite an early generation of SSD might I add) I found that read speeds were blisteringly fast but write speed was soooooooooo slow which made using Windows as the OS almost impossible (bearing in mind that Windows is constantly writing to itself, especially when using the swap file) and found the only way around this was to ditch the far superior file system of NTFS for the older FAT32 file system (which is what Windows 95 & 98 used back in the day) and then on top of all that try and hack the 'Enhanced Write Filter' (preventing long delays whilst writing to the SSD) from Windows XP Embedded into a Windows XP Pro install .... this is no problem for an IT techy (like myself) but not an easy task at all for most end-users. I also tried other Linux distros on this machine and found that Ubuntu ran well (although the versions that were about at the time I got my Acer Aspire One back in 2008 were a bit flaky with the Aspire's wireless adaptor) Have a good think about this before you make the purchase. Later models have improved, but avoid models with an SSD if you want a more familiar Windows interface.
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