Technical Reviews and Geek Toys

I am so jazzed! Ever since I purchased my Acer Aspire One the one thing I have not been happy about is the overall speed. The model I purchased came with Windows XP Home, 1GB RAM and two 8GB SSD cards instead of a conventional hard drive. The internal SSD card is drive C and the external SSD card, when it is plugged in is drive D. It was very obvious the bottleneck was the the drive as the drive light was always on solid. I did several things to try to improve the performance. Virtual memory was not enabled so I enabled 1250MB on drive D. The SSD cards were formated FAT32 so I changed them to NTFS. Both of these changes seemed to help a little, but not enough. I guess the final straw was when I was on a support call and I couldn't get the configuration spreadsheet to open. Now for the rest of the story...

Follow up:

Ubuntu 9.04 was released last week. As part of the release Canonical Announced Availability of Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix. Reading the announcement my eyes 'perked up' when I saw that Remix had been fully tested on the Aspire One.

Installation of the Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix was so easy. Just select a location near you and hit the Begin Download button. Then while the file is downloading you can check out the help page. Since the Aspire One doesn't have a CDROM drive, you will need to create a bootable USB Flash Drive. This process will erase your stick so make sure it is backed up. I downloaded Win32 Disk Imager,the Windows version and after verifying the USB image downloaded ok I followed the five simple steps and I was ready to install.

The installation was just as easy as every other Ubuntu installation. The installer asks several simple questions (like your name and the area where you live), you select the drive to install to and pretty much sit back and watch. Ubuntu Remix has two desktops for you to choose from; the standard Gnome desktop and the Netbook desktop which I really like. The application menus are found on the left. When a category is selected, its contents is shown in the center column. The right column contains the file system and remote connections.

So after using Ubuntu Remix for a few days all I can say is I like it. The overall performance has been dramatically improved. A cold boot from pressing the power switch to the appearance of the keyring password prompt to access the wireless network is a count (one thousand one...) of 37. Firefox takes a count of 3 and OpenOffice Writter takes a count of 18 the first time it is opened (a count of 4 after that).

I have discovered very few problems. Suspend and Hibernate don't seem to work quite right and the right side SSD reader doesn't recognize a card that is inserted. Hibernate says there isn't enough swap space so that may also be why suspend isn't working. I haven't had a chance to research the SSD reader issue. The install and the 850MB that I have managed to put into my home directory still leaves 3.5GB free so I am plumb happy. With XP on the machine I had to move My Documents to drive D as I was running out of space on drive C. If you have a Netbook I would really recommend Ubuntu Remix to replace your Windows XP home.