You are hereHow to speed up Windows XP on the Acer Aspire One SSD
How to speed up Windows XP on the Acer Aspire One SSD
I recently treated myself to a little Acer Aspire One netbook. Its a great little piece of kit but after I eventually installed Windows XP on there I noticed it crawls! This is because the SSD has terribly slow write speeds. You can get around this by making a few tweaks to XP so I have outlined the steps I took to improve things. This should help with any other netbooks that have a cheap slow SSD drive as well. Good luck!
1. Turn of System Restore.
I personally have never used this so best to get rid of it.
Go to Control Panel -> System -> System Restore and disable it.
2. Turn off the paging file
Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Performance Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual Memory -> Change -> No Paging File
Only do this if you have 1GB of RAM or more. This may stop some applications from running which require a page file such as Photoshop, however, I doubt you will be doing any serious graphic work on your netbook so it should be safe to turn it off!
3. Disable any unused Services
The easiest way to do this is to read the guide here:
http://www.blackviper.com/2008/05/19/black-vipers-windows-xp-x86-32-bit-...
Its very comprehensive. Just make sure you don't turn off services required for wireless networking.
4. Create a RAM drive and use it for your web browsing cache and the system temp files. I personally use Firefox for browsing. To do this follow these instructions...
First install the Ram disk driver. You can find it here:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and...
or attached to this guide.
Then open Control Panel and then the System control panel. Go to Advanced and click Environment Variables.
Now edit the TEMP & TMP paths to point to your new RAM disk. Don't forget to change both the User and System variables.
Firefox settings
Type "about:config" in the address bar, press enter.
Right click>new>string>"browser.cache.disk.parent_directory" and type "R:\cache" or "R:\TEMP" or wherever you want the files to be kept on your RAM drive.
set "browser.cache.disk.capacity" to 50000 =50mb
and set "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers" to 0
5. Get yourself a copy of RegToy. This can be used to tweak lots of registry settings that can help. There are some reg settings for loading XP into RAM rather than into the pagefile which helps if you have more than 1GB of RAM. Find the download at the following link or attached to the article:
http://www.trankynam.com/regtoy
6. Install FlashFire SSD Accelerator (formally Flashpoint SSD) to speed up SSD writes. It uses your free RAM as a write cache and makes a huge difference. Download the latest version from these links or from the bottom of this page:
https://wiki.cc.gatech.edu/epl/index.php/FlashFire
7. Install a1ctl for fan control and a few other tweaks. Available from here or at the bottom of this page:
http://nodadev.wordpress.com/pc-projects/a1ctl/
Please register and add any more info you can about speeding up XP on the Aspire One SSD.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| ramdisk.zip | 150.44 KB |
| a1ctl_v1.0.rar | 86.06 KB |
| FlashFire099.zip | 71.05 KB |
| regtoysetup.zip | 1.63 MB |
- Acer Aspire One
- Acer Aspire One
- ASUS Eee PC
- Classes of computers
- Computing
- Dell Inspiron Mini Series
- epl
- http://flashfire.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=df4e8d0752da33131aeee37c8d840779
- http://flashfire.org/xe
- http://k-n.co.cc
- http://k-n.co.cc/regtoy
- http://nodadev.wordpress.com/pc-projects/a1ctl
- http://www.blackviper.com/2008/05/19/black-vipers-windows-xp-x86-32-bit-service-pack-3-service-configurations
- http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm
- http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server
- http://www.mydigitallife.info/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server
- http://www.trankynam.com/regtoy
- Linux based devices
- Memory management
- Netbooks
- Paging
- RAM
- RAM disk
- Ram disk driver
- Solid-state drive
- Technology Internet
- Virtual Memory
- web browsing cache
- Windows Vista
- Windows XP
- wireless networking
- XP
Yeah, Flashfire really works, but it is destroying windows by every restart. It is corrputing files, and after few days your windows will be unusable...
i read something about older flashpoint dont have these problem, so tried thath to speed up your SSD, or try another program, SSD accelerator, for example SuperCache, i read positive reviews about this, but i do not test it yet.
I bought a new Acer Aspire One ZG5 well over a year ago but it was sooooo slow out of the box I avoided using it. As others have already commented (and with which I agree completely) - it was bordering on unusable it was so slow.
However, I'm pleased to report, that having installed Flashfire it runs as briskly as I believe it should !
Many thanks for your advice re: "Flashfire" - very much appreciated.
Arthur
I installed Flashfire and my Acer now has a reason for not being sold for spare parts - thankyou!!!
Claire
THANK YOU :) I am a Computer Engineer with quite extensive experience. However, the ridiculously slow performance on a Customer's Acer Aspire one after re-installing XP had me baffled for days.
Until I discovered your page.
After installing Flashfire and rebooting the difference was EXTRAORDINARY.
Thank you so much.
With kind regards
Chris Sadler
CJS Systems
http://www.cjssystems.co.uk
thnx flashfire work so nice
I was contemplating making a HDD investment as proposed by other sites. I am glad I did not. These straight forward solutions Save me both time and money, without the risk of taking opening up the netbook. Greatly appreciate your efforts to improve the user experience on the older ACER Aspire One's. Take care and be well, Big Jim.
Only installed Flashfire so far but what a difference already. Excellent! Thanks for the tip!
i read through all of this. Install fireflash. Do it is great everything will be better and faster blah blah. so I did, downloaded it from the link provided, installed it it asked to restart my laptop and that was it. It never started again. So yeah if you want to loose all your data and pay a hefty price for a recovery then go ahead and install that little piece of shit.
I never had any issues with flashfire. I definitely didn't have any issues with data loss. If you don't have the technical knowledge to do your own recovery you probably shouldn't be trying things such as flashfire.
Also, in what way did it not start? Did you get an error message or a BSOD? Maybe somebody could help you if you were more specific about the problem you had.
like a couple of the other comments on this page, i was about to hurl my zg5 aspire one (16gb SSD) out the window after re-installing xp in the hope that it would be clean and run nice and quick.
Actually, it was atrocious - practically unuseable!! After following your guide, specifically the flashfire, the machine is running like a dream!!
Thanks so much for posting this.
You are a genious, man. I even skipped steps 3, 4 and 5 and but installing FireFire SSD Accelerator made the biggest difference. XP now runs like a F1!
Wanted to share...
almost thru this ASPIRE ONE totally out tonight!
Took 11 minutes by the clock to boot, took at least four minutes every single click of the mouse, every load of a program, each image loaded on a single webpage, each link on any webpage, each object loaded at least two minutes per--driving me nuts! So not worth the aggravation and ready for the trash heap.
Nothing to lose-final moments surfing found this about FLASHPOINT, downloaded 099 installer, clicked Run, seconds only then a forced reboot...
reboot took less than 40 seconds--hopeful but not going to get hopes up...
clicked IE--when I say it was up and running in less than 4 seconds ready for me to mouse click and type search words into Google box that's no exaggeration.
I am absolutely amazed at the days I spent trying to optimize XP services (blackviper.com), turn off unneeded start programs, optimize my wireless power saving, not one thing worked!! and on XP SP3 I was still looking at more than 50 Windows updates I needed to do with only an 8gb SSD and this SLOOWWWWWWWW speed!
This went from slamming it hard into the trash bin tonight, to back to loving it (surfing as fast as I do on my high end pcs now!).
To those hesitating trying an unknown download, but not wanting to give up XP, not wanting to reformat to FAT32 because oh my gosh going to reinstall all THAT again?! -- please consider trying this fix. In my case, worked like a dream!
THANKS THANKS THANKS for posting and suggesting FLASHPOINT! Sorry, I was so thrilled that it worked and so busy typing how astounded I was that I totally forgot to say MANY THANKS! And notice the date--SEPT 2010 and still saving the day (and in many ways by my way of thinking ACER's reputation)!
I've seen several facts-somewhat a range of reports, but I believe I saw where this SSD on my Aspire One has a read speed of 20 but a write speed of only 5???? That seems to make no sense, to install this hardware but not also install something that ups the write speed ...
Acer owes FLASHPOINT a big thanks says me for pulling reputation out of the fire.
Thanks again!
Glad it helped! Flashpoint is pretty amazing on the slow SSD's.
i was tweaked my aspire one but still very slow. But after install flashfire...wow! it's very2 amazing...like using hdd..thanks...sorry my english not good
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.
It's really work, fantastic, my netbook become very fast like my vista, weehaahhh.....
Glad to know it helped!
Dear friend, as a student i work day n night to buy acer netbook, it got fucked off after installing flashfire. there is no way to restore coz 1st thing u told disable system restore
You should always perform a backup when installing software such as flashfire. I've never had any issues with it. Was this on XP? What exact problem did you have? You are not exactly specific. I'm guessing Windows built-in restore would not help you with whatever issue you had anyway.
Also this is just advice. You do not have to follow any of these instructions and I take no responsibility if you have issues. I did not create flashfire. Its open source software.