Okay… XP on the Aspire One has been a many week trial and error process. I’ve installed XP about 6 times already on the One and I’ve finally gotten it down pat. But not without some missteps.

After the nLite disaster I went with just a normal full XP install. This worked well but things were hella slow. I decided perhaps it’d be a good idea to move my Program Files to a much quicker SD Card. This sounds easy and it would have been if I were not at the helm. Firstly, I could not move Program Files to a removable drive so I had to find a way to make the one think that my 8GB SD card was an internal disk drive. Pinoyboy was helpful with this and pointed me to how to do it on the eeePC and it worked perfectly on the One. Next I copied the files over and began to edit the registry. I did a find on C:\Program and three hours later I had gotten thru all the changes, only to realize that I should have searched for C:\Pro as there are entries for C:\PROGRA~1\. I spent another hour doing the rest of the changes and then reboot and viola program files on the D: drive.

Things seemed to have pepped up and I went on to my next idea. Dual booting the original Linux OS with Windows. I headed back over to the AspireOneUser Forums to ask and that’s when i noticed the thread on how to speed up XP on the One. There were hints like turning off indexing, page files, caching etc. I found a few good ideas but there was one suggestion that I didn’t even believe, they suggested that FAT32 formatting was preferred over NTFS. This didn’t seem right to me but I decided to give it a try. Well they were right! The OS installed in a third of the time. It booted faster and took less time to get into the OS. Software installed faster and everything was peppier. Also this time I thought… isn’t their some sort of Find and Replace for the registry? Sure enough there was and I made my four hours worth of changes in less than 30 seconds! Everything seemed to be working great now but I was having quite a few Blue Screens and I could not sort out why. I decided to try to install the OS one last time and not move the Program Files. I am thinking maybe there is intermittent read lags or something form the SD card.

I tried to install the OS via the USB jump drive again and for some reason I just could NOT get it to work, so in frustration I took a DVD drive out of my old Gateway PC and hooked it up to one of my external hard drive enclosures. I think this was the best idea. XP installed quickly and cleanly and it seems pretty solid. Hopefully my woes are behind me.