A110 unusably slow with Win7

Hi all,

I've just bought a (graded) A110 with 1GB ram, 16gb ssd. I installed Win7 Home Basic, doing a complete reformat and partition of the C drive into one big partition. The machine is now so slow as to be completely unusable - I'm not talking about a bit of lag, but 5 minutes for a boot or shutdown, at least a minute to launch any new application, 30 secs+ just to open a new tab in Firefox! There are also plenty of hangs / spinning circles / not respondings. Just to be sure, I reinstalled Windows, and then for good measure tried installing a version of Win 7 Starter. I haven't installed any software, apart from firefox, not even antivirus.

The task manager never seems to be showing above 10% CPU usage or above 50% physical ram usage. One thing I did note is that the drive light is almost permanently on, like it's going back and forward to the drive for everything. The drive is (or claims to be) running in Ultra DMA mode 4. In Device Manager there are three "Base System Devices" that are unidentified, no idea what these might be.

I'm guessing this isn't normal, and i want to establish whether it's just an installation issue, or if there's actually some sort of hardware fault that's causing the bottleneck. Any ideas?

 

Sorry it has been so long since your post and no one has replied. I haven't visited the forum for awhile. Here is what I suggest: Use windows "tiny7rev1" via torrent download; add ram if you can and install "flashfire" from http://flashfire.org/forum/index.php. I have this on my 8gb A110 and it boots in less than one minute and is completely stable and fast. Good luck.
James

 

Also, apologies for the late reply.

A 16GB SSD is a little small for Win7. I think when I upgraded to Win7 the OS took up at least 12GB, which must only leave you with a couple of GB (you never really get the full 16 in the first place). The stock 16GB Intel SSD might be a little slow too. And while 1GB of RAM is alright for XP, its might be a little tight again for Win7 - 800+ MB of memory is normally in use on my A110, without any applications running...

The following things might help you:

1) As you have an SSD, make sure defrag is disabled. I would personally recommend disabling superfetch too, plus maybe Windows Search as well - turning off all three of these services should noticeably help to reduce disk activity after bootup into Windows.

2) Definitely replace your 512MB stick of RAM with a 1GB stick - to give you 1.5GB in total (i.e. including the RAM soldered to the MB) - this will help a LOT. RAM is cheap, only about £10.

3) As mentioned FlashFire could help speed up the SSD, although when I tried it out I honestly couldn't tell. Also if you have a nice big SD card in your expansion slot you could enable ReadyBoost on it. Both bits of software are free so its worth a try.

4) Firefox - its a great browser but its got a bit bloated. I recommend turning off the block reported attack sites and web forgeries options on the security tab of the options dialog box (under Tools). Whenever Firefox launches it downloads an updated database of such sites to your SSD and it can be quite a big db - slowing your Internet connection and causing a LOT of drive activity. Turning it off really made FF far more repsonsive for me.

5) Set Windows Update to 'check for updates but let you choose if you want to downlaod and install'. Otherwise when you turn your netbook on and connect to web it'll do it all automatically - again impacting your Internet connection for web browsing and causing a good deal of disk activity.

I have all these quick and easy tweaks implemented (except for FlashFire) and they all work very well for me indeed. Win7 is performing just perfectly.

 

I would just repeat my suggestions. Tiny7 is 1.9 gb installed and flashfire increased the read/write speeds three-fold (tested) and has made it it an excellent performer. With the super talent you would probably not see the difference because of the better performance from the get-go. Sure would like to make that switch in mine! Was it difficult to pull off? Did you get the purpose-made drive? My problem here in Thailand is to get something like that shipped w/o customs "doubling" the price!
James

 

Yes I agree, its definitely worth trying FlashFire. Yes, I got the purpose-made SuperTalent, installation was very easy. The hardest part was removing the ferite block from the stock Intel SSD, so I could stick it back onto the new one (later realised it was really easy if you disconnect the zif cable from both the MoBo AND the SSD - and then gently twist the block off!).

I ordered the SuperTalent from the USA, as UK sellers were trying to double the price and availability was very scarce here. I would recommend it to everyone. My Win7 AOA outperforms my friends' much newer Dell Mini 10s and Samsung netbooks. They really hate that!