Better SSD XP Experience Summary

I'm going to try to make more of a sticky-style thread where we can have the XP speed improvement steps for the SSD version all in one place. I believe that was the purpose of the "Steps to a happy XP experience" post, but that thread's now 25 pages long. Please post below with any modifications you believe I should make to this post.

PROBLEM: Acer Aspire One SSD version (at least with the Intel SSD) has severe write speed problems, which becomes much more severe with lots of small writes. This makes a default XP install completely unusable. Below are some suggestions on how to improve responsiveness and usability in XP.

1. Format SSD as FAT32 (normal, not quick) : This seems to be the most widely used and significant speedup. It's somewhat unfortunate, since under normal circumstances NTFS seems to handle small writes better than FAT32, and NTFS also permits compression which should actually provide a speed boost, since the Atom processor is plenty fast and the real bottleneck is disk write speed. Compression would have meant smaller writes, widening the effective disk write bandwidth. Also, FAT32 doesn't allow files bigger than 4GB, but how many 4GB files are you going to have on an 8GB SSD anyway? Alas, NTFS appears to cause the AA1's SSD to crawl up into the fetal position. One suggestion was to use a larger block size for NTFS (32k or 64k, rather than the default 4k), but this would require preformatting the SSD prior to running the XP install and would also prevent compression (block sizes larger than 4k don't permit compression). Also, I've noticed that my FAT32 partition which seems to work fine also has 4k block sizes, so this may not be a valid suggestion. Lastly, I haven't tried it, but a good idea with NTFS might be to set the NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate registry setting, reducing excessive writes. Overall, however, sad as it is, the consensus has been to go with FAT32.

2. Disable D2D in the BIOS : This is some system recovery tool. If you're installing XP, you've killed the system that was intended to be recovered anyway (Linux), so it's not necessary. Besides that, it appears to interfere with XP somehow, so turning it off appears to be a good thing.

3. Install alternate chipset/vga drivers - either the ones for the MSI Wind or possibly the latest ones from Intel's site : I'm somewhat doubtful about this option, but it also appears to be a consensus smash hit. The reason I doubt is because the only driver I can see mattering is the ICH7-M SATA driver, which (correct me if I'm wrong, anyone) I believe is actually the same driver across all three sources (Acer, MSI, Intel). Even though the driver install will indicate a different version, that's actually because the install package contains drivers for every Intel chipset imaginable. The driver that actually gets installed on the AA1 is always the version 8.2.0.1011 driver from 11/15/2006, no matter which set of drivers I install. That being said, there's quite the consensus that this helps, so maybe it does but we just don't understand why. It's probably best to go ahead and take your pick of MSI or Intel drivers and install them. Of course, others have indicated the Acer drivers work fine. So, you're on your own on this one. One way or another, it's probably best to install whichever driver you choose before you install anything else.

4. Turn off your page file : Yes, you can actually turn that off. This eliminates swapping to the writingly-challenged SSD you just bought. However, it does randomly kill running programs (such as your anti-virus software!) if you run out of memory, so perhaps you are simply trading a slow computer for one that randomly kills your browser or whatever else you're running. So, this is a good option, but you will definitely want the extra gig of RAM (at least PC4200, if you're wondering). My 512 MB AA1 ran out of memory trying to boot up, and I didn't have much running on startup.

5. Turn off system restore : This will eliminate a few writes, and save space.

6. Disable prefetch : This eliminates some writes.

7. Install Firefox 3, disable malware protection and saving session state : These settings can be modified by going to about:config in the address bar. Malware protection does egregious, seemingly endless and pointless writes to disk, and saving your session state writes out lots of small files every couple of minutes. I've not seen it be necessary to get so drastic as to disable browser cache and browsing history altogether. In the past, while running Firefox through portableapps on a thumb drive (which, of course, is effectively a USB SSD), I've seen that reformatting from FAT32 to NTFS solved the speed problem caused by these writes, but as we already know, that's not an option.

8. Disable the write cache on the SSD : Several have suggested that this helps, although several posts have indicated that this was not necessary and even counter-intuitive (write cache helps slow drives). While you're in there messing around with hard drives and controllers, make sure that the disk is running in Ultra DMA mode, not PIO.

9. Turn off the windows indexing service : Less writes!

10. XP SP3 : Whether it's through NLite, a true XP SP3 CD, or installing SP3 after the fact (though this wastes some space on disk), SP3 is probably the best way to go. NLiters love to eliminate unnecessary files and turn off unnecessary services and move page files or My Documents folders to alternate drives (SD cards, etc.). If that's your cup of tea, have at it. 8GB is plenty and most of the default services don't make that much of a difference, but you can certainly trim some of the fat off if you see fit. (If you're going to NLite - poster aspirin suggests "be sure to select the multicore settings as described in a few of the posts, and leave the manual set up files in place.")

11. WLAN drivers : Some have suggested the MSI Wind drivers, some have suggested the Acer drivers are fine. At any rate, installing the latest drivers you can find fixes the problem with the WLAN LED.

12. Suspend problem (power light is green, but computer won't come back up from suspend) : Some have suggested that using the generic Microsoft webcam driver instead of the Acer driver solves this problem (weird, huh?), some have suggested updating the BIOS.

13. Disable Hibernation : Not completely necessary, but saves some space on disk.

14. Disable WLAN power save mode : This eliminates some problems that some users have reported with the WLAN connection dropping out occasionally.

15. Use lightweight programs : Firefox instead of IE, Foxit Reader instead of Adobe Reader, etc. When you find that a bloated Windows program that you're used to using doesn't perform particularly well on the AA1, there's usually a free, non-bloated alternative. Which AntiVirus solution you use can also have a major impact on performance (read: whatever you do, don't use the bloated commercial versions of McAfee or Norton - these are almost as bad as the viruses that they *supposedly* protect against).

16. Give up and just buy the HD version : This works, but it's crap. There's no reason why we should have to do the above 15 steps just to get XP working reasonably. I didn't have near this many problems with a much weaker machine in the EEE 701. The AA1 is actually a decently powerful machine. There's got to be some sort of flaw in the driver, since Linux doesn't appear to have this problem as badly. Acer should release a fix for this.

17. EWF : This has been suggested and explained on other threads. Basically it avoids writing to the SSD altogether. Any changes made to the drive are instead made in RAM. Since you don't write to the disk, everything is lost and you keep going back to the same system state after each reboot - writes don't stick, unless you run a command before rebooting that commits all writes to the disk. The speed benefit of this is certain, whether you can deal with the limitations is up to you. Personally, I think that if you follow the first 15 steps, you'll have a pretty good machine. You'll notice that I've tried to stay as non-drastic as possible. (See how I didn't even ask you to disable your browser cache or browser history?) EWF can be considered the most drastic option in both a good way and a bad way, depending on how you look at it. A less drastic version of this would be to use a ramdisk for Windows temporary files, or other constantly changing, relatively useless folders.

18. Other notes : Don't defragment. SSDs don't "fragment" in the traditional sense. No spot on the "disk" is any further away than any other spot. It doesn't matter that your SSD is fragmented any more than your RAM is fragmented. Ever defragment your RAM? (And don't start blabbing about contiguous memory and Java garbage collection - if you know about that stuff, then you know it's not what I'm talking about.)

OPEN QUESTION: Why can't we use NTFS? It's better, generally faster, allows large files, compression, etc. Again, the NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate registry setting would be worth trying if anyone feels like risking returning their AA1's SSD back to the fetal position for a while...

 

Give that man a cookie.

This is the issue that I am hanging on. The atom barely gets the opportunity to flex its muscles with the shackle that is the SSD performance around its legs :|.

 

Applying EWF should be the last step, and the most important one. It has made my Aspire One probably 5x faster, since no writing occurs on the SSD. This works great for me, I do very little writes on the One, and you can commit all changes with ewfmgr c: -commitanddisable -live before shutdown. Anyway, the SSD is very slow on the One, but EWF makes life a lot easier.

 

Edited to reflect starterz' suggestion. I personally don't like EWF, but its pros and cons should be made known to anyone attempting to install XP on an SSD. Good point.

-BJ

 

RAM Drive???

What about redirect some caches (ie, firefox, temp, pagefile...) to a ramdrive?

I did all these steps above (except the hd one ) and mounted an 380MB Ramdisk to host the these caches (i'm on a 1.5GB RAM AA1)

A light and fast antivirus/firewall program help too much. Maybe we can find a good balanced power/weight couple as a default indication? Free or not.

I'm loving AVIRA Free/Spybot in the antivirus/spyware front ... I have tried NOD32 before but AVIRA is lighter. My boot/shutdown times are better now.

I'm not using a firewall but is good to have one. Any advice?

{}s
CreativeBR

 

You make a good point about your choice of antivirus software. I'll try to make a point about that.

I'll also mention the ramdrive, but I'd bet that if you turned off malware protection and session saving in firefox, you'd probably not experience any stalls/stutters. I don't really like disabling browser cache and history or moving it to a ramdrive because those things are actually useful, unlike windows temp files, which would probably be a good candidate for a ramdrive.

Putting your pagefile on a ramdrive is somewhat pointless - you might as well just turn it off. A pagefile is for when you run out of RAM. It doesn't really help to put it IN RAM.

Lastly, I'd imagine that you could get by with the built in Windows Firewall with XP SP2+. It typically comes enabled by default. Check for Windows Firewall under the Control Panel.

 

I guess you will find AVIRA a good option but i cant compare it with AVC because i never used it. Did you?

My XP is the TinyXP rev09 and the bare version i have installed dont have the XP firewall... So i think i will need a 3rd part firewall.

Actually i didnt install Firefox. I have to access some ipCameras that need activeX components that dont work with any other browser but ie. The ie cache in Ram drive is working nice to me.

The Pagefile is a mistery. If i turn it off sometimes windows gives me an alert msg saying that i dont have a pagefile and creates one with the default suggested size in the SSD root. May be its a bug/feature of the TinyXP?

So i have made the minimum pagefile size at ramdisk -> 2MB and it never happened again.

{}s
CreativeBR

 

*Sigh* I should probably brace for the flames, but I don't actually see the need to use TinyXP or an NLited XP - it ends up causing more trouble than it's worth. I think it's a holdover from the original EEE 700/701 days when NLiting was pretty much necessary (especially with the 2GB). 8GB really is plenty of space for a full XP install. You might try that. Then you get your firewall and (probably) your pagefile problems go away.