why is the Acer Aspire so slow

First post so please be gentile with me

Up until recently most of the family have been using Asus Eee netbooks, however due to my daughter giving her netbook a bath in cola, we chose to give my daughter my wif'e netbook and purchased a new Aspire from PC World. This model has a 16GB SSD and 1GB RAM and came with a form of Linux installed, which my wife wanted replaced with XP. I used nlite to remove some basic things like languages and keyboards that we don't require, but that was as far as I went, leaving most things in tact. However we noticed that the machine seems so slow, especially on boot up. I ran ATTO and noticed that the results peaked at the 256 range with 15MB/s write and 39MB/s read, which is about par with the stock Eee SSD's of same size.

I've tried to speed things up by turning off indexing, zero page files etc (most of the normal things) but it still seems slow, with the HDD led often constantly lit. However when programs are running, navigating with in the application is quite acceptable.

Does anyone have any further checks or suggestions on making this machine a bit faster ? (other than installing a Runcore SSD, which, unlike the Eee, seem a very big job involving a complete strip down of the Aspire)

 

There are any number of tips which can speed things up, and most can be found by trawling this forum. From my own personal experience and your mileage may vary, the most important are:

Absolutely do not format the SSD with the NTFS file system, FAT32 shows a dramatic improvement.
If you have enough RAM, turn off Pagefile
Turn off Prefetch
Most stunningly useful tip of all: install the latest freebie FlashPoint (links can be found in this forum); makes a truly astonishing difference through its caching miracle!
Turn off System Restore
Turn off the Recycle Bin unless you really need it.
Finally for even better performance, download the demo version of eBoostr. The demo version is fully functional for four hours at a time after bootup and can make a huge difference by caching frequently-used commands either to your RAM if you have enough, or to an external memory card or flash drive.

There are other useful tips in this forum, aimed mainly at the AAO's principal bottleneck, writing-back to the SSD. I also suggest you download and install the most current BIOS, 3309, from the Acer site before doing any of the above.

I run a heavy-duty version of XP Pro SP3 on my little 8GB SSD AAO, including notorious resource hogs like the latest CorelDraw, and of course Office 2007. Even so, with all of the above and a number of startup apps, my bootup time is about 30 seconds (down from more than four minutes after the fresh XP install!) and on second and subsequent usage Office applications, Opera, etc., will fire up in about four seconds! Good luck -- it's a fun challenge!

 

Thanks for the prompt reply, and tips.

There is a very active thread on the Eee user forum regarding the flashpoint software, so I might take a ghost image for backup and try that along with eBoostr to see what it does, at least I will be in a position to restore the PC if I encounter problems.

Yes that sounds like our machine.. loads to desktop OK but then takes about the same time as that before the HDD led goes out and the machine is usable.

 

Forget Eboostr, it won't do any help.... Flashpoint and FAT32 and no swap and indexing are the ones with the most impact. Install 1.5gb RAM also helps alot.

 

Have you ever used eboostr before? Eboostr has increased the responsiveness of my AAO by a lot.

 

yes I have. It takes too much time putting stuff in the SDHC card. Very little gains. Flashpoint has been the utility that greatly improves the SSD speed on the AAO 110.

 

It takes a while to put everything on the SDHC card on there, but after that, eboostr will update them when there's very little disk activity thus not affecting the performance.
For me, gains were like night and day. Multitasking used to lag, but not it's smooth as butter. After using eboostr, the percieved speed is about as fast as my quadcore desktop computer.

 

eboostr has been around awhile. if it's as good as you say, then it should be very popular by now. Compared with the relatively new flashpoint, and yet it has an ever growing fan base already. hehe. anyway, I'll give eboostr another try later. Anyway my AAO has beed demoted to a testbed netbook. I'll see how it goes this time around.

 

If you have fast SD/SDHC card and heavily loaded accessed disk, eboostr will be very effective. My SDcard is a Adata 4GB SDHC that has about 25MB/s read speed and 0.1ms access time. Right now, I'm converting a couple H.264 HD videos, running zune software, live messenger, internet explorer, foobar..etc. 100% cpu ussage on both the cpu and its hyperthreaded core, HDD ussage is over 70%, all of my ram used + 300MB page file, yet AAO shows no signs of lagging. Without eboostr running, the netbook will lag and switching between opened programs takes a good 10-20s before anything will respond.

The reason why eboostr works so well on acer aspire one is because it has a PCI expressed based card reader. If it was a usb based card reader, the cpu overhead alone would make the netbook slower or at least shows now improvements.

 

Is your AAO the SSD or HD version? I just tried eboostr 3 latest build, and it did not do much good. My SDHC btw is a Sandisk Extreme III, 25mb/s read/write. I think the benefits will be on the HD version AAO, since there will be no access lag if the SD is used. On the SSD version AAO, there's no perceived difference. At least from what I have observed. Oh well, good that it works that good on your AAO. On mine it just added a few seconds on my boot time. So I uninstalled it.

 

I have AOA150 with 160GB hdd. It lowered my boot time by a couple seconds ( from 20 seconds to around 15-17.5).

On an HDD version, HDD offers fast throughput with moderate access time which is utilized by page file and the eboostr and sd card offers very fast access time at moderate speed. When combined, it's fast throughtput and fast acess time.

 

Like I said, the benefits are on the HD version A150.... the TS has an SSD version AAO.

 

Absolutely the best benefit from eBoostr comes if you have enough RAM to make it eBoostr's first caching destination of choice. It appears to assemble a list of your most common actions over time in a separate file on the SDD, then works from this in RAM. On my machine (and as I said early in this thread, your mileage may vary) eBoostr DEFINITELY helps.

And it doesn't seem to be an 'either/or' situation with FlashPoint and eBoostr either, as one entry in this thread suggested. I run both, and together with all the other tweaks they have performed a near-miracle on an SDD machine which originally reduced me to frustration and frequent trips to the kettle immediately after converting it to XP -- originally one of those 'Ohmigod what have I done?' moments which FlashPoint and eBoostr between them absolutely fixed.

And hey, the demo eBoostr is free so what's to lose giving it a try? If it works, keep it in its four-hour version or pay for a full one. If it doesn't, ditch it!