Optimizing Acer Aspire One Netbook with XP

Note: if you are look for the driver for the SM Bus Controller in XP, use The Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility. There you will see a link Get the utility, which will help you install the missing drivers.

Once get into computer science and IT and people know that, you will never stop giving tech support. As a result I came to enjoy it and always welcome new stuff that I have never played with. This week I got my hands on  a Acer Aspire One Netbook, with Windows XP, 500 MB RAM, 8GB Flash Disk N270 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom processor .

The owner (and friend) told me there was something wrong with the sound, so I decided to check it out. First impression on case and keyboard was good, but boy was it slow in booting and lagging when using it, so I decided to make it faster. Here is what I did:

Tip #1

Go to Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System

Then click on the Advance Tab

Then Click On Settings and you will see the following window:

Here select Adjust for best performance

This will remove any eye candy and give you a look similar to Windows 2000.

Tip #2

Uninstall any programs you don’t need and any bundled antivirus. I recommend you a lightweight one like AVG (which is free).

Tip #3

Remove any startup your computer, some software and services that you need may boot. To remove them go to

Start->Run

Type msconfig and then ENTER.You will get this screen:

Click on the Startup Tab, where you can see and disable which process startup when you boot. In this case I disabled Google Update, MSN Messenger and other stuff. If you don’t know what to remove, try or go the the task manager and see which process that you don’t need are consuming much of the memory.

Next go the the Services Tab.

There you do the same thing, look which services you don’t need.

Tip #4

Defragment the hard drive, in the case of this Netbook it had 40% fragmentation and after this I saw a noticeable change. To defragment your harddrive, go to:

Start-> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter

Tip # 5

Patience.

If you have a Laptop with a Atom Intel N270 processor, you need to have some patience, because it lacks L1 cache and its L2 cache is only 512 KB. Means that it can’t process many instructions as other with more L2 Cache. Also the Bus speed is 533 MHz, which means that data coming from memory come slower, almost by a magnitude of three, than the speed of the processor, which creates a bottle neck. So if you see that the clock icon in your mouse, don’t start clicking on other places, give it some time. It doesn’t matter if it has Hyper Threading (you will see two CPU graphs in the Task Manager), you will need to wait, the speed of the processor is to fast compared to the speed of the other components. However modern processors get a bit of help from the L1 and L2 cache, which store data and instructions that can be access at fast speeds.