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.

Yesterday I said hi to a classmate of mine and while going through the routine: “how are you.. what’s up .. blablabla”, he told me he had trouble with a new “mini” laptop he just bought. He installed Ubuntu on it and the wireless wasn’t working. So, I asked him if it was a Asus Eee and he told me “Yes”.

I’m a fan of the Asus Eee and netbooks in general, because they are practical, “cheap” and can replace a paper notebook. Also they could proliferate the use of 3G Internet, only if mobile operators could see the potential and market it in a smart way.

I’m not going to write down a howto however I will reference to the sites I used and point out what, problems, what was done differently, etc. So the first thing you need to do is STFW . And started with the follow page:

http://www.tommcfarlin.com/2008/07/11/ubuntu-on-the-eee-pc-900/

I tried two of the fixes the post regarding Ubuntu on Asus Eee. The shutdown fix, worked without problems. However the wireless fix didn’t work all the way. First I couldn’t download the package because the madwifi domain couldn’t be resolve. A quick search, permitted me to find out that madwifi had a problem with the DNS and they changed their domain to madwifi-project.org. The second challenge I got, was when I tried to compile the madwifi drivers, since I received some errors on the make:

:~/madwifi$ make
Checking requirements… ok.
Checking kernel configuration… ok.
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/build SUBDIRS=/home/ndaula/madwifi modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.27-7-generic’
CC [M]  /home/ndaula/madwifi/ath_hal/ah_os.o
cc1: warnings being treated as errors
/home/ndaula/madwifi/ath_hal/ah_os.c: In function ‘ath_hal_lookup_register_name’:
/home/ndaula/madwifi/ath_hal/ah_os.c:451: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments
make[3]: *** [/home/ndaula/madwifi/ath_hal/ah_os.o] Error 1
make[2]: *** [/home/ndaula/madwifi/ath_hal] Error 2
make[1]: *** [_module_/home/ndaula/madwifi] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.27-7-generic’
make: *** [modules] Error 2

Honestly I was to lazy to try to go into the code and check what was the problem. So, after trying, updating and doing everything that was in page, I decided to give it a rest. After a couple of hours, I went back and tried to fix the this issue. After searching the Web for the error on the make, I ended up in the follow page:

http://madberry.org/2008/11/how-to-get-atheros-ar242x-to-work-on-810-intrepid-ibex/

Given that it was similar process to the first page, I decided to give a try. Here, instead of using the drivers from madwifi, they use the drivers from kernerl.org. So, I download them, made the make (which took a long long time) and then continue with make install, unload and load of the new drivers. And after a reboot it work good.

[Side note]

By the way, I think madberry has a script that updates the url of the tar with the driver. You see, every day kernel.org changes the name of the tar, with “today” date. This is pretty neat since visitors can follow the tutorial step by step without thinking.