I have a general inquiry. I have an Acer Aspire that has XP Home on it and my friend has one that has Linpus. She bought the Linpus version because it was black (they didn't have the Black colour for XP home version). She doesn't like Linpus, I was wondering if I could use my XP recovery disc and load it on her Acer to override the Linpus operating system and hers would now be running XP home. I know how to make the USB stick, just wondered if I CAN do this while still maintaining the functionality of the netbook (still able to connect to the internet, use the webcam, etc). Both are 110 models checking on the Acer website the drivers seem to be the same for all 110 models so I think it would work just want someone's opinion before hand.
Yarr, ye be talking piracy thar. She doesn't own a license to use that copy of Windows. It might work, but probably won't, and if it does, you'll probably get lots of scary messages from Microsoft's WGA spyware. If you want a legitimate copy of Windows on there, you're probably going to have to: 1. Buy an OEM copy 2. Buy a USB CD/DVD drive unless you feel like making a lot of manual changes to the Windows install scripts. Windows is not designed to install from/to USB, though it can be... coerced. There are better versions of Linux that can be installed, Linpus, as the name suggests, is Linux, only full of pus. There is probably some enthusiast distro or set of instruction on how to install Ubuntu out there, the AA1 didn't appear to have the same build quality as the Eee when I bought my netbook, so I can't help you too much there. Linux is a lot more flexible with installing from/to USB, so should be pretty straightforward if you can find a tutorial. If you still want to install Windows, I suggest you look for help in the Windows forum.
Thanks for the reply and I don't want to do anything with piracy so sorry if that was out of line. If she buys a copy of XP Home (they're selling relatively cheap here in Canada) and I make a USB bootable image can I install that on hers and it will work? I did some research and people say Home takes up 1.2GB of space so that shouldn't be too much. We both have the AA1 with the 8GB SSD as we both want to use it for Microsoft Office and Student. Is the retail copy of XP Home the same one installed on my Laptop? I don't want a to buy it and install it if it is really laggy. Any insight is greatly appreciated.
I ditched Linpus on my 120GB Aspire One, as it was freezing/locking up. Linpus seemed quite decent other than that (as in everything was configured and it had pretty menus LOL). But i don't do freezing and locking up so it had to go. I found a tutorial on the internet for configuring a USB stick to make it bootable for updating the BIOS (as there were a handful of BIOS updates since i purchased the Acer), then just hooked up a standard optical drive (in a USB2.0 enclosure) and installed XP Pro. Machine runs for weeks at a time without issue or even needing restarting (machine is generally used for *cough* downloads *cough*). As Mick says, there are indeed better versions of Linux out there, in my case i needed the machine to be XP based. (Had deliberately bought the Acer with Linux as it was cheaper and i liked the Linpus at first (yes, i was swayed by the pretty menus), it just turned out the Linpus was unstable ie crap). There are ways of stripping down XP to fit on the 8GB SSD version of the Acer, it looks fairly straightforward (i've read of people using nLite, i think it's called), i deliberately didn't buy the SSD version as i wanted better performance than an SSD could provide. But it seems that (almost) adequate performance can be gained from XP being stripped down. A better fit for the SSD might be Linux in your case i think.. that would avoid the performance issues with the SSD...
There are reports (I don't know how true they are) of xp killing the ssd variants in le than a year due to the continual page file writing xp does all the time. Linpus seems to have the swap area loaded into ram.. a good move, but that might be what makes it so sucky.. not 100% sure. I stick a dreamlinux sort of homebrew variant on these and they look like macs and run sweet... with the usual wireless bollox messing about stupidity to get it to work. Puppy should run a treat as well.. it usually does on acer hardware.
Thanks for the replies Should I just sell the Linpus Acer and get an XP based one for her? She will settle for the Blue version because she doesn't like the way Linpus is arranged. Are the retail versions that they sell in stores (they do sell XP Home on the 8GB SSD version) full Windows home versions or are they cut down versions?
I presume the XP machines have a full version of the OS. It could be that one of the many BIOSes released, have fixed the freezing issue, or it could just be that the freezing was in Linpus itself, i just couldn't be bothered with it myself. If the machine is only going to be used for office anyway you could leave Linpus on or replace with a.n.other Linux. I'll see if i can find the Acer BIOS page. Just found my notes re how i updated the BIOS btw, see here - http://www.netbooktech.com/2008/10/01/instructions-for-updating-the-acer-aspire-one-bios/ I've got BIOS v3305 on mine, looks like latest is 3309, not touching mine as it's 100% stable. Downloaded it so that i can post the changelog here in case there's anything useful been fixed of late... (mine came with BIOS 3114 so i'll only post changelog details from there onwards, apologies for the amount of info, i often write posts in order to reference them later when more cobwebs hide info that i need) - Anyways, not a lot going on BIOS-wise, i'm guessing the freezing i experienced was Linpu-related edited for alcohol-releated typo's
Thanks she returned and got the XP version but was wondering now lol if there was a way to merge the SD slot and SSD to make the 8GB one big 16GB so we can install Office and Student which is 7GBs total.
Yes you can under Linpus, and no doubt under other linuxes, under XP i have no idea, you'd have to google for that..
