I am trying to help a relative who just bought a Netbook with XP
Home. It's an Acer Aspire One, with a gig of RAM, Atom processor, and
8 gig solid state hard drive. I have the same one, but with a normal
hard drive, which is 160 gigs, and it's very fast.

The one with the SSHD, however, was very slow out of the box, so slow
that it's basically useless. The green hard drive indicator light
never shuts off once it gets to Windows during startup. It stays on
the you can feel the area underneath the hard drive get hot. I did
the usual tweeks to make it faster, such as going with optimal
performance compressing files, and XP classic mode, but that didn't do
anything. Then I tried getting disabling indexing, changing the
virtual memory, eliminating unnecessary startup items, etc. It took
hours, but then when I restarted it, it seemed fine. The green hard
drive light did not come on much, once everything was loaded up.

This morning, however, when I went back to it, to do a malware scan,
it was very slow again. Another thing I noticed is that whenever I
change the "appearance" to Windows classic, it starts up to Windows
XP. Also, even if I get things like Solitaire and the browser to run
reasonably fast, accessing something like the properties of something
takes much longer than on any computer I've ever had (and that's going
back to the 1980s).

Any thoughts about this? TIA.

montygraham wrote:

> I am trying to help a relative who just bought a Netbook with XP
> Home. It's an Acer Aspire One, with a gig of RAM, Atom processor, and
> 8 gig solid state hard drive. I have the same one, but with a normal
> hard drive, which is 160 gigs, and it's very fast.
>
> The one with the SSHD, however, was very slow out of the box, so slow
> that it's basically useless. The green hard drive indicator light
> never shuts off once it gets to Windows during startup. It stays on
> the you can feel the area underneath the hard drive get hot. I did
> the usual tweeks to make it faster, such as going with optimal
> performance compressing files, and XP classic mode, but that didn't do
> anything. Then I tried getting disabling indexing, changing the
> virtual memory, eliminating unnecessary startup items, etc. It took
> hours, but then when I restarted it, it seemed fine. The green hard
> drive light did not come on much, once everything was loaded up.
>
> This morning, however, when I went back to it, to do a malware scan,
> it was very slow again. Another thing I noticed is that whenever I
> change the "appearance" to Windows classic, it starts up to Windows
> XP. Also, even if I get things like Solitaire and the browser to run
> reasonably fast, accessing something like the properties of something
> takes much longer than on any computer I've ever had (and that's going
> back to the 1980s).
>
> Any thoughts about this? TIA.

I think there's something wrong with it (hardware) and your relative should
take it back and get a different one. The solid state hard drive is really
on the tiny side and if at all possible, I would get a better one. But the
netbook should certainly be perky right out of the box.

Malke
--
MS-MVP
Elephant Boy Computers - Don't Panic!
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/#FAQ

You have a new machine that is obviously defective: why aren't you getting
warranty repair?
If you research the matter you may find that there has been a significant
failure rate in early model SSDs.

montygraham wrote:
> I am trying to help a relative who just bought a Netbook with XP
> Home. It's an Acer Aspire One, with a gig of RAM, Atom processor, and
> 8 gig solid state hard drive. I have the same one, but with a normal
> hard drive, which is 160 gigs, and it's very fast.
>
> The one with the SSHD, however, was very slow out of the box, so slow
> that it's basically useless. The green hard drive indicator light
> never shuts off once it gets to Windows during startup. It stays on
> the you can feel the area underneath the hard drive get hot. I did
> the usual tweeks to make it faster, such as going with optimal
> performance compressing files, and XP classic mode, but that didn't do
> anything. Then I tried getting disabling indexing, changing the
> virtual memory, eliminating unnecessary startup items, etc. It took
> hours, but then when I restarted it, it seemed fine. The green hard
> drive light did not come on much, once everything was loaded up.
>
> This morning, however, when I went back to it, to do a malware scan,
> it was very slow again. Another thing I noticed is that whenever I
> change the "appearance" to Windows classic, it starts up to Windows
> XP. Also, even if I get things like Solitaire and the browser to run
> reasonably fast, accessing something like the properties of something
> takes much longer than on any computer I've ever had (and that's going
> back to the 1980s).
>
> Any thoughts about this? TIA.

There are performance issues with Jmicron controllers on SATA SSDs.
See if you can get more info on the SSD and what it uses.

http://www.dailytech.com/Exclusive+I...icle14004c.htm

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...px?i=3531&p=25

Paul

On Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:03:55 -0700 (PDT), montygraham
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>Any thoughts about this? TIA.

Yes, you probably haven't thought about this but it would be better to
not give vague subject lines because I had to fetch your article to
see if it applied to me too. Other people will skip it because it
doesn't say what it's about.