Acer Aspire One D150 + Windows 7 Ultimate: 6 months on ...

I've spent the last year or so hopping from one operating system to another in a quest to find what works best (for me) on netbooks in general and specifically on the Acer Aspire One(AAO) D150 that I bought in May 2009. That journey took me from the default (as it was then) Windows XP build, through a number of Linux Distributions, to Windows 7 RC, and now to Windows 7 Ultimate.

The thing that is most telling is that I haven't changed my installed operating system in 6 months.

Right from the first boot (half the time taken to book Windows XP) it was obvious that Windows 7 was a different prospect to it's predecessors. It is well thought out, robust, friendly, not a resource drain (despite a number of posts and articles recently trying to imply the opposite). Simple things like the integrated device driver database now mean you can plug in any common USB device - that printer in clients office that you have never used before - and be able to use it straight away, no drivers to download, no reboot required.

Windows 7 has worked so well that I am comfortably sat in my office writing this post with my AAO plugged into an external mouse, keyboard and monitor and having a very comfortable and productive experience. These peripherals aren't essentials either - my AAO has been a more-or-less constant companion since I bought it and I would estimate it gets 12+ hours use just about every day.

Don't think that I only use it to surf and handle my email: I'm launching my new communications agency on the 18th March (PH Digital Communications - take a look at http://www.ph-digital.co.uk) and the brand design, 3D animation, Flash and website programming including some AR (augmented reality work) were all done on my netbook. My installed software ranges from the expected (Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, Sky Player, MS Office) through to the more exotic (Flash 8, Flash CS4, Adobe Creative Suite CS2, Dreamweaver, Blender, Second Life amongst others).

I've made only one hardware change to the netbook - I've swapped it's 1GB standard RAM module for the maximum 2GB, but that's it.

Will I need a more powerful computer? Yes - I'll undoubtedly need a more powerful desktop for animation rendering and larger scale 3D work, and I have an old desktop configured as a server, backup and printer host. Will I trade my netbook up for a laptop? Not in the near future. My AAO has served me flawlessly through buiness presentations and anything I have needed to do whilst out on business and it's 6 hour battery life has been a great help. All from a computer that a grand total of about £300. The extreme portability coupled with enough power and the broad features and stability makes this a winning solution for my needs.

Installing Windows 7 RC on an Acer Aspire One D150.....

Ok. I'm more than a little invested in Linux - I think it's an amazing alternative to MS Windows and has recently upped it's game to deliver something that is as easy to use and install as Windows XP (and takes considerably less time fixing once it has been installed).

Fedora 11 is due out in a few days and it's my plan to review it soon after it is release, so I thought I'd take the next rew days to check out how well an old favourite, OpenSuse 11.1 worked on my nice new Acer Aspire One D150. Well, long story short, not that well ... install was easy enough, but no WLan after the install, so plugged in a cable an opted to install all the updates that were listed as pending. This didn't fix the WLan and nuked the X config - meaning I couldn't boot the machine and was faced with having to pick it apart and fix it. I have this Windows 7 RC disk hanging around so I thought I'd give it a go...

The install is as easy as you could hope for ... answer the questions and wait. All over and done with in about 30-40 minutes and it was good to see everything working from first boot ... all the aero effects work, WLan, Lan, Audio, Webcam ... even the pesky light on the front that shows WLan connection status. Very good.

So I start by installing the obvious applications (Firefox 3, Thunderbird 2, Open Office 3 + JRE, Skype and AVG Free) which all goes smoothly and performance is good. This is an (as yet) un modified netbook so it only has 1GB of RAM, but I haven't really seen it swapping to disk yet.

Boot times are OK ... not Linux fast but at about 1 minute 30 seconds to get to a working desktop are tolerable, and about 25 seconds to shut down is a good time.

I decided to take things a little further and tried Blender - works fine - and Second Life which promptly refused to believe that there was ebough 3D support to run. I find this a little odd, as the netbook has plenty of power to be able to run this. A little web research finds me this video review including the AAOD150 running Second Life. This led me to think that it's a Windows version compatibility problem and switching to running the application in XP compatibility mode as the administrator would solve the problem. For some reason that's not the case. I neede to download the original intel driver and install that (downgrading the one that came with Win 7 RC (build 7100). But that coupled with running as admin in compatibility mode *did* work.

I have a three.co.uk 3G USB dongle that works very well on a Windows Vista laptop that I use but this refused to work under Windows 7. This is down to how this particular device works. Rather than ship a separate disk of drivers, the USB device is dual mode and presents both the modem device and a data partition from which the drivers can be installed. It seems that he problem with Windows 7 is in switching modes - from data to modem - and the device consistently presents as a data device even after the drivers are installed. I'm working on an answer for this and will let you know when I find it ...

So far, I'm very happy with Windows 7. Easy, reasonably fast, works ... just need to change that screen resoultion thing and get my 3G modem working and I'll be happy!

The death of linux on netbooks may have been somewhat exagerated.....

Having seen a lot of press about the 'death of linux on netbooks'. I've started doing some stats gathering myself, from everyone I know who's using netbooks plus some random polls on twitter. I appreciate that these results aren't totally solid, but I expect they offer a better idea of opinion than some of the sales based stats being chucked around at the moment.

Of 27 people polled, 6 of them run Windows XP on their netbooks. Of the remaining 21, one person is running Windows 7 and the rest are a mix of Linux distributions. That gives an approximate Linux adoption rate of 74%.

The statistics that are being used to suggest that Windows has regained the netbook market are all about sales - and a quick study of any of the online stores selling netbooks will show you why: the new generation of netbooks are mostly being sold with Windows. High return rates for Linux based machines have been quoted as a reason for this change, but I would suspect manufacturers only needing to make and suppliers only needing to stock a single version of each model (rather than a Linux and a Windows version) may also have been a factor.

What is significant, in my opinion is that these stats only describe the units as they are sold. I'm looking to buy a new netbook at the moment. The first thing I'll be doing is installing Ubuntu 9.04 on it, regardless of which OS it ships with. The current stats that are being used to indicate user preference fail to capture this and I would be interested to see the figures for the that are reinstalled to a Non-windows OS by their owners .....

Window 7 RC public release - a bit of a dilemma

Now I have a dilemma. Microsoft have done the obvious and are working to build as much interest around Windows 7 as possible. Putting the RC out to the public is an obvious way of doing this and retaining control over it's distrubution (rather than the host of torrents for the betas that we have seen).

This does however leave me having to make a decision:do I test Windows 7, just to see, when I have to confess I am absolutly happy with Ubuntu 9.04.

That statement would benefit from a little qualification. I've been running Ubunt 9.04 from the day that it was released (some 3 weeks ago) and it has been a very welcome relief from the near-misses of many other distributions. Ubuntu has raised the game for Linux significantly with this, to the point where I would prefer to use that rather than any of the MS Windows based machines I also use. The *only* thing I haven't tried yet is my 3G USB modem. I suspect that that will just be a case of installing the drivers, but I'll confirm that later.

So I feel that I should give Windows 7 a go, just to see what it's like and how it deals with the challenges presented by the hardware constraints of netbooks, but I have to say, I just don't feel the need ...

Netbook + Windows XP = Still the most usable combination?

I hate to be writing this. As you may have spotted from the rest of my blog, I love Linux and I own an EeePC 900. OK. I've tried a number of distributions and I have come to a conclusion that I don't actually like: Install Windows XP. Because in the end, it is just easier, and you'll be more productive because more of the software that you want to use will work.

It is a sad state of affairs really. We all know that Windows XP isn't all that - let's face it, we're talkign about an OS that has some fundamental flaws. But what it offers, and what I really hope that the Linux community will soon provide is true ease of use.

For example, I have a 3G usb modem that I can use while travelling. The device has a memory stick built in that contains the drivers - for both Windows and Linux. The Windows drivers install first time and work, the Linux drivers won't install properly and don't provide any feedback on why.

I don't actually want to use Windows XP - it feels like a step backwards. It just happens to work better. I'm hoping that JoliCloud will provide a real alternative ... then theres Windows 7 ...