I rebuilt my Acer Aspire 1 with the factory provided DVDs. Mainly, I did this because I want to use the soon to be released Ubuntu 9.10 UNR. By installing and using the netbook’s version of XP I can get a good idea of a best case scenario as my baseline. With my newly purchased USB DVD drive I got to work.
Removing Ubuntu was a simple matter of logging into the netbook, becoming root, and then running fdisk. I deleted the existing partition and began installing XP. Which refused to boot because I did not delete grub properly.
I ended up booting fron another XP install CD. I selected recovery and ran fixmbr. I spent the whole afternoon getting updates from Microsoft. Once I was up to date I deleted McAfee and installed AVG Free.
The netbook is behaving remarkably fast. On a lark I installed FlashFire but haven’t looked to see if that’s what’s causing the netbook to be noticeably faster. Even Youtube is displaying quickly. If this continues to work so reliably then maybe I’ll leave XP on this machine.
