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Hey there, just wanted to say “Hi” and introduce myelf.
I’m from Germany, got my NC10 in mid March of this year and upgraded it to 2GB of RAM and Windows XP Professional right away.
I was reading in this forum every now and then and came back here to follow the “Broadcom-HD-Decoder” thread a few days back. I found some nice information here so I thougt it would be nice to register myself and give some of my thoughts and experiences back. (Well, at least, when I have some… 😉 ).Well why did I get myself the NC10? Before the NC10 there was my old ald trusty IBM (yeah IBM not LeNovo!) X23 Subnotebook. 12″ Intel Pentium-III-M 866MHz and 640MB RAM. (No mistake either, 128MB onboard + 512MB). Got it as used business notebook for little money in late 2004. That little thing really had a hard time. Took it to college every day, additionally had to suffer on cold and drafty constuction sites, used in hot and cold inside my car. This thing never let me down.
But with time this thing ate batterys (no wonder, i always had two of them, each one giving me about 3h of runtime, both of them re- and dicharged every single day.) and the display started to become dim. (no wonder, too, cfl doesn’t last forever.)
After the third set of batterys started to get short on runtime I had to make a decision. Invest another EUR 120,- for another twin-set of chinese replacement batterys or look for a replacement for the whole system and sending the IBM to retirement.
Believe me that was no easy one. Since my IBM’s overall built quality, matte display and keyboard were plain excellent, the new one had to keep up with that. Only the Samsung came close to that, all others had quirks I could not get used to. (Man the keyboard-layouts of the early Asus Eees, I’m still shivering. The Acer 8.9’s displays – I don’t need no make-up mirror, damn it.)
Now that I’m writing my diploma thesis on different locations and I’ve got a sideline that requires mobility and a laptop, the NC10 fits just excellent. I’m so very happy with it, there are just two things that were better with the old IBM:
– The glossy lid. Having to clean the lid everytime before entering a customer’s office is quite annoying.
– The touchpad. It’s really tiny. I simply loved that trackpoint on my IBM.I don’t know if this is the right place to “show off” some tweaks I did to my little companion, but maybe there’s something interesting and new to some of you, maybe not.
My primary goal for my NC10, as it is my workhorse, is to keep it as snappy and responsive as possible. This is the way I did and it worked quite well.First of all I had a clean install of Win XP professional (had a spare licence left anyways, so why not use that one?), trimmed down with nlite a little bit and a “slipstreamed” Service-Pack3. Then I got rid of that Teletubby Luna-theme, back to plain and boring Win2000-look. Only Samsung Display-Manager, Battery-Manager and “Magic-Keyboard” made it back to the system, as well as a bunch of drivers, not included in XP. I also try to avoid any kind of “bloatware” and unnessecary programs and apps, that like to install some fancy wizzards and helping-programs or other annoying goblins in your systemtray, always starting up, when Windows loads, hogging loads of memory and CPU time only for that once in a month you might use that program.
(Common suspects are MS Office startup-thingy, multiple scanner/printer/digi-cam/fancy-gadget helper-programs, and so on.)Upgrade to 2GB of RAM and tweaks to Windows to save battery by using RAM instead of HDD.
– Upgrade to 2GB was a nobrainer for me as memory is cheap and even if it is “too much” or not needed, it doesn’t have any negative effects. A 2GB module doesn’t need that much more power than a 1GB module that you might notice.
– Reducing writes to the HDD by disabling Page Eecutive, preventing kernel-mode drivers and kernel-mode system code to be paged to disk when not in use. (I was told lately, Win XP disables this by default, when using >1GB of RAM.)
– Reducing writes to HDD by disabling Last Access Update, something like the “Mount -noatime” in Linux. When a file is accessed (read) Windows XP writes a meta-information to that file when that last access happened. That’s not needed from my point of view.
– Disabling the Windows-pagefile/Virtual Memory. There’s no constant “swapping” to disk when larger programs or (flash-based) websites are loaded. Some problems with specific programs were reported by others (Some Corel or Adobe Image and Video editing programs AFAIRC) For myself I had no problems until now.
– Creating a RAM-Disk with a simple Utility named “RRAMDisk”. Found no quick tutorial for it in english but it ain’t hard to set up for an adept user. My RAMDisk is 512MB of size. Just right for me. All my downloads and temp-files as well as the browser caches point to that drive. Extracting a zip/rar archive 200MB of size inside that drive is ridiculous. Simply blazing fast. There are some downsides of this practice, too: Downloads >500MB only by “Save link as/to…” dialogue and to HDD. ZIP/RAR… archives >500MB can only be extracted, when the TMP-directory is placed back to HDD (and after that back to RAMDisk again). And of course, before powered down, you have to save everything you’ll need after that to your HDD.
– Mounting my SD-Card as a “permanent” harddisk instead of “removable media”. There’s a nice tutorial @ Acer Aspire One forums for that task. Intended for the A110L with that pathetic 4GB SSD. You won’t be able to install or run certain programs (like MS Office) on removable media. When you’ve got programs that are constantly reading and writing on your HDD (e.g. Mozilla’s Thunderbird or Opera) you might want to install them on your SD-card, saving constant access on your HDD and battery runtime.All those tweaks are very usefull for those of you using a first gen (non Intel, Samsung or Indilinx-Controller based) SSD. Helping to reduce writes to the disk, extending lifetime and smoothing out those “random write-lags”
Another thing that underwent some “more than usual” tweaks was my Firefox.
Looks a bit dull, I’ve got to admit, but i’s all about efficiency with me.Now looking like this it’s using every possible vertical pixel for displaying web-pages, save those needed for navigating.
Plugins as follws:
– Fission (takes the progress-bar from status bar to url-field)
– Hide Caption Titlebar (as name indicates, minimize, resize and maximize reside beside url-field in navigation-toolbar)
– Hide Menubar (as name indicates, menu is brught back by pressing “Alt”-key)
(There’s an alternative plugin but I can’t recall it’s name. It shows a Button named “Menu” on the very left of the navigation-toolbar. It’s got all those known “File”, “Edit”, View” menus as submenu. Maybe called “tiny menu” or someting like that.)
– Theme is “Classic Compact 3.2.2” (Glad to have it back, took a long time since it became compatible with FF 3.5)Welcome to the forum. Tweaks lists are always welcome – I’ll add this to my lists of posts to go through – I would like to create an NC10 Tweaks page on the wiki perhaps.
There is a tweaking thread (created by Freddy) but it would be great to move some of this to the wiki so more than one person can help maintain it.
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