Ravaging a Netbook

Image by Cambridge Cat via Flickr

I received a gift from some friends of an Acer Aspire One netbook computer. The computer is from a new breed of computers just hitting the market that are small, inexpensive (relatively) and designed mostly for internet use and light computing tasks. They are about the size of an average hardback book, have a small screen, and either a hard drive (like mine) or one of the new SSD, which is a solid state drive, a replacement for hard drives and silent. They do not come with a CD or DVD drive, so if you need to load something it has to be done either over the network or plug in an external drive.

They purchased this netbook for one of their children for school, but it turns out it just isn’t capable enough for what the child needs, so as a thank you for all the technical support I’ve given them for years and years, they gave me the netbook as a gift. Thank you very much.

So I did what any good geek does, I looked on the internet for the hacks that are out there for the netbook.

There are a few, but I decided to take a 2.5” 160GB SATA hard drive I already had, and replace the hard drive in the netbook with it, so I could install and run Windows Vista. I did this for three reasons. First, I’m a geek, this is what we do for fun. Second, I wanted to see if Vista would install and run OK (the netbook came with Windows XP Home), and third, I actually prefer Vista over XP.

I know that the netbook is not ideal for Vista. It has a relatively slow 1.6 GHz processor (although it is hyperthreaded), and only 1 GB of RAM (Vista really prefers 2 GB, but will run on 1).

So I went over to tnkgrl’s website where she has a video up of disassembling the Aspire One and saw how it goes. (Mind you, I started about 9 p.m. one night)

By midnight, I had swapped the drive and had Vista booting and looking for driver updates on the net. It ran fine except I didn't have sound.

I figured it was a driver issue, so I spent the next few days or so using the netbook but also looking for new drivers, getting frustrated, installing some stuff that didn't work, etc.

It turns out that in reassembling my ravaged netbook, I forgot to reconnect the speaker wires.