The Acer Aspire One is a fun little netbook, but it’s just not fast enough to run Windows Vista. That’s why Windows XP was included instead of Vista. Right? Well, I put that to the test and found that by modifying Vista as I described earlier, Vista runs great on the Aspire One.
It actually ran more fluidly than Windows XP did. I attribute that mainly to Vista’s support of:
- the Atom chipset’s hyperthreading. XP Home does not take full advantage of the chipset.
- ReadyBoost, a Vista feature that uses a flash drive to cache and speed up random reads that would otherwise go to the hard drive.
See this video of my Aspire One showing the speed of opening several applications: